Supreme Court is Wrong in Saying that Urdu is Free from Religious Obstinacy

  

Facts are sacred, comments are free. Therefore, every person under 19 (1) (a) has the right to free speech and expression, which includes the right to reasonable criticism of the law courts or any executive action. Similarly, section 5 of the Contempt of Courts Act, 1971 states that a person is not punishable for contempt of court if he or she publishes a reasonable comment on the merits of a matter that has been heard and determined or if a person publishes a fair comment on the merits of a matter that has already been heard and determined.

The issue involved here is the Urdu language, which has been a bone of contention right from its inception in India. There is hardly any doubt that Urdu and Hindi are of the same genre. The only difference is the script. While Marathi, Hindi, and Nepali are written in Devanagari, Gujarati, Bengali, and Punjabi also share many similarities with the Devanagari script. However, a particular community is responsible for making Urdu a communal language, as this community insists on writing Urdu in the Arabic-Persian script. It was promoted more by the medieval Muslim rulers than by the common people.

In all the states where Urdu is the second language, its growth has been retarded for two reasons: one is its alien script, and the other is its support by a particular religious community, which has stubbornly refused to accept any change. Otherwise, there seemed to be no reason why Urdu should be foisted upon the people of West and East Pakistan, where not even a fraction of the people could speak this language. Even today, those who are fighting for the signboard of the Patur Municipal Council to be written in Urdu along with Marathi belong to only the Muslim community. They do not fight for homogeneity but for a separate identity. Thus, the lecturing of the Supreme Court on Urdu is injudicious, uncalled for, and has no connection with reality.

Judges of High Courts and the Supreme Court nurse a false notion that they know all, forgetting the fact that the Supreme Court is supreme, not because it is infallible, but because it is final. Urdu is undoubtedly a sweet language, and its growth will depend upon its acceptability by other communities, especially if its script is changed from Arabic-Persian to ancient Devanagari. For this, the obstinacy of Urduwalas belonging to a particular religious community will have to eschew its tenacity.