I had to go to Dhaka; I had to shed tears at Dhaka’s Paltan Ground over our national disgrace. I had to embrace and weep with the stranded Pakistanis in their camps, to tell them we are ashamed that we prioritised one crore Afghans over them, jeopardising our own country’s peace. I wanted to offer Fatiha at the grave of Abdul Malik, a poor 22-year-old student who gave his life for the Islamic education system at Dhaka University. To this day, I have been deprived of that. What can I say? The truth is that it is not easy to untie the tangled knots of history.

Pakistan was the result of an extraordinary movement, but the blood-soaked events of the linguistic conflict on the initial pages of this new state’s history created a deep rift that we have not been able to fully bridge even today. It was a cruel irony of time that a state came into being on the map of the subcontinent whose eastern wing, comprising nearly 58% of the total population (according to the 1951 census), was geographically, linguistically, and culturally distinct from the western wing. Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s decision to declare Urdu as the sole national language, viewed as a symbol of the unity of Muslim nationhood, to some extent sowed the seeds of alienation in the hearts of the Bengali-speaking majority. Given the different languages of five ethnic groups, the decision to make Urdu the lingua franca was arguably better. However, under the influence of nationalist propaganda, our Bengali brothers protested, considering it a violation of........

© The Nation