May 26, 2002	Sunday	Rabi-ul-Awwal 13,1423

Please Visit our Sponsor (Ads open in separate window).

PESHAWAR, May 25: The former member of the provincial assembly and deputy secretary of the Awami National Party, Iftikhar Hussain, has condemned the distorted details given in the Urdu course book of AIOU about Pushto language.

According to a statement the Urdu book contains some baseless facts on page 24 under the topic “regional languages”.

The book says that there are almost 40 languages which are spoken in Pakistan and few languages have semantics and literary material.

The book hasn’t even mentioned Pushto and has opposed that Pushto is spoken in few areas of Frontier but the fact is that many other languages are also spoken in Frontier Province.

Iftikhar Hussain has protested over the distorted facts. He said that Pushto is one of the ancient languages and it is 8,000-years old.

He said that the book said that Pushto is spoken in few areas of NWFP which is proved false by the latest Consensus. It is stated that the 75 per cent of the population of NWFP speaks Pushto.