Bangladesh: India needs to tread carefully yet purposefully

India needs come up with a renewed diplomatic effort for ordinary Bangladeshis to be invested in India

- JAYANTA ROY CHOWDHURY

Ringside View L ast week for the first time since Bangladesh became independent in 1971, an event was held at Dhaka's National Press Club extolling Muhammad Ali Jinnah, a figure of hate to those who founded Bangladesh, as the language movement which eventually metamorphosed into a freedom struggle, started in right earnest after Jinnah ruled in March 1948 that "Urdu and Urdu alone" would be the national language of the newly-formed state of Pakistan.

On the fateful day of March 24, 1948, Jinnah, who was then Governor General of Pakistan, addressing a gathering at Dhaka University's Curzon Hall, made this declaration in a bid to stifle nascent demands that Bengali be given equal status along with Urdu as the national language of his country since a larger percentage of Pakistan's population lived in its eastern wing and spoke that language.

Earlier in the day he had met a cross-section of Bengali leaders and citizenry from East Pakistan and added insult to injury by asking them if they could point to any instance of great literature written in Bengali to back their contention that the language be given national status along with Urdu. (This despite the fact that the only Asian Nobel Laureate for Literature till then had written exclusively in Bengali!) That single act of linguistic chauvinism on the part of the man who had been hailed as Quaid-I-Azam by his millions of followers was to cost Pakistan dearer than the any of the sinister theories its leaders have claimed responsible for breaking up that ill-fated nation or led to its current state of financial and political chaos.

On that fateful day in March, for the first time Jinnah was heckled by an audience in Pakistan and had to hear loud calls of "No, no", challenging his diktat which till then had been taken as the final word in his country.