Nationalists, literary bodies call for granting national status to all major languages

Nationalist political parties and literary organizations held meetings and protest demonstrations separately on International Mother Language Day in support of their demands that the government declare all major languages of the country “national languages”.

International Mother Language Day was chosen by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation in 1999 to commemorate the killing of four students in Dhaka on February 21, 1952.

Speakers at these events held in various parts of Karachi lauded scholars, writers and intellectuals of regional languages who had through their own resources kept alive mother languages.

PkMAP’s demo

The Pakhtunkhwa Milli Awami Party’s Sindh chapter organised a protest demonstration outside the Karachi Press Club, voicing their anger at the government for ignoring the importance of regional languages, such as Pashto, Punjabi, Sindhi, Balochi and Seraiki, despite the fact that Pakistan was a signatory of the UNESCO charter to promote these languages.

Speakers at the protest said Pakistan was a multi-lingual state but successive governments had been ignoring the importance of mother languages as medium of instruction in schools, which had created a sense of deprivation among the indigenous people.

When Pakistan was composed of the eastern and western wings, the Bengali language was accepted as the official language in East Pakistan, but in the west of the country the use and practice of regional languages were discouraged in Punjab, Sindh, NWFP (now Khyber Pakhtunkhwa) and Balochistan, they said.

Nazir Jan Yousafzai, the PkMAP Sindh president, in his speech, demanded of the government to make Pashto and Balochi languages as the medium of instruction in schools to impart education to children in their mother tongues.

Speakers also called for an end to making languages and ethnic groups subjects of ridicule and jokes in the media and in society. Other leaders of the PkMAP, including Sabreen Chagarzai, Sikandar Yousafzai, Bashir Mandokhel, Noorullah Tareen, Tahir Zaland and Qasim Afghan, also spoke to the protesters.

ANP holds seminar

The Awami National Party has organised a seminar at Baacha Khan Markaz, the party’s provincial headquarters in the Banaras area, where speakers said mother languages played a vital role in the development of a nation.

Speakers, including provincial secretary general Younas Bunariee, former provincial minister Amir Nawab Khan, central labour secretary Rana Gul Afridi, and provincial leaders Hameedullah Khattak and Nooraullah Achakzai, said the celebration of February 21 as ‘Mother Language Day’ was a good tradition, but it was the need of the hour that the occasion should be turned into a full-fledged movement for the promotion of mother languages across the country.

They said the previous ANP government in KP tried to promote Pashto and other mother tongues and give them due importance, but the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf’s present government had sabotaged all those efforts. After the seminar, a Pashto poetic session was also organised, in which a number of Karachi-based Pashto poets shared their poetry with the audience.

Lyari Literary Forum

Lyari Literary Forum, a Lyari-based literary organisation, also organised a seminar on the eve of International Language Day at Shaheed Benazir Bhutto University in Lyari, saying that learning in one’s mother tongue was a basic human right.

Speakers at the seminar said mother languages were identities of communities and reflected the cultures and traditions of the natives.

Dr Syed Jaffar Ahmed, former head of Karachi University’s Pakistan Study Centre, Akhter Baloch, the university’s VC, researchers GM Solangi and Dr Badal Khan, Syed Zubair of the Institute for Applied Linguistic and journalist Ali Arqam were key speakers.