Re: Urdu as our national langauge
Same can be said about East Pakistanis. An extreme poverty stricken land with dismal literacy rate, but somehow Pakistan arm chair intellectuals love to propagate that Bengalis chose a war because they didn’t get Kishore. Isn’t this also a very literary discontent? Like you said, this whole language debate would have been a small footnote in the history, if economic and electoral dispute of that time was resolved. The language issue was so insignificant in grand scheme of things that Mujib didn’t even bother campaigning over it. He was not stupid! He knew exactly what he was doing.
Honestly, that Bhutto creature has to be the worst thing ever happened to Pakistan. His death massively distorted the 1971 narrative - massively. Large chunk of writers who had written the so called history of 1971 did so as a personal and political reaction to Zia for sake of Bhutto - nothing to do with writing objective history. Just look at NFP from today’s time, a hardcore Jiyala is the ‘social historian’ who always induce a massive of dose of Bhutto sycophancy.
Sometimes I think how different this whole blame everything on Punjabis narrative would have been if it was not a Punjabi dictator (though technically a Muhajir) who hanged Bhutto. What if Zia, just like Ayub and Yahya was another Pashtun.
It’s like Jiyalas just don’t want to own it up that it was Bhutto’s self destructive stubbornness that cost East Pakistan - but no, aa ja ke, ghoom phirke kisi tarhan blame Punjabion ko karna he. Yes that includes Punjabi jiyala too who were so upset with their master’s tragic death, that they actually imposed the whole collective guilt and blame on the entire ethnicity just to protect the reputation of their king.
Yes Punjabis perhaps were at fault. Instead of blindly falling for the charms and charisma of Bhutto, they should have recognised the rights of Mujib, and stood up against that psychopath to save the country.