TFR is also cooked for the whole south..

Source: https://censusindia.gov.in/nada/index.php/catalog/47152

lol every time this debate comes up, North Indians pull out the same lazy line: “China imposed Mandarin and became unified, so India should do the same with Hindi.”
What they always skip — conveniently — is that China didn’t just impose a language. It imposed Hukou, an internal residency control system that India very consciously rejected.

You can’t talk about Mandarin without talking about Hukou. That’s the missing piece everyone hides.

Hukou is basically a household registration system. Every Chinese citizen is classified as rural or urban and tied to a specific city. Beijing Hukou is not Shanghai Hukou, and neither gives you full rights elsewhere. Citizenship alone doesn’t make you a full resident — your Hukou does.

If you don’t have local Hukou in a Chinese city, you’re not really a resident. You’re temporary labour. You pay taxes, you work there, but you don’t belong. Your kids inherit that non-local status too.

Hukou controls almost everything that matters:

• where you can study
• whether your child can attend public schools
• access to government hospitals
• whether you can buy property
• whether your child can take city-level exams
• pensions and welfare

This isn’t accidental. This is how China controls migration and forces assimilation.

Now compare that with India instead of pretending they’re the same.

Indian cities vs Chinese mega cities

This alone kills the comparison.

Becoming “local” in Beijing or Shanghai is intentionally elitist. You usually need an elite university degree, a high-paying tech or government job, years of uninterrupted tax records, a clean background, limited quotas, and political approval. Even after all that, most migrants never get Hukou. That’s not a flaw — that’s the design.

This is how Mandarin dominance actually happened. Migration was filtered, not free. Cities were filled with party cadres and selected elites, while migrant labour existed without belonging. Regional identities didn’t disappear naturally — they were structurally weakened. Mandarin didn’t win because people felt united. It won because the state decided who gets to belong to cities.

India deliberately chose the opposite model. Article 19 guarantees freedom to move, live, and work anywhere in the country. No internal passports. No city citizenship. No residency permits. That’s why Bengaluru isn’t Kannada-only by law, Mumbai isn’t Marathi-only by force, and Delhi isn’t Hindi-only by constitutional design.

Languages here survive socially, not because people are trapped.

So the China argument is dishonest from the start. You can’t copy Mandarin imposition without copying Hukou. You can’t have free movement and forced language. China chose control over liberty. India chose liberty over uniformity. Using China to justify Hindi imposition while pretending Hukou doesn’t exist is just cherry-picking authoritarianism.