Author Jane Jacobs once noted: “The trouble with paternalists is that they want to make impossibly profound changes, and they choose impossibly superficial means for doing so.” This aptly describes the institutional biases in Pakistan that have created so many grievances amongst the country’s diverse and ancient linguistic, ethnic and religious communities since 1947. Even Mohammad Ali Jinnah, a visionary with tremendous respect for citizen’s rights, evinced a paternalistic stance towards the diverse population Pakistan inherited after independence. His insistence on Urdu being Pakistan’s national language in 1948 was met with riots in East Pakistan, which had provided the intellectual backbone of the Muslim League. Liaquat Ali Khan’s continuation of this policy led to a language movement in East Pakistan in 1952, an event that in retrospect marked the beginning of the divide that eventually led to civil war and national disintegration in 1971. Jinnah and Liaquat may have believed they were acting on higher motivations, i.e. the need to create a united national polity in Pakistan, and that any means would do to achieve this end, but the means often define the ends. The policy of suppressing indigenous sub-nationalism for fear that it could undermine the Pakistani state was insensitive, ignorant of the deep wellsprings of historically received cultural and linguistic identity, and ultimately self-destructive. Nowhere in the thinking of Pakistan’s political leaders in those early years was the idea that diversity itself could be a source of strength. Attempts were made to force cultural and religious homogeneity, an enterprise doomed to fail conceptually and in practice in the face of the ancient cultural and linguistic traditions that predated both Urdu and Islam. Under Ayub Khan’s self-serving regime, the policy widened to include formulating a ‘national ideology’ for Pakistan, which could be used essentially to brainwash public opinion. The process reached its culmination under Ziaul Haq’s military regime and the results of his so-called ‘Islamisation’ are before us today.
Given this history, it is disappointing that the National Assembly’s Standing Committee on Law and Justice for the second time in three years rejected on Wednesday a bill by parliamentarian Marvi Memon to elevate what are currently called regional languages to the status of national languages. Ms Memon moved the Constitution Amendment Bill 2014 in February this year, seeking to substitute Article 251 of the Constitution that presently makes Urdu the country’s national language. The bill called for granting the status of national language to “all those mother tongues as deemed to be major mother tongues of Pakistan by the National Language Commission.” Studies have shown that children learn faster and easier in their mother tongue as cognitive ability using familiar cultural benchmarks is implicit in language. Just as importantly, many historical and cultural references are only understood through oral traditions in mother tongues, creating respect and knowledge about history in children. Both these qualities are sadly lacking in Pakistan today. The committee’s rejection of the bill therefore is ill informed and ill advised. *