The signboard is never just a signboard

A government that discovers Hindi on its highways "by mistake" and retreats only when it is caught has told Tamil Nadu everything about how it governs — by testing how much the people will swallow before they spit it out. The latest signboard on the road to Delhi: two highways engineers suspended, the offending Hindi boards pulled down, Tamil boards restored. All of it after M.K. Stalin's X post shamed the government into motion. Without the outcry, the boards would still be standing — and that is the point. This administration does not have a language policy. It has a reflex: float something regressive, wait for the backlash, then perform regret and call it listening. The record of the last two weeks reads like a manual of reversals. September 21: the Public (Law and Order) Department — the department that handles inquiry reports on police firings, custodial deaths and police torture — is quietly exempted from the RTI Act. September 27: after the opposition calls it an "open effort to turn Tamil Nadu into a police state", the order is revoked. The student-protest directive, folded. The jobs GO, struck down under Articles 14 and 16. And now Hindi signposts, hung on the state's own highways by the state's own engineers, removed only when the Leader of the Opposition points at them. The apologists will say the government corrected itself, which is the least a government can do. But a government that must be publicly shamed into every correction is not learning — it is auditioning. Each U-turn is a rehearsal for the next one, and the audience is supposed to applaud the exit while forgetting the entrance. Language is never decoration. The two-language policy is not nostalgia; it is the settlement Tamil Nadu won through the blood of the 1960s anti-Hindi agitations, defended by Periyar's self-respect movement and Anna's and Kalaignar's governments against every central government's back-door imposition. A signboard is where that history meets the road a farmer drives on. When the board speaks Hindi, the question is not which engineer approved it. The question is what the government believes Tamil Nadu is: a state with a language, a history and a spine — or a billboard for someone else's nation? A reels government treats governance as content: shoot it, post it, delete it if the comments turn. But a language is not a reel. You cannot shoot it, apologise to the timeline, and move on to the next trend. Tamil Nadu's two-language policy is its lifeline, as Stalin said — and a government that keeps discovering its own hands on the knife can hardly be trusted not to cut it.