The Pakistan Ideology: History of a grand concoction

http://dawn.com/news/1038961/the-pakistan-ideology-history-of-a-grand-concoction

But things, in this respect, get even more complicated when one is reminded of how it was actually Jinnah who triggered the first serious expression of ethnic turmoil in Pakistan.

In March 1948, Jinnah delivered two speeches in Dhaka (the largest city of the Bengali-dominated East Pakistan).

The speeches were delivered in English and were made at the height of a raging debate within the ruling Muslim League on the question of the country’s national language.

Bengali leadership in the League had purposed the Bengali language on the basis that Bengalis were the largest ethnic group in Pakistan.

However, the party’s Mohajir members led by one of Jinnah’s closest colleagues, Liaquat Ali Khan (who was also Pakistan’s first Prime Minister), disagreed by claiming that Pakistan was made on the demands of a hundred million Muslims (of the sub-continent) and that the language of these Muslims was Urdu.

Of course, it was conveniently forgotten that the majority of these millions of Urdu-speaking Muslims had been left behind in India and that at the time of Pakistan’s inception, Urdu was spoken by less than 10 per cent of the country’s population.

Faced with this dilemma and aggressively pushed by the arguments of Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan to declare Urdu as the national language, Jinnah arrived in Dhaka and in his two speeches there insisted that, indeed, Urdu was to become the country’s national lingua franca.

As the Bengalis went on strike and held widespread demonstrations protesting the contradiction in the government’s decision, Jinnah ordered that the Bengali writing system (close to Vedic and classic Sanskrit) be replaced with Arabic script and even with the Roman script.

It was as if the government was suggesting that Bengali could not be adopted as the national language because its writing system looked too much like that of Hindi.

Jinnah’s desperate attempt to replace the Bengali writing system was vehemently challenged by Bengali intellectuals and politicians and he had to beat a hasty retreat on the issue.

But Urdu did become the national language.

The Bengalis’ resentment found immediate sympathisers within other non-Punjabi and non-Mohajir ethnic communities.

Sindhi, Pushtun (and eventually Baloch) intelligentsia were alarmed by the way the state and government had treated the Bengalis’ demands, and foresaw the same happening to their own languages and ethnic cultures.

But instead of anticipating future fissures in the country on ethnic lines, the League (after Jinnah’s death), became even more myopic and wallowed in its self-serving naivety about using Islam as a slogan that was supposed to dissolve ethnic nationalism among the Muslim majority of the country.

>>>> I hope NIs will learn a lesson from what happened in Pakistan before insisting that Hindi should be the national language.