Presumably almost all competitors from India would be fluent in English (given it is the second most spoken language there)? I guess the same is true of Icelandic though.
Yes, and there's also languages of ex-USSR countries, whose competitors presumably all understand Russian, and so on.
The real reason might be that there's an enormous class of self-loathing elites in India who actively despise the possibility of any Indian language being represented in higher education. This obviously stunts the possibility of them being used in international competitions.
Discussions about Indian politics or the Indian psyche—especially when laced with Indic supremacist undertones—are off-topic and an annoyance here. Please consider sharing these views in a forum focused on Indian affairs, where they’re more likely to find the traction they deserve.
It is not "supremacist" to believe that depriving hundreds of millions of people from higher education in their native language is deeply unjust. This reflection was prompted by a comment on why Indian languages are not represented in international competitions, which was prompted by a comment on the competition being available in many languages.
Discussions online have a tendency to go off into tangents like this. It's regrettable that this is such a contentious topic.
Your disdain for English-speaking Indian elites (pejoratively referred to as ‘Macaulayites’ by Modi’s supporters) is quite telling. That said, as I mentioned earlier, this kind of discourse doesn’t belong here.
My disdain is for the fact that hundreds of millions of Indians cannot access higher education in their native language, and instead of simply learning a foreign language as a subject like the rest of world, they have the bear the burden[1] of learning things in a foreign language which they have to simultaneously learn. I have disdain for the people responsible for this mess. I do not have any disdain for any language-speaking class, specially not one which I might be part of.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44615783.