[lg policy] Pakistan: tongue-tied

[Harold Schiffman]

Tongue-tied: The politics of language
Herald Exclusive | Umer Farooq | Fahad Naveed — Updated about 6 hours ago



The language question has always spawned activism and antagonism in
Pakistan in, perhaps, equal measures. On one end of the spectrum, there are
parties which accord primary importance to ethnic identity and language as
building blocks for political representation. Parties on the other end have
tenaciously held on to the ‘one country, one nation, one language’ mantra.
Those who place ethnic and linguistic identity above any other marker of
identity are usually, but not exclusively, known as nationalists. Those in
the opposite camp, generally right-wing Islamist parties and religious
groups, see Pakistan as a religious state with no room for the recognition
and promotion of ethnic and linguistic diversity.

This division seems to have blurred a bit in recent months. Early last
year, 10 members of the ruling Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PMLN), a
right-wing entity, tabled a bill in the National Assembly, seeking national
language status for the 10 most widely-spoken languages in Pakistan —
Punjabi, Pashto, Sindhi, Balochi, Seraiki, Hindko and Urdu among others.
When the bill was first presented, Zahid Hamid, the minister in charge of
law and parliamentary affairs, vehemently opposed it. He, however, did not
object when the speaker sent it for further deliberations to the National
Assembly’s committee on law and parliamentary affairs. After thorough
discussions, though, the committee turned down the bill.

Marvi Memon, a PMLN legislator considered close to Prime Minister Nawaz
Sharif, is the bill’s lead mover. She insists she will continue striving to
have it discussed and passed as long as she is a member of the National
Assembly. To put her efforts in perspective, there have been at least two
other similar bills doing the rounds since 2008 without being taken up for
discussion. Here, the Herald looks at various facets of the language
question, in order to highlight reasons for the legislative rejection of
these bills.

Language has always been a divisive issue in Pakistan. Yes, without a doubt.

It all started in Dhaka in 1948 when Mohammad Ali Jinnah made a speech
there, declaring that Pakistan would have only one national language —
Urdu. He said the same language will also be the official language of the
country, meaning that all business of the state and government would be
conducted in Urdu. By 1952, the intelligentsia in East Pakistan – mainly
university students and teachers – were agitating to get the same status
for Bengali. The response by the Pakistani authorities was brutal. On
February 21, 1952, many agitating students were shot dead by the police in
Dhaka. In recognition of those who lost their lives for their mother
language that day, the United Nations adopted February 21 as International
Mother Language Day, celebrated the world over since 2000.

By 1972, it was the turn of Urdu-speakers in Karachi to rise up in protest
when the Sindh government declared Sindhi the official language of the
province — mandating that the business of the provincial government must be
conducted in it. This led to rioting, arson and killing in Karachi at a
large scale. The riots were so severe that Begum Qadeeruddin Ahmed, the
wife of a Supreme Court judge and belonging to a prominent Urdu-speaking
family, told the Herald, at the time, that the tragedy of secession of East
Pakistan might be repeated “here in Sind if the language controversy
continues.” Sibte Hasan, a prominent Karachi-based, Urdu-speaking Marxist
ideologue and writer, believed the riots symbolised much more than just
love and hatred for one language or the other. Writing in the Herald’s
August 1972 issue, he said the controversy over the language was “the
symptom of a deeper malady and part of a large socio-economic conflict
which has arisen on account of the new ethnological pattern of Sind. Unless
serious efforts are made to resolve the basic conflict it might endanger
the unity and solidarity of the entire country.”

These dire warnings have not materialised even when Pakistan in general,
and Sindh and Karachi in particular, have suffered serious conflagrations
among communities opposing each other on the basis of ethnicity and
language, among other things. The brutal suppression of Sindhis by a
Punjab-dominated martial law regime in the 1980s, tit-for-tat ethnic
cleansing in parts of Karachi in the mid-1980s carried out by Pukhtuns and
Urdu-speaking Mohajirs, killing and eviction of Punjabi settlers in rural
Sindh in the late 1980s, the 1988 massacre of Urdu-speakers in Hyderabad —
here are just a few examples of language and identity converging into a
deadly mix. In a less deadly vein, a movement for the creation of a
separate province for Seraiki speakers, followed by a similar demand by
Hindko speakers in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, has been creating political ripples
since 2008.

The question of language, identity and politics, however, is not unique to
Pakistan. In India, for example, efforts to make Hindi the national
language met stiff resistance from southern states which saw it as a threat
to their own indigenous languages. India ended up having no national
language — it instead declared Hindi an official language, along with
English.

Dr Tariq Rehman, the author of Language and Politics in Pakistan, observes
language has always been centre stage in the subcontinent’s complex
centre-periphery politics. “Languages become the symbol of grievances of a
community alienated from the centre primarily on the basis of some
political and economic causes.” When the Muslims in India were fighting for
their political rights, he says, “they invented two symbols. One was
religion and the other was language — Urdu.” In post-independence Pakistan,
according to Rehman, “the economic deprivation that East Pakistanis faced
forced the Bengalis to adopt language as a symbol of resistance.” In other
words, language is not a divisive factor. It only symbolises existing
divisions.
Marvi Memon chairing a meeting of the Standing Committee on Information,
Broadcasting and National Heritage at the Parliament House. Photo: AFP

Political parties exploit the language question for electoral mileage.

Only to a certain extent.

Activists from Seraiki-speaking areas have long demanded a separate
province, citing neglect by the Lahore-based Punjabi establishment. When
Yousuf Raza Gilani, then prime minister, announced in March 2011 that his
Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) will include the formation of a Seraiki
province in its election manifesto, many Seraiki activists were elated.
Non-Seraiki analysts, however, saw it just as a PPP gimmick to inflate its
vote bank. In the end, the announcement did not gain the party much
electoral traction.

The PPP is also accused of fanning ethnic and linguistic differences
between the residents of urban and rural Sindh, in order to have the rural
Sindh vote bank in its thrall. The Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) is said
to be doing the same in urban Sindh.

Seen in this context, Memon’s bill can be termed an attempt by the
Punjab-dominated PMLN to encroach on the political space so far solely
occupied by parties from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Balochistan and Sindh. She,
however, tells the Herald that she is acting in line with her party’s
election manifesto which had promised to give national status to 10
languages mentioned in her bill. Other sponsors of the bill may just be
responding to pressure from their electorate. Their own ethnic origins are
significantly relevant. Apart from Memon who belongs to Karachi, three of
her co-sponsors come from Seraiki-speaking areas, two from Balochistan, one
from Sindh and one from the Hazara region.

Dr Ibadullah, who represents Mansehra in the National Assembly, and is a
signatory to the bill, tells the Herald that the basic idea behind the bill
is to ensure state protection and support for the country’s major
languages. “In context of the rampant terrorism in Pakistan, there are
people who say this country does not belong to them. This bill should give
some of them a sense that they belong to Pakistan,” he says.

His colleague Makhdoom Syed Ali Hassan Gillani, who comes from the
Seraiki-speaking area, is similarly motivated by the political relevance of
language to his constituency. He believes language is a very important
issue for his voters and, therefore, promises to continue “campaigning for
making Seraiki a national language.”
The front page of Dawn newspaper on December 17, 1971, declaring the end of
the war.

There is little chance for the bill’s approval. Yes, it is an uphill task.

Memon insists it is a PMLN bill “for all practical purposes”, because
signatories to it all come from that party. Enjoying a comfortable majority
in the National Assembly, the PMLN should face no problem in passing the
bill into a law — that is, if it so desires. “The fact that the bill is
introduced by PMLN members in a private capacity is a clear indication that
the ruling party has refused to sponsor it,” says a constitutional expert
based in Islamabad. Private bills, he points out, are seldom taken
seriously in legislative business.

Another obstacle is the fact that the legislature remains completely
divided on the language issue, and not just along party or ethnic lines. In
2008, Yousaf Talpur, a PPP lawmaker, introduced a similar bill in the
National Assembly. His own party, which was also in power in Islamabad at
the time, opposed his move. In 2010, during deliberations over the 18th
Amendment, members of the Awami National Party (ANP) continued raising the
language question; insisting that according national status to major
languages spoken in Pakistan should be part of the amendment. The PPP kept
shooting these suggestions down. Frustrated, ANP Senator Haji Adeel later
submitted a private bill in the Senate, which again faced stiff opposition
from the PPP.

The party insists it does not oppose giving people their language rights,
but deems the according of an official status to a language is the
prerogative of the province where it is spoken. “Our party policy is that
the promotion of regional languages is a provincial subject. By bringing
this subject into the federal parliament, we will be negating the
constitutional arrangement,” says Naveed Qamar, a former minister who
represents PPP in the National Assembly’s standing committee on law and
parliamentary affairs.

The PMLN’s opposition to Memon’s bill originates from a different source.
“From time to time, the party has debated the issue and a majority of its
members strongly believe that Urdu should remain the only national language
of Pakistan,” says a senior PMLN legislator.

The only way that the bill can possibly get through the National Assembly
is if a large number of legislators from both PPP and PMLN, who in their
private capacity support the proposed legislation, join hands with
nationalist parties. This does not seem to be happening, mainly because of
a lack of trust between the two sides. “I don’t expect anything good from
the ruling party on this issue,” is how Adeel reacts when asked about the
fate of Memon’s bill.

Sponsors of the bill are not giving up, though. “We will discuss it with
the party leadership as soon as possible and re-table it,” says Makhdoon
Ali Hassan Gillani.
File photo

An ethnically diverse country like Pakistan needs a lingua franca. Yes, but
choosing one will always be difficult.

“There is a need for a main language [in Pakistan],” argues Dr Zafar Iqbal,
the vice chancellor of the Federal Urdu University of Arts, Science and
Technology, Karachi, in a report from Dawn newspaper dated August 10, 2014.
When the National Assembly’s standing committee on law and parliamentary
affairs sought his advice on the issue, he told the legislators: “One of
the basis of a country’s creation or, for that matter, its disintegration
is language — as witnessed in the case of East Pakistan.” He was clearly
suggesting that the language question was a Pandora’s Box which once opened
could have many untoward consequences.

Mehmood Bashir Virk, the chairman of the committee, takes the same line of
argument when he says Pakistan is one nation and, therefore, should have
only one national language. “The committee’s majority view was that Urdu is
spoken in every nook and corner of Pakistan. It is already our lingua
franca,” he tells the Herald.

The extent of Urdu’s outreach as Pakistan’s lingua franca, however, is
debatable. According to the 2001 census, only 7.57 per cent Pakistanis
regard Urdu as their mother language; in 2008, this figure was estimated to
be 7.59 per cent. By this measure, it is only the fifth major language of
Pakistan. Does this qualify it to be the country’s lingua franca? Perhaps
not at a public level — at least not so far.

An article published in the Herald in 1972 theorised about this failure.
Quoting a Sindhi research scholar, Dr Faiz Husain Shah, the article argued
that Urdu was linked to an Islamic ideology which was supposed to keep the
different provinces of Pakistan together, irrespective of their ethnic and
linguistic differences. That ideology failed with East Pakistan becoming
Bangladesh. “So there is no question of Urdu integrating us once again,”
Shah was quoted as saying.

At the official level, however, Urdu has been successfully adopted as the
language of priority in all federal and provincial chambers of the
legislature. It is also the main language of political interaction among
the leaders and activists of political parties of different ideological
persuasions and ethnic origins. As Rahman puts it in his 2003 paper titled,
Language Policy, Multilingualism and Language Vitality in Pakistan, “even
ethnic activists agree that it [Urdu] could be a useful link language
between different ethnic groups.

The problem is that Urdu has been tainted by association. “...It has been
resisted because it has been patronised, often in insensitive ways, by the
ruling elite at the centre,” writes Rahman.

fwd from dawn.com (original url lost)
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