KARACHI: Indecision on flag issue annoys publishers: STB puzzled
By Our Staff Reporter
KARACHI, March 15: The Sindh Textbook Board (STB) has decided to suspend printing of textbook pages involving the national flag of Pakistan till the time it is clear about the correct direction of the flag in the print form.
Talking to Dawn on Tuesday, the chairman of the board, Abdul Aziz Mehranvi, said that in view of the growing concern over the positioning and reproduction of images of Pakistani flag in the textbooks, the board had moved for getting opinion from different quarters, including federal and provincial government agencies, scholars and intellectuals on the issue.
Market sources said that the STB remained unmoved on the issue till late, despite some correspondence by a private publisher on this issue. There are different opinions on the issue as some quarters say that the mast of the flag should be witnessed on the left in the printed sheets, instead of the right, otherwise it should be considered as a reverse or incorrect image.
A publisher of the Urdu Qaida-I at Karachi, who approached the STB on the issue a couple of months back, said that when he inquired the board about the direction of the flag in the book, he was asked to print an unfurled and hoisted flag, with its pole on the right, as in all the textbooks of Urdu for all classes the direction of the flag was same.
According to the publisher he had printed the flag in Urdu Qaida with the mast on left (right hand hoisting) for the session 2003-4, but the then chairman of the board had not objected to it at all.
He claimed that the present management of the board was ignoring the well established practice and printing norms witnessed in the case of government documents and stationery and postage envelops and stamps as well because a number of book publishers had been printing the flag with a pole on the right.
To a question, the STB chairman said that publishers had been printing textbooks with a flag of left-hand orientation even before his taking over the board. However, following criticism now I had ordered to stop printing of all such books involving the flag for the time being, he said, adding that the board was in the process of ascertaining the right direction for the flag in books.
Responding to a question, he said that no clear cut policy or directive or government notification regarding the publication or reproduction of flag images in books was available with the STB and that was why he was seeking guidance from writers and scholars, legal personalities as well as the law department and wings of the federal and provincial governments.
The chairman said that there were some other books too which contained Pakistani flags and as such printing of such pages had also been suspended till the time any uniform policy was evolved for textbooks.
He further informed that some books of Punjab board also contained flags with left hoisting.
