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
Quite agree with that. Hindi / Urdu divide was also used by Muslim League during independence movement. Isn’t it using language for political purposes?
It is very naive to assume that imposition of Urdu was just for purpose of lingua franca. If this was the case, why were Bengalis not allowed to use their language during assembly proceedings? Insistence of only Urdu / English, where majority population was Bengali. Did all members know Urdu / English to present their case in assembly?
http://pu.edu.pk/images/journal/csas/PDF/Mussarat%20Jabeen%207.pdf
Muhammad Ghulam Kabir noted that "Since the demand for Bengali wasarticulated in CAP and EBLA by Hindu members, the ruling party [MuslimLeague] tried to create the impression in the public mind that the languagemovement had been inspired by the hostile Hindu leaders of India”. Even Dawnalleged that it (language movement) was due to the machinations of fifthcolumnists, in other words the Hindus. This was not true and Hindu leaders hadlittle connection with it as Dhirendranath Dutta declared during the session ofCAP on April 10, 1952 that ‘the movement was nurtured by the Muslims and itwas carried on by the Muslim alone unaided by anyone from outside” (Kabir,1980: 167; Afzal, 1998: 167).
See how Urdu was treated as only Islamic language and insistence of other languages was termed Hindu conspiracy.
From the same document:
In fact, the language movement received wider support throughout EastPakistan after Jinnah’s categorical assertions in favor of imposing Urdu as theonly state language of Pakistan. The controversy temporarily cooled down afterthe visit but the issue remained unresolved. It seemed that Quaid was given onesidedbriefing on the issue and half-truth was presented to him. The picturepresented to him depicted that the demand for Bengali as State language wasnothing more than a conspiracy of disgruntled leaders of the Muslim League, theHindus, the communists and anti-Pakistan elements (Umar, 2004: 34). Time didnot allow Quaid to apply his political wisdom to explore and resolve the issue,as he did in 1937. During a session of the All India Muslim League at Lucknow,a proposal was tabled for making Urdu as official language of the MuslimLeague in 1937 but it was strongly opposed by the Bengali delegates. Quaidintervened and final version of resolution carried that wherever the Urdulanguage was the language of area, its unhampered use and development shouldbe upheld, and where it is not the predominance language, adequatearrangements should be made for teaching it as an optional subject (Sayeed,1948: 210).