The Urdu dilemma
Published in The News on October 12, 2015
This refers to the articles, ‘Burying the
doctrine of elite necessity’ (October 9) by Umer Gilani and ‘Urdu: from pidgin
to creole’ (October 9) by Zubair Torwali. As far as Urdu is concerned, I take
exception to the commonly-held belief that Urdu is spoken and understood by
over a billion people in the Subcontinent. In South India, very few people
speak Urdu or Hindi (in fact, Indian prime minister Deve Gowda could not speak
Hindi at all). As for Punjabi families speaking in Urdu with their children,
this may be largely true of those who live in Karachi but in Lahore most people
think they are speaking Urdu when in fact they are talking in Punjabi. Similar
is the situation in rural areas of other provinces where Urdu is like a foreign
language.
As for making Urdu the state language, I do not
see why this is necessary. It is the mother tongue of only seven percent of the
population and, as we learnt to our cost, declaring it the national language
ultimately led to the breakup of the country. It should also be understood that
Article 251 was adopted by the 150-member National Assembly of 1973 probably
because the country was still in a state of shock following the loss of East
Pakistan. There was no referendum held to determine whether it should be the
national language of the country. In fact, this should be done now if we really
want to know what the people want.
Shakir Lakhani
Karachi
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