Pakistan Army surrendered before Indian Army on December 16, 1971. It was a great tragedy. One of the greatest causes of this tragedy was Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s wrong decision to keep the dominion of Pakistan as one country. The culture, language and demography of East Pakistan and West Pakistan were so different, and the distance between these two parts was so great (distance between Karachi and Dhaka is 1800 km) that it was not at all reasonable to make one federation of these two parts. It was not a mistake; it was a blunder.
Only a person, completely disconnected from reality, and living in an ideal world of his own mind, could make such a strange decision. Quaid is considered a pragmatic politician, but this decision was far from any shade of pragmatism.
Urdu-Hindi conflict played an important role in the formation of two-nation theory in the subcontinent. But when two-nation theory crystallized in the form of a separate country Pakistan, the ground realities took a strange shape: none of the part of Pakistan belonged to Urdu speaking zones of subcontinent. And as far as the East Pakistan is concerned, Urdu was an unfamiliar language to a large extent. There was an unrest regarding Urdu and Bengali languages in the East Pakistan.. During this unrest Quaid arrived Dhaka and announced that Urdu, and only Urdu will be the national language of Pakistan, and those who differ with this view are enemies of Pakistan. Such policies of Quaid played important role in partition of Pakistan.
In other cultural phenomenon, people of both wings of the country were completely aliens to each other. Unfortunately the doctrine of defence suggest by General Ayyub was extremely fatal. He suggested that the defence of the East Pakistan lay in the West Pakistan. This doctrine inculcated a sense of deep insecurity in the people of East Pakistan.
Not dividing both wings into two separate countries was strategically not feasible. This strategic error played role in 1971 war. India succeeded in capturing the East Pakistan quite easily.
Had Quaid made proper decision, and had declared both wings as two different countries; we would not have been experienced defeat in Dhaka.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
A logical explanation for declaring Urdu language as the national language is that all the communities within the nation are very different in culture and in their value systems so there could be two options to unite them
ReplyDelete1:Religion(for which not much could be promoted as independence was in the name of freedom to practice our own beliefs so this freedom could not be restricted to Islam otherwise we could not be different from Hindus).
2: Second option could be a language which could not be related to a dominating portion of the population to save smaller communities from feeling insecure and Urdu/English were such options but out of these there was sentimental resistance against English and Urdu became the inevitable choice.