JAMMU: It was on October 16 that National Conference (NC) Vice President Omar Abdullah became Chief Minister of Jammu & Kashmir. He then promised that there would be no regional discrimination meaning thereby that the Jammu region will not be discriminated against. This was because his party had won most of its seats from the Kashmir valley and word went around that past practices of Kashmir-centric governance will return.
It has not taken very long for his words to sound hollow and bereft of any meaning as also substance. The very first employment opportunity that his government has referred to Public Service Commission (PSC) is 575 posts of Lecturers in the Education Department. Out of these, there are 36 posts of Urdu, two posts of Arabic and four posts of Persian. Not one post of Hindi or Sanskrit is among this large cohort of 575 of which 53 are for English.
In all, there are 102 posts of Lecturers in different languages, with three posts each for Kashmiri and Dogri and one for Punjabi. How does referring no post of Hindi or Sanskrit to PSC mean discrimination against the Jammu region? Well, both these languages are spoken and taken up as elective subjects in the schools of Kathua, Samba, Jammu, Udhampur and Reasi districts, which are Hindu-majority.
Various organisations of students in schools, colleges and in the Jammu University have strongly condemned this discriminatory move of the government. Sanatana Dharma Sabha (SDS) president Purshottam Dadheechi has termed it as gross discrimination against the vast Hindu population of the Jammu region. This is a deliberate attempt to demoralise the Hindu students so that they become fearful of the consequences of pursuing these subjects, he added.
It bears mention here that Hindi is a major language in the Eighth Schedule of the Indian Constitution and most widely spoken language countrywide. Deliberate omission of Hindi language can also be the government’s way of signalling to the Centre that Urdu will be imposed on unwilling people of Jammu again, Mr Dadheechi surmised. Incidentally, Urdu was the official language of Jammu & Kashmir state till late 2020.
A year after Article 370 of the Constitution was abrogated in August 2019, both Houses of Parliament passed The Jammu and Kashmir Official Languages Bill, 2020, in the month of September. The Bill declared Kashmiri and Dogri, besides Urdu and English as the official languages to be used for the official purposes in the Union Territory (UT). Again, the prerogative of declaring official languages is that of the UT Administrator, in this case Lieutenant Governor Manoj Sinha.
As such, the move to weed out Hindi and Sanskrit from schools of the UT is being interpreted as undermining his authority indirectly. According to 2011 census data, over 26 lakh people had shown Hindi as the language spoken by them and over 25 lakh people had listed Dogri as their mother tongue. Both these languages are written in Devnagri script or Takri which is close to Prakrit and Sanskrit.
Only 181 people had declared that they used Arabic! Compared to that, at least 18,000 had declared Pushto/Afghani as their mother tongue. Not one person had officially declared Persian as his/her mother tongue. The government has sought to get four persons appointed as Lecturers in Persian when none speaks it in the UT. In contrast, it has not sought a single post for Hindi which was spoken by over 26 lakh people in 2011. By now, it is likely that this number would have risen substantially but there is no data available.
For writing Urdu, Arabic and Persian, Nastaliq script is used and that way these languages have a major commonality. In contrast, Hindi and Sanskrit are two languages written in Devnagri and they have been completely ignored by the Omar government.
