LAHORE, Jan 16: Undemocratic governments used the language to divide and rule the people in the past and are using it for mistifying the facts at present to serve the interests of the international financial institutions.

The observations were made by the speakers on the first day of the three-day conference on politics of language on Thursday. It was organized by the Simorgh Resource Centre here.

Speaking on political rhetoric as a masking tool, Dr. Rubina Saigol said that the language was a means of expression but the rulers were using it to hide the realities for disempowering the people.

She said that the poetic language, which expressed the emotions of the people, had been discarded by the rulers for not being precise and replaced it by the language of donor agencies.

Statistics and abbreviations were being used in social policy making to mystify the things. She said federal finance adviser Shaukat Aziz was an expert in the art.

She said that cliches were also being used for masking the facts. Supreme national interest now meant the interest of the rulers and not the people and politicians who changed loyalties called themselves patriots.

Similarly the doctrine of necessity was used for justifying the unconstitutional rule. When Prime Minister Mir Zafarullah Khan Jamali spoke about “the continuation of policies” he was referring to the policies of Gen Pervez Musharraf.

She said that even the nomenclature of the key state offices had been changed from the democratic to the administrative with the state started serving the interests of the private sector at the cost of the public sector despite the fact that the market economy was not an alternative to a state failing to deliver.

The president had designated himself as the chief executive and the heads of different institutions were being described as executive officers.

‘Accountability’ meant that the rulers did not consider themselves responsible to the people and had made themselves answerable to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

Good governance and transparency were also meant for winning the confidence of foreign investors.

She said that excessive use of mistifying language had depoliticized the society indicated in lesser and lesser voter turnouts in elections and lesser resistance to unpopular policies.

There was nothing strange in the military-NGO alliance as one suppressed dissent and the other tried to minimize it.

Speaking on the politics of language, Sindhi poet Attiya Dawood said that the linguistic conflict had started in Sindh following the large-scale migration of the Urdu-speaking people into the province after independence.

The Urdu-speaking migrants did not adopt the Sindhi language and culture because they considered their language and culture superior to it.

“Prime minister Liaquat Ali Khan described the Sindhis as a nation of donkey herdsmen and Sindhis described the migrants as panahgir and makkar.”

She said that the late Zulfikar Ali Bhutto created a Sindhi middle class by introducing the quota system for Sindhis and asked them to leave the villages and live in the cities.

But when Mumtaz Bhutto moved the Sindhi language bill in the Sindh Assembly it was opposed despite the fact that it was not aimed at opposing the Urdu language.

The late Gen Ziaul Haq divided the Sindhi and Urdu-speaking people and engineered clashes between them. Sindhi women were proud of Benazir Bhutto but she always hesitated in supporting them on the gender-based issues because she spoke English and not Sindhi.