Chennai: Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M K Stalin on Tuesday took strong exception to the use of Hindi language on the website of Life Insurance Corporation (LIC) of India, and said that the website has been reduced to a propaganda tool for imposing Hindi.

Posting a screenshot of the LIC of India webpage containing Hindi, the chief minister said in a post on social media platform ‘X’: “the LIC website has been reduced to a propaganda tool for Hindi imposition. Even the option to select English is displayed in Hindi!” This, he claimed, was nothing but cultural and language imposition by force, trampling on India’s diversity.

“LIC grew with the patronage of all Indians. How dare it betray the majority of its contributors? We demand an immediate rollback of this linguistic tyranny. #StopHindiImposition,” the chief minister said in the post.

Terming the move as a “blatant imposition” of Hindi on other language-speaking people, BJP’s ally and PMK founder Dr S Ramadoss, said this attempt by LIC is highly condemnable as it was trying to “push” a language among the non-Hindi speaking people.

“Giving sudden priority to Hindi alone is not acceptable as the LIC has a customer base drawn from the people from diverse languages in India,” Dr Ramadoss said in a post on ‘X’.

He reminded that both the Centre and other institutions under the control of the union government belonged to all sections of the people and not just to the Hindi-speaking population.

“Hence, the home page of LIC of India should immediately be changed to English and a Tamil version website should be started,” he said.

AIADMK general secretary Edappadi K Palaniswami flayed the LIC for making it all Hindi and said the revamped website was currently unusable for people who did not know that language.

“The language change option on the website is also in Hindi and is not possible to find it. It is reprehensible that the central government is going to any extent in imposing Hindi,” he said on ‘X’.

It was not acceptable to impose a language in India, a country of diverse languages, cultures, and politics. Hence, the Centre should change the default language of the website to English for all people to use and desist from taking further action to thrust Hindi, the former chief minister said.

Strongly condemning the Centre, TNCC chief K Selvaperunthagai, called upon the Centre to immediately abandon all activities aimed at imposing the language on non-Hindi speaking states.