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| Dr. Afzal Mirza | Nadir Ali | Ishtiaq Ahmed  | Shafqat Tanvir Mirza |Tariq Rehman|

| Najam Hussain Syed | Jaspal Singh | Nirpuma Dutt | Aditi Tandon|

| Harjap Singh Aujla |  Safir Rammah |

Tariq Rehman

   

 

     
 

Language policy and the ruling elite.   Dr Tariq Rahman.
Pakistan emerged on the map of the world on 14 August 1947 as a consequence of a political movement. This movement mobilized the Muslims of India through two symbols: Islam and Urdu.

English, Urdu or...?   Dr. Tariq Rahman
Language is a key to understanding complex political matters as the distribution of power within ethnic groups, between social classes, and even between individuals, observes Dr Tariq Rahman.

World mother tongue day   Dr. Tariq Rahman
The 21st of February is celebrated as World Mother Tongue Day. The UNESCO, which hopes to make people conscious of the importance of the mother tongue, declares in its latest publication Education in a Multilingual World (2003), that the most suitable language for teaching basic concepts to children is the mother tongue. Indeed, the UNESCO declared this as early as 1953 in its report The Use of Vernacular Languages in Education. Yet, as the world modernized, the smaller and weaker mother tongues started dying. The schooling system, the media and the jobs all demanded the languages of power - the languages used in the domains of power i.e. administration, government, military, commerce, education, media etc. - which had to be learned by people in their own interest.

People and Languages in Pre-Islamic Indus Valley   Dr. Tariq Rahman
What was the language of the Indus Valley, present-day Pakistan, in the pre-Islamic period? Did this region have one language or many? Did it have one language family or many? In which script, or scripts, were they written? These questions cannot be answered by the linguist alone. To answer them one needs the help of the archaeologist, the historian and the anthropologist. Let us then begin with the evidence about the Indus Valley civilization brought to light by the archaeologists first.

The Punjabi Movement   Dr. Tariq Rehman
The activists of the Punjabi movement want Punjabi to be used for educational, administrative, and judicial purposes in the province of the Punjab. As the Punjab is the most populous and prosperous province of the country, notorious for its dominance in the army and the bureaucracy, many people find this language movement incomprehensible. Indeed, most Punjabis of the upper and the middle classes do favour Urdu, and submerge their Punjabi identity in the Pakistani one. What is difficult to explain is why the activists of the Punjabi movement do not do so. Would the Punjabi activists gain power? Considering that most of them are generally competent in Urdu (and some even in English), they could choose the easier way of joining the Punjabi elite rather than opposing it. Moreover, some of them such as Hanif Ramay—who was the chief minister of the Punjab under Z. A. Bhutto’s PPP rule in 1972-76 and is the Speaker of the Punjab Legislative Assembly at the time of this writing—possess political power; nor is it difficult for others to join mainstream politics and rise to eminence as Pakistanis (as Ramay asserts in his book: 1985: 29). Does the lure of the movement extend only to the less successful, as Christopher Shackle suggests?

The Right to Learn In Your Mother Tongue  Dr. Tariq Rahman
If one goes to an elitist English-medium school and meets the principal, or whoever condescends to grant an audience, one finds out that one's mother tongue - assuming one is a Pakistani - is held in supreme contempt. I once asked a certain principal whether Punjabi children had the right to be educated in Punjabi even in the juniormost classes and she gave me the kind of look one reserves for the mentally handicapped.

                                
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