National status for regional languages: National Assembly body to consider Amend bill tomorrow

The Standing Committee on Law, Justice and Parliamentary Affairs will take up the Constitutional Amendment Bill, 2008 to give regional languages the status of national languages. A meeting of the Standing Committee on Law, Justice & Parliamentary Affairs on the subject will be held in Parliament House on Wednesday.
Pakistan will have up to eight national languages - not just Urdu. The private bill was introduced in the National Assembly on January 2011 without any government objection. The introduction of the long-pending bill has 22 authors as its members, with Yusuf Talpur on top of the list, along with some members of PML-Q. The Constitution (Amendment) Bill 2011 - a nomenclature that could be changed by the house standing committee on law and justice during its scrutiny - seeks to replace the Article 251 of the constitution that specifies only Urdu as the national language with a new one that says: "The national languages of Pakistan are Balochi, Punjabi, Pushto, Shina/Balti, Sindhi, Saraiki and Urdu."
The bill needs two-thirds majority in both National Assembly and Senate to become part of the Constitution. Because language has been a sensitive issue since the early days of Pakistan's creation when Urdu was chosen as the only national language with the exclusion of Bengali spoken by the majority of the population living in former East Pakistan, now Bangladesh.
And any talk of giving national status to some major languages spoken in the four provinces of the country has been viewed with suspicion because of its perceived link with the concept of different nationalities propounded mainly by nationalist parties and demand for the creation of new provinces like the one in the Saraiki-speaking south of Punjab or in Pushto-speaking north of Balochistan.
The new bill also provides for continuing English as Pakistan`s official language "until arrangements are made for the national languages to come at par with it" while the original Article 251 says that "arrangements shall be made" for Urdu "being made for official and other purposes within 15 years from the commencing day" and that "the English language may be used for official purposes until arrangements are made for its replacement by Urdu".
Another addition to the article requires the federal government to establish a fund for the development and promotion of national languages "as well as to ensure teaching of Arabic as a compulsory subject at school level" for what an accompanying statement called a better understanding of Islam by the country population and Persian as an optional subject "so that regionally we remain connected to our age-old literary traditions of Persian".