India, a linguistically diverse country does not have, contrary to popular belief, a constitutionally declared national language. India has had its share of language controversies but those pale in consequences when compared to what the language issue has done to Pakistan since its creation. The birth of Bangladesh lay in the 1952 language riots and police firing on the supporters of the Bengal Language movement. In 1948, the Pakistan government had declared Urdu as the sole national language. It was suggested that Bengali could be written in the Perso-Arabic script or in the Roman script but not in the Bengali script and this script was removed from the currency notes and postal stamps. A proposal in the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan to allow members to speak in Bengali was defeated with opposition from the then Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan and the Muslim League, who dubbed it as anti-national. Even Jinnah, during a visit to Dhaka in March 1948 called the demand for the Bengali language and script as the action of a “fifth column” and of “enemies of Pakistan” but he was heckled during his meetings. There were others, like Mohammad Shahidullah, who pleaded for making Arabic the state language of Pakistan; there was even an East Pakistan Arabic Language Association and Shahidullah was its president. The aim of such groups was to create a bond between the Muslims of both the wings of Pakistan and those of the Arab world, North Africa and Indonesia; Malaysia at that time was a Muslim-minority country.

The Bengalis in East Pakistan were enraged while the Urdu speaking population, pejoratively called Biharis, celebrated the move. In a 1949 survey among the educated East Pakistanis, comprising teachers, officers and politicians, 301 respondents were asked their opinion about the script to be used for Bengali language. 96 wanted the Arabic script, 18 favoured the Roman script and 187 were for the Bengali script. Liaquat Ali’s successor too was strongly in favour of using only Urdu, pushing the eastern wing towards violence. The Communists, seizing the opportunity provided by the split in the society and the youth dominance in the Bengali language movement, called for a strike on February 21, 1952 that resulted in firing and the death of 29 people. The Communists brought in the industrial workers the next day and more violence followed. After six years of violent protests, the Muslim League lost power in the East Bengal Assembly and the new rulers were less rigid on the issue. Official status was granted to the Bengali language in the 1956 Constitution but by then the society in East Pakistan had been split between the two language groups and that split ultimately led to the creation of Bangladesh.

Pakistan’s rulers failed to learn any lessons from the 1971 split of the country that primarily stemmed from the language divide. In the leftover Western wing, they continue to enforce Urdu as the national language. Because of East Pakistan being surrounded by India, there was a substantial population that spoke in Urdu, an indigenously evolved language in India, comprising words from Sanskrit, Hindi, Persian, Turkic and Arabic. Such influence was absent in parts of Pakistan that were on the West of the Indus River. All the classical writers were unanimous that India was to the east of the Indus; to its West were other cultures. The People of Balochistan and those of the region between Punjab and the Durand line, did not have any affinity with Urdu. Even the Sindhis and Punjabis, though familiar with Urdu because of its use by the later Mughal administrators and then by the British, spoke at home only in Sindhi and in Punjabi. In the whole of Pakistan, there is no area where Urdu is spoken at home and thus it is not the mother tongue of most of the Pakistanis though it is the national as well as the official language of Pakistan. Those who have travelled to Pakistan, would have noticed that whenever a Pakistani phones home, he does not speak in Urdu; he uses his mother tongue, Punjabi, Pashto, Baluchi, Sindhi etc.

Pakistan’s newspaper Naya Daur had reported on June 18, 2020 that more than 70 languages are spoken in Pakistan but less than 10 percent of Pakistanis speak Urdu as their First Language. It also reported that the provinces are unhappy about Urdu having a dominant position in schools. Is the question of language once again creating fissiparous tensions in Pakistan? There are already some demands for breaking away from the Islamic state. In Balochistan, the separatist movement has already reached the stage of organised violence and hatred for the ‘dominant’ Punjabis. There have been incidents of selective killings of Punjabi bus passengers. The Pakistani army is seen by the Baloch, not entirely unjustifiably, as dominated by Punjabis and as occupiers of their land.

The Pashto language is derided by Urdu speakers as akin to the noise of shaking a tin box full of pebbles and the speakers of Pashto feel a greater affinity with the co-linguists in Afghanistan. Sindhi language, poetry and music have a stamp of the composite Hindu-Muslim culture in pre-Partition India but, because of that influence, Sindhis are not considered Islamic enough by the Punjabis. To add to the divide, a majority of Sindhis and Baloch are Shia and the Sunni majority of Punjab looks down upon them as heretics. Many of the elite families in Sindh, like the Bhutto clan, are Sunni but it is rare for Shias, who constitute 15 percent of the population, to be in the top echelons of political power. This may be surprising in a country founded by two Shias, Jinnah and Aga Khan III. If they thought that the idea of Pakistan would unite the Shia and the Sunni, they were over-optimistic. The divide is so deep that in British India, the Shia tended to hide their religion in the census, afraid that the Sunni would target them. There have been numerous attacks in Pakistan on Shia Ashura processions, the most infamous being the Rawalpindi attack in 2013 that soon spread to other cities. The Shia were not spared even in Gilgit in POK, where they are in a majority. In the infamous Gilgit Shia massacre of 1988, where the Sunni marauders were supported by the Pakistan Army under Gen Zia-ul-Haq, 700 were killed, women raped and villages burnt down.

In Pakistan, Islam was said to be a uniting force and its raison d’etre but it has actually become a divide deep enough to threaten its very existence. Jinnah had said that Urdu will be a uniting force but that too has encouraged separatism in this synthesised nation. Monolingualism may have been a good idea for the countries of Europe but in South Asia the saying is ‘the language changes every mile; the taste of water changes every two miles.’ The dichotomy of a nation fractured by language and religion is poignantly illustrated by Arthur Dudney, Fellow, Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Cambridge, in an article published in September, 2016. He mentioned that in 1951, the Aga Khan, a Shia, delivered a speech in favour of making Arabic the national language of Pakistan, arguing that Urdu was the mother tongue of only a small minority. He did not mention that Arabic was the mother tongue of none of the Pakistanis. More importantly, he delivered the speech in English!  

( R N prasher is a former IAS officer. The views expressed are his personal.)