Re: Urdu as our national langauge
I don’t think that anyone is trying to politicize the debate here, but thanks for understanding my intentions. I anyway would be the last one to politicize this issue, as I belong to the 8% group that speaks Urdu as the first language. It’s just that I see the enforcing of it as a national (and now official) language being an unfair policy.
I am not an attentive reader of history; at least not as much as many of the other participants of this thread are, but believe that Urdu was forced on Pakistanis because it was promoted as the language of Muslims in subcontinent. You go anywhere in the world, and you don’t see language being used as a divider between the religious groups. Only in indo-pak it has been used as a divider. Even in today’s India, if I am Hindu and you are Muslim and even if we live in same community, you would be automatically assumed to know the Urdu script.
Amazingly, this division of language between religious groups is more noticeable in the western indo-pak. Bangladesh and West Bengal don’t see that division. Many of my Bengalis friends don’t read Quran in Arabic script. They read Quran in Bengali script