Yes, that concludes it all. Now go into the denial mode and pretend that the race isn't real. The existence or originality of the race isn't to be determined by you, its the right of the people that recognize with it and that figure runs into millions. And its a title, time proves, which was awarded by Pakistanis. Its your policies, racial conflicts and military action that has strengthened it to this point. Either come to terms with it or maintain a view that is neither consistent with reality on ground nor facts. We exist, your not believing it won't undo it or make it untrue.
Indeed, the partition of the subcontinent and 1971 war was an extremely peaceful time to migrate to mainland. Because that is when most Muhajirs arrived here. The rest you mention were sent to Pakistan under a tripartite agreement and there was nothing a bit glamorous about it, as you put it here. If you wish to distort historical facts, at least add a little truth to make it credible because this is nonsense. Furthermore, if you want to curse the Urdu-speakers, be man enough and have the guts to do it openly and explicitly. This hiding between sentences of "lost their golden opportunity", "racial slurs", "centuries old tradition of Lucknow responsible for Shia-Sunni divide" and "organized criminal gangs" serves no purpose.
What cowardice is this, cb4? And not so surprisingly, five people have already thanked this post. It appears
@notorious_eagle @FunkyGen @Rashid Mahmood @coffee_cup @Major Sam agree with this racial BS in disguise of some correcting the history post. So you people want to convince us of equal treatment, no son of soil bias and Muhajir tag being self given by cursing us, so how does that work? This exact same attitude is the reason why we call us Urdu-speakers and migrants!
And we wont forget this: In its attempts to exterminate the militant core of the MQM, the state resorted to a calculated policy of collective punishment — massive pre-dawn "siege-and-search" operations and house-to-house searches that led to the illegal arrest and detentions of over 75,000 men between the ages of 12 and 50. Most of these men, often innocent relatives or friends of MQM activists, were blindfolded with their own shirts, paraded down to the local police station, and tortured or beaten until their families paid an extraction fee for their release.The state's counterinsurgency measures also included outright murder — in the daily newspaper reports of the deaths of MQM militants, "killed in police encounters" became an accepted euphemism for blatant extra-judicial killings. Since the Muhajir community as a whole bore the brunt of a program of systematic intimidation and harassment by the state, even those Muhajirs who had previously not supported the MQM, or did not believed in the politicization of their Muhajir identity, now felt that they had no choice but to support Altaf's MQM.
The Battlefields of Karachi: Ethnicity, Violence and the State
You cant even defend Operation Cleanup done by Pakistan Army, let alone any atrocities in the 1971 war, apparently the lessons gathered from the crimes of Tikka Khan and Operation Searchlight are too deeply latched onto the memory of the military establishment. The reasons for separatism was simple: denial of rights and unfair treatment. Language and culture is a pathetic excuse seeing their contributions for the freedom of this country.
And I can gauge your knowledge of the whole matter by seeing the PIA and Pakistan steels, you won't find a single Urdu speaker in the former literally (I have interned there very recently) and there are few left with Steel Mill. Apparently, the only qualification required for all Federal and Provincial Govt jobs is a certain domicile and that of Karachi isn't considered valid. This "manufacture of facts" is disgusting to say the least, if you are unaware of something, try not to pass it in the hope that none would notice and know it. The son of soils have first and foremost right to jobs in the country, the second rate citizens cant even apply in the first place.
Bengali Language Movement
After the partition of India in 1947 and the establishment of the Dominion of Pakistan, East Pakistan was formed made up 44 million of the newly formed Bengali-speaking people out of Pakistan's 69 million people. Pakistan's government, civil services, and military, however, were dominated by West Pakistanis. In 1947, a key resolution at a national education summit in Karachi advocated Urdu as the sole state language, and its exclusive use in the media and in schools. Opposition and protests immediately arose. Students from Dhaka rallied under the leadership of Abul Kashem, the secretary of Tamaddun Majlish, a Bengali Islamic cultural organisation. The meeting stipulated Bengali as an official language of Pakistan and as a medium of education in East Pakistan. However, the Pakistan Public Service Commission removed Bengali from the list of approved subjects, as well as from currency notes and stamps. The central education minister Fazlur Rahman made extensive preparations to make Urdu the only state language of Pakistan. Public outrage spread, and a large number of Bengali
students met on the University of Dhaka campus on 8 December 1947 to formally demand that Bengali be made an official language. To promote their cause, Bengali students organised processions and rallies in Dhaka.
A little before 1947, Dr. Ziauddin Ahmed, a former Vice-Chancellor of Aligarh University of India had suggested that Urdu be the state language of the future Pakistan. In opposition, Dr. M. Shahidullah, a noted Bengali linguist of the time from Dhaka University put forward the argument:
Urdu or Hindi instead of Bengali is used in our law courts and universities that would be tantamount to political slavery.
Dr. Shahidullah’s comment was the beginning of the language controversy of Pakistan and the Bengali Language Movement.
As soon as the Dominion of Pakistan came into being, Tamuddun Majlis
[1], a cultural society( an organization by scholars, writers and journalists oriented towards Islamic ideology)published a booklet in Dhaka, the capital city of the province of East Bengal or East Pakistan on 15th September 1947 titled “
Pakistaner Rashtro Bhasha Bangla na Urdu?” (Is Pakistan’s State Language Bengali or is it Urdu?). In it was put forward:
- Bengali language shall be the following:
- Medium of instruction in East Pakistan
- Medium of court communication
- Medium of office communication
- The language of the Central Government shall be both Urdu and Bengali (Mazlis 1947: 1-2)
On the 5th of December, 1947, teachers and students of Dhaka University held their first demonstration arguing for their linguistic rights as majority part of the nation of Pakistan. However, on the following day, another protest meeting was held in Dhaka University against the government-sponsored Education Conference in Karachi, West Pakistan which recommended that Urdu shall be the state language. As a consequence, the “Rashtra Bhasha Sangram Parishad”(Bengali for “the state
language committee of action”). The committee aggressively protested the exclusion of Bengali from postal stamps, newly-issued money, coins, and office forms of the Government of Pakistan.
Unfortunately, the West Pakistani leaders who practically controlled the Central Government of Pakistan, ignored the deep-rooted sentiments of the Bengalis and did not allot the rightful place for Bengali in the state affairs. On the second session of the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan held on 25th of February 1948 Mr. Dhirendra Nath Dutta, a member from East Pakistan, moved an amendment on the rules of procedure of the Assembly. The resolution moved to make Bengali a language of the Constituent Assembly along with Urdu and English. Speaking on the amendment, Mr. Dutta told the house:
Bengali is a provincial language but so far as the state is concerned, it is the language of the majority of the people of the state…..out of the sixty-nine million people in Pakistan, forty-four million of the people speak the Bengali language…The state language of the state should be the language which is used by the majority of the people of the state, and for that, I consider that the Bengali language is the
lingua franca of our state….I am voicing the sentiments of the vast million of our state, and therefore Bengali should not be treated as a provincial language. It should be treated as a language of the state. (Constitutional Assembly of Pakistan Proceedings 1948: 15-16)
Strong opposition by Liaquat Ali Khan, the Prime Minister, and others led to its rejection on the first day of its session. The Prime Minister’s argument was as follows:
Pakistan has been created on the demands of a hundred million Muslims in the sub-continent and the language of a hundred million Muslims is Urdu…Pakistan is a Muslim state and it must have for its
lingua franca, the language of the Muslim nation.(Constitutional Assembly of Pakistan Proceedings 1948: 17)
This started an explosion of anger in the East. “Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan’s argument was emotional and fallacious in that the hundred millions of Muslims in undivided India were never a mono-lingual or Urdu-speaking community. Indian Muslims were historically multi-lingual and the Bengali muslims have always outnumbered the Muslims of the other parts of (British) India,” describes member of Press Council of India and author Hiranmay Karlekar. Students of Dhaka University observed a protest on the 26th February, 1948 and an “All Party State Language Committee” was formed. The party scheduled a protest on 11th March. The government however took recourse. As a result, the police used tear gas and
lathis (large sticks) and injured hundreds of people. Nearly a thousand people were imprisoned. Jinnah later visited East Pakistan from 19 to 24 March 1948, during which he reiterated his stand that Urdu would be Pakistan’s sole state language and warned Bengalis about the activities of “subversive elements” out to destroy Pakistan. These comments fueled enormous anger and resentment in the hearts of the Bengalis of East Pakistan.
Despite police action, the protests continued unabated until Khawaja Nasimuddin, chief minister of East Bengal signed an eight-point agreement with the committee. Immediately after signing did Jinnah come to visit Dhaka and on 21st March he issued the following:
Let me make it very clear to you that the state language of Pakistan will be Urdu and no other language. Anyone who tries to mislead you is really the enemy of Pakistan. Without one language, no nation can remain solidly tied together and function. Look at the history of other countries. Therefore, so far as the state language is concerned, Pakistan’s shall be Urdu (Jinnah 1948: 89).
However Jinnah’s emphatic support only called upon further protests and then a memorandum was submitted by the committee demanding once more that Bengali be one of the state language, but to no avail. Khawaja Nasimuddin too, contrary to his erstwhile support for the eight-point plan he had signed with the committee, moved the following resolutions in the East Bengal legislative assembly on the 8th of April, 1948:
- Bengali shall be adopted as the official language for replacing English in the province of East Bengal; and it will be implemented as soon as the practical difficulties are resolved; and
- The medium of instruction in educational instructions in East Bengal shall, as far as possible, be Bengali, or the mother tongue of the majority of scholars in the institutions (East Bengal Legislative Assembly Proceedings 1948:165).
The resolutions, adopted by the East Bengal legislative assembly however only aggravated the situation, as the compromised version fell largely short of the normal expectations of the Bengali people. Dr. Shahidullah reacted against the resolution at the first Bengali literary conference of East Bengal held at Dhaka on December, 1948. To quote:
It is true that there are Hindus and Muslims. But what is transcending is that they are in essence Bengali. This is a reality. Nature with her own hand has stamped the indelible mark of Bengali in such a manner on our appearance and language that it is no longer possible to conceal it (Shahidullah 1949).
Shahidullah captured the ethnic and cultural distinction of the Bengali-speaking people of Pakistan. But this fact was adamantly ignored the reality, especially the fact that Pakistan was a multi-lingual state.
Instead of taking steps to quell the anger, the Pakistani government moved to edit the style and diction of the Bengali language by publishing a report in 1950 saying that Sanskrit words from Bengali were to be strictly avoided and Urdu, Arabic or Persian words were to be replaced with them. But Bengali like other Indo-Aryan languages had assimilated large numbers of Sanskrit or old Indo-Aryan words in the course of its thousand years of evolution and it would be impossible now to undo this historical process. The East Bengal language committee also suggested drastic modifications of the Bengali writing system and issued a model chart as a guide. The most important part of the Committee’s recommendation is:
It is true that Urdu can be studied as a second language in the secondary and higher stage of our education in order that we may make the linguistic, social, political and cultural bonds between the two wings of Pakistan closer and deeper (East Bengal Language Committee Report 1949:102-03)
Needless to add, the report was jettisoned by the linguistic scholars and Bengali intelligentsia.
Bhashani supervised over an all-party convention in Dhaka. The convention was attended by prominent leaders like Abul Hashim and Hamidul Haq Choudhury. A broad-based All-Party Committee of Action (APCA) was constituted with Kazi Golam Mahboob as Convener and Maulana Bhashani as its Chairman, and with two representatives from the Awami League, Students League, Youth League, Khilafate-Rabbani Party, and the Dhaka University State Language Committee of Action.
Throughout February the committee held protest meetings. However on February 20th, an order under Section 144 of the Criminal Procedure Code prohibiting processions and meetings in Dhaka city was promulgated. As a result an enormous strike erupted on February 21st. At noon, a meeting was held in the campus of Dhaka
University.
Students unified to defy the official ban imposed by the administration hence processions were taken out to stage a demonstration in front of the Provincial Assembly. What followed was a reign of terror but the language movement did not stop. The police and para-military forces started wide-spread tear gas shelling , clubbing then finally shooting the students as they retaliated by batting bricks. The ensuing riot spread to the nearby campuses of the Medical and Engineering colleges. Hundreds were injured, thousands were arrested. At around 4p.m. the police opened fire in front of the Medical College hostel. Five people- Mohammad Salauddin, Abdul Jabbar, Abul Barkat, Rafiquddin Ahmed and Abdus Salam- were killed, the first three being students of Dhaka University.
Inside the assembly which was holding a meeting then, six opposition members pressed for the adjournment of the House and demanded an inquiry into the incidents. But Chief Minister Nurul Amin urged the House to proceed with the planned agenda for the day. At this, all the opposition members of the Assembly simply walked out in protest. A martyr’s column was immediately raised and the
Shaheed Minar (martyr’s monument) was built on the spot where the first student was slain each student killed were declared martyrs as they had laid down their lives for their beloved mother tongue.
After continued unrest and widespread protests, eventually on 7th May 1954, the constituent assembly resolved with the Muslim League's support to grant official status to Bengali. Thus Bengali came to be recognized as the second official language of Pakistan on 29 February 1956, and article 214(1) of the constitution of Pakistan was reworded to "The state language of Pakistan shall be Urdu and Bengali."On December 3, 1955, a national language-research institute- The Bangla Academy, was established. When the Awami League government came to power in 1956, Chief Minister of East Pakistan Ataur Rahman Khan requested Chief Engineer Jabbar and Zainul Abedin to ask famous architect Hamidur Rahman to prepare a plan for a Shaheed Minar. Hamidur Rahman's design provided for stained glass to be used in the columns
on which a pattern of hundreds of eyes were to be incorporated through which the sunlight would glow. The floor was to be of marble, so as to show up, or reflect, the moving shadows of the columns as the
sun crossed the sky, thus creating a mobile drama of geometric lines and colour from the stained glass. He had thought of inclusion of blood-stained footsteps of the "Shaheeds" (Martyrs) and outsize footprints in black of the aggressor, on the marble. He had kept provision for a clock tower and a well-stocked research library. In the basement gallery of the Minar, he had designed 1,500 sq. ft. of fresco depicting the scenes of the Language Movement, which was in fact one of his masterpieces.
More Sources:
Account of the Bengali Language Movement: Bhasha Andolon
Introduction to the Bengali Language Movement
Bengali Language Movement - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Lucknow connection
It may shock many Indians to know that the massacre of the Shia in Pakistan since 2002 has been caused by edicts of apostatisation issued by a madrasa of Lucknow. One may also connect the trauma of sectarian killings in Iraq today to a fund moved from Lucknow in the 18th century to construct the Hindia Canal that turned the desiccated Shia shrines of Najaf and Karbala into agricultural land, seducing Sunni nomadic tribes into settling down as Shia farmers, and thus converting Iraq into a Shia-majority country. A recent report on Sunni-Shia riots in Lucknow, appearing in Muslims in Indian Cities: Trajectories of Marginalisation (2012) by Laurent Gayer and Christophe Jaffrelot (editors), speaks of the current Muslim-versus-Muslim sectarian riots in a city where literary Urdu was born at the hands of three great classical poets, Anees, Dabeer and Mir, all of them Shia. Speaking this language in a chaste accent, the majority Sunni Muslims of Lucknow fight sanguinary battles with Shias during the month of Muharram. In his paper in the above book, “A Minority within a Minority: The Shias of Kashmiri Mohalla, Lucknow”, Gilles Verniers tells us: “Lucknow is a city of hills and dales, where altitude once defined status. The rulers of Awadh, a Shia dynasty that established itself in the city in the late eighteenth century, distributed lands and properties to their administrators and courtiers in the higher reaches of the hills. The commoners, labourers and orderlies of the state and the court were concentrated in the lower parts, darker, more congested and prone to water logging.” Then, between 1775 and 1778, Kashmiri Pandits migrated to the city as able administrators for Asaf-ud-Dowlah, the fourth Shia Nawab of Awadh, who had shifted his capital from Faizabad to Lucknow. They were soon joined by Muslim families, mostly Shias, who also hailed from Kashmir, and were directly or indirectly connected to the royal family and its court or served the Awadh state as high-ranking officials. Then came the British, cutting the mutinous Shia down to size after 1857. Fortunes declined in the 1950s after zamindari was abolished under land reforms and better-educated Hindus moved out to better jobs. This small area started mutating into a slum, covering an area of 12 sq km and housing a population of 39,319, mostly Shia Muslims. Unfortunately, Lucknow has earned a bad name today, not because of Hindu-Muslim riots but Shia-Sunni violence among the poor Muslim community, reflecting, too, what is happening in Pakistan, Iraq and Syria today. Following the 1979 Khomeini revolution in Iran, the Sunni Arabs of the Gulf and Saudi Arabia felt threatened by Iranian irredentism. They first approached Pakistani dictator Zia-ul-Haq, and then, of all places, Lucknow. Zia imposed a new tax (zakat) on Sunnis but included Shias too, which was not according to Islamic law, provoking the Shia to stage their first angry march on Islamabad. Saudi Arabia then approached the Sunni head of the famous seminary, Nadwatul Ulema of Lucknow, to write two books to incite hatred of the Shia in the entire Islamic world. The first was a condemnation of Iran’s Imam Khomeini, and the second was a compilation of fatwas (edicts) from the madrasas of India and Pakistan declaring the Shia as kaafir and therefore liable to extermination for succumbing to apostasy. In 1986, the Deobandi seminaries of Pakistan and India had issued fatwas of apostatisation against the Shia population and thus upheld the manifesto of Sipah-e-Sahaba, a party formed in 1985 in Pakistan on the basis of its demand that the Shia be declared non-Muslim by the state of Pakistan through an amendment to the constitution. The state had already set the precedence of apostatising a Muslim community, the Ahmadis, and declaring them non- Muslim under the second amendment of 1974. The anti-Shia edicts (fatwas) were “managed” through a scholar of India, Manzur Numani, then head of Nadwatul Ulema of Lucknow, who had earlier written a book against Imam Khomeini and Iran. Funded by the Saudi charity Rabita Alam Islami (World Islamic League), he wrote to the Deobandi seminaries of India and Pakistan, asking them to give their juristic opinion on the Shia faith. The “masterpiece” he achieved came in the shape of a collection of fatwas printed serially in the Lucknow-based journal Al Furqan from December 1987 to July 1988. Yoginder Sikand, a noted Indian scholar of Islam, laments: “Even madrasas considered somehow more ‘open’ and ‘modern’ are not free from the virus of sectarianism.One of the Nadwa’s leading teachers, Manzur Numani, penned numerous diatribes against the Shias in the wake of the Iranian Revolution, branding them as infidels and insisting that Shi’ism had nothing to do with ‘authentic’ Islam whatsoever.” In 2003, when the first batch of the Shia Hazara community was massacred in Quetta, Balochistan, these fatwas of Lucknow were first distributed across the city. I noticed that pages from the book of Numani’s fatwas — which I possessed — had been photocopied, enlarged and distributed in the city before the massacre. Now, a word about the nexus between Lucknow and the ongoing Iraqi implosion. The conversion of Iraqi Arabs was owed, among other factors, to the “bequests” that came from the Nawab of Awadh, who was to rule Lucknow, first rescuing a waterless and desiccated Najaf from death, through the construction of the “Hindia Canal” from the Euphrates, then through permanent stipends to the Shia jurists of the city. (Thanks to this lifesaving Indian canal, Najaf today has a surplus economy run by a cleric, now Grand Ayatollah, who migrated to Iraq from Jalandhar, India, in 1947.) The fertility of the land around Najaf and Karbala, ruled then by Turkey, attracted the desert Arabs to agriculture, while the Ottoman bureaucracy encouraged them to own land so that tax could be collected from them. The well-endowed Iranian Shia jurists, threatened by repeated raids from the Wahhabis of Arabia against the Shrines of Najaf and Karbala, began to proselytise intensively among the Arab tribes till most of them converted. In the 19th century, Iraq had already become a Shia-majority state. The one big factor was the corpse traffic (naql al-janaez) that accounted for nearly 20,000 dead bodies of Shias from Iran and India every year for the purpose of burial at the shrines of Najaf and Karbala. The practice was old and had stemmed from the hadith of the sixth Shia Imam Jafar al-Sadiq that “being next to Ali a day is more favourable than seven hundred years of worship”. The coming of the corpses had its own economics that attracted a lot of commerce to the city of Najaf. Yitzhak Nakash, in his book The Shi’is of Iraq (1994), tells us that Lucknow gave more than a million rupees annually from the nawab’s treasury for the upkeep of the Shia shrines in Iraq. The money went to the Iranian Shia jurists settled around these shrines. It is unfortunate that Shi’ism, which once informed the Muslim-Indian culture and also changed Hindu attitudes through its syncretic character, is now changing into a dogma that it never was. The Shia in Pakistan and India are rediscovering their faith as a schism that took place in early Islam and are readying themselves for a new armageddon.
The Lucknow connection | The Indian Express | Page 3
More Sources:
Azadari in Lucknow - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Shi'a Islam in Colonial India: Religion, Community and Sectarianism - Justin Jones - Google Books
Picturing Muharram: Images of a Colonial Spectacle, 1870–1915 | Rianne Siebenga - Academia.edu
Assessment of Socio-Political and Socio-Economic Factors Causing Sindhi-Muhajirs Conflicts in Sindh-Pakistan | Khatwani | British Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies
Partition of India a blunder - Altaf Hussain
