PESHAWAR: The Peshawar High Court has directed the Pakistan National Language Authority (PNLA) and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government to respond to a petition seeking orders for the federal and provincial governments to use Urdu and Pashto in their offices and educational institutions, respectively, instead of English.

A bench consisting of Justice Musarrat Hilali and Justice Ijaz Anwar issued notices to the respondents, including the PNLA director general, KP chief secretary and the secretaries of cabinet and establishment divisions, asking them to respond to the petition of citizen Mohammad Jawaid Iqbal on the matter.

The petition sought the court’s orders for the implementation of different provisions of the Constitution, especially Article 251, which provides for the use of Urdu language for official and other purposes.

It also prayed the court to ask the provincial chief secretary to establish institutions for preserving and promoting Pashto, Hindko, Kohistani, Gujri, Khowar and Seraiki languages in the province.

The petitioner’s lawyer, Malik Mohammad Ajmal, said mostly Pashto was spoken in the province, while the residents also spoke Hindko, Kohistani, Gujri, Khowar or Chitrali, and Seraiki as their mother languages, but the provincial government had failed to adopt Pashto as the official language as well as medium of instruction in educational language in the province.

He also complained about the federal government’s failure to adopt Urdu in the centre in utter disregard of Article 251 of the Constitution.

The counsel contended that the Constitution declared Urdu as the national language and empowered the provincial assemblies to adopt the main provincial languages of their respective province in government offices and educational institutions.

He said that the failure of the respondents to implement that Constitutional Article was not only a great injustice to the people of the province but also amounted to the denial of fundamental rights guaranteed by the Constitution to them.

Mr Ajmal said that Pashto had a very rich history and had produced numerous poets and writers of international stature such as Khushal Khan Khattak, whose poetry had been translated into many international languages.

He also said that the right to education had a direct link with one’s language and empirical studying throughout the world advocated the use of the children’s native languages in instruction as they were the languages the children grew up with and which were used in their homes and around them.

The counsel said that the mother language was an important factor in the development of human brain, which was recognised and accepted all over the world, so most countries provided basic education and other necessary facilities to their residents in their own languages.

He claimed that mother language was not only a language but it was also an expression and identity of a group of people, who had existed for thousands of years together.

Mr Ajmal said that mother languages needed to be preserved, written, taught as well as spoken as the languages were the sum total of their ancestral evolutionary history and for that reason, the Unesco had declared Feb 12 as the International Mother Language Day in 1999.

Published in Dawn, February 20th, 2022