One of the most divisive issues confronting Pakistan in its
infancy was the question of what the official language of the new state was to
be. Mohammad Ali Jinnah yielded to the demands of refugees from the Indian
states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, who insisted that Urdu be Pakistan's
official language. Speakers of the languages of West Pakistan (Punjabi, Sindhi,
Pushtu, and Baluchi) were upset that their languages were given second-class
status. In East Pakistan, the dissatisfaction quickly turned to violence. The
Bengalis of East Pakistan constituted a majority (an estimated 54%) of
Pakistan's entire population. Their language, Bengali, like Urdu, belongs to
the Indo-Aryan language family, but the two languages have different scripts
and literary traditions.
Jinnah visited East Pakistan on only one occasion after
independence, shortly before his death in 1948.[1] Speaking in Dhaka to a
throng of over 300,000 on March 21, 1948, he announced that, "Without one
state language, no nation can remain tied up solidly together and
function."[2][3] Jinnah's views were not accepted by most East Pakistanis,
but perhaps in tribute to the founder of Pakistan, serious resistance on this
issue did not break out until after his death. On February 21, 1952, a
demonstration was carried out in Dhaka in which students demanded equal status
for Bengali. The police reacted by firing on the crowd and killing many
students, most of whom remain unidentified to this day. (A memorial, the
Shaheed Minar, was built later to commemorate the martyrs of the language
movement.) Two years after the incident, Bengali agitation effectively forced
the National Assembly to designate "Urdu and Bengali and such other
languages as may be declared" to be the official languages of Pakistan.
