Mother tongues languish to national detriment.

On 21st February 2023, another International Mother Tongue Day came and passed by, more or less unnoticed, but for some social media mention, sans serious commitment, public or private.

Neglecting mother tongues and avoiding giving them their true status in our constitutional and educational system has always been a problem. We forget that withholding the grant of a national language status to the language of a majority of our population, Bengali, became the first seed germinating into the breakup of the fifth largest country in the world!

There are nearly 3,400 languages spoken in the world and 74 of them have completely disappeared. Will our regional languages Punjabi, Sindhi, Baloochi, Pashto or Pakhto be the next to disappear?

International Mother Language Day is a worldwide annual event held on each 21 February to promote awareness of linguistic and cultural diversity and to promote multilingualism. The proposal for commemorating the Mother Tongue Day was initiated by Bangladesh.

In 1948 declaring Urdu as the national language was met with widespread protests in erstwhile East Pakistan. Bengali was sought to be declared as a national language on a par with Urdu. This demand was first raised by Dhirendranath Datta from East Pakistan on 23 February 1948 in the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan.

In protest against the 1948 announcement, large protest rallies and meetings were held. On 21 February 1952, police opened fire on peacefully striking students killing six with hundreds injured. February 21 became a Shaheed Day as well as part of a nascent separatist nationalist consciousness.

On 17 November 1999, the 30th General Assembly of UNESCO unanimously resolved that '21st February be proclaimed International Mother Language Day throughout the world to commemorate the martyrs who sacrificed their lives on this very day in 1952', later ratified by the UN General Assembly in 2001.

With our pathological preoccupation with an external and internal 'enemy', real, perhaps more exaggerated, regional ethnic and lingual diversity is wrongly considered imperiling national unity. We forget that nationhood, amidst cultural diversity, cannot but be dispersive and accommodative.

While the urge for national unity in new states is paramount, the question of national language took a different direction in India.

With more than a hundred regional languages, it followed accommodation, giving the status of national languages to 22 regional languages along with...