ISLAMABAD: The promotion of mother languages and cultural diversity will create social harmony and help resolve social and political conflicts, poets, writers and politicians said at a literary session on Friday.

The policy of creating a monolithic identity through the imposition of Urdu as the medium of instruction in educational institutions and neglecting other Pakistani languages has created disharmony in a complex Pakistani society, Senator Mir Akram Dashti said at the session, which was hosted by the National Party (NP) at the Pakistan Academy of Letters.

The event was organised in connection with Mother Language Day, observed on Feb 21 to remember the 1952 incident in Dhaka University in which dozens of academics, intellectuals and students were shot dead during a protest. They were demanding that Bengali be given the status of a national language alongside Urdu.

“The day reminds us of the policy of disharmony and discord the rulers adopted from day one of independence, when the constituent assembly members were asked to take oath either in Urdu or in English. This infuriated a Bengali member who insisted on taking oath in Bengali,” the senator said.

There were 40 million Bengalis and 20 million people in West Pakistan at the time of independence.

This was the beginning of the language conflict. The governor general in 1948 refused to accept the demand of declaring Bengali as second national language, Senator Dashti said, who is also the author of four books.

Our rulers have not learnt any lesson from history and continue the same colonial policy of denying equal rights to neglected nationalities which, the senator said, will undermine social cohesion.

We should recognise the fact that Pakistan is a multilingual and multi-cultural country, he said and asked the government, intellectuals and writers to work for the promotion of Pakistani languages and give education to the students in their mother tongue in the provinces, Azad Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan.

He said his party was the first to declare Balochi, Pashto and Brahvi as official languages in 1988, encouraging people to write books in their own languages.

The senator and other speakers including poets and writers Rafique Sandelvi, Haleem Qureshi and Ghazanfar Hashmi, lauded the Lahore High Court verdict in which it has directed the provincial government to teach Punjabi in educational institution.

They however, bemoaned the statement of Punjab Chief Minister Usman Buzdar directing to teach Urdu at all levels of education in the province.

Former member of the Balochistan Assembly, Yasmin Lehri advocated mother languages as a medium of instruction in schools and learning of all national languages.

She said she is against any chauvinistic stance vis-à-vis the promotion of languages and supported equal promotion and learning of all languages.

NP Punjab President Ayub Malik slammed the policies of the rulers and urged the progressive intellectuals and writers of the largest province which has a lion’s share in bureaucracy and policymaking to speak up not only for Punjabi, but also for the oppressed people.

Poets, including Ali Ahmed Qamar, Saadat Sahar, M.R Shafique, Sabeen Yunus, Haider Farooq, Dr Shahid Obed and Mehmood Azhar presented their poems in Pashto, Urdu, Punjabi, Saraiki and Balochi.

Published in Dawn, February 23rd, 2019