Sindhi gains national status

Seventy years after the emergence of Pakistan and asround four decades after the creation of Bangladesh, Pakistan’s diversity of languages remains a contentious issue. The Sindh Assembly recently adopted a resolution to recognise Sindhi as a national language. Giving Sindhi a national status will allow it to be an optional subject in school curriculum across the country. This is a step in a direction that Pakistan should have long walked towards. People of all provinces have had respective demands to give their languages a national status. It is hoped that following the Sindh Assembly, other provincial assemblies will also raise this issue again and push the centre to recognise the legitimate space for regional languages.

In countless countries there is no national language. In India for instance, while the official languages of the federation are English and Hindi, each state has its own official language, with no language having a “national” status. But in Pakistan even debating the issue is seen as against national unity. It unfortunate that the citizens of Pakistan are deprived of studying the languages spoken in their country when in many schools, students have the opportunity to learn Arabic, French and other European languages. Urdu was adopted as the national language to unify the country, except that it was among the major contributing factors for the increasing feeling of discrimination faced by Bengalis. In fact, the International Mother Tongue Day is observed to mark this discrimination, where on February 22, 1952, the police killed Bengali students in Dhaka for protesting to include Bangla as a national language. Clearly, the approach of using Urdu as a tool to unify failed long ago.

The policy of maintaining Urdu supremacy is discriminatory, more so because it is the mother tongue of less than 10 per cent of Pakistan’s population. The demand to recognise provincial and regional languages is a legitimate one that should no longer be suppressed by declaring it a “sensitive” subject.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 4^th, 2016.

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