12-27-2007, 04:16 PM
Heritage of Urdu: partition and islami imperialism.
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Kargil, Ladakh and Kashmir:
<span style='font-size:14pt;line-height:100%'>Role of Urdu and divisive politics</span>
By Dr Kunal Ghosh
In India we usually call the Pakistan occupied part of the state of Jammu and Kashmir PoK. Baltistan is that part of PoK that is contiguous with the Kargil region of north western Ladkh. In turn the north-eastern part of Laddakh is contiguous with the western Tibetan plateau. The status of Baltistan and western Tibetan plateau are disputed between Pakistan and India and India and China. Baltistan, Ladakh and western Tibetan plateau are now under the control of three different countries, but peoples of these three regions are of the same race and speak the same language. Baltistan was part of Ladakh district before 1947. Fig 1 shows a map of the state of Jammu and Kashmir in which these three regions can be seen. The original Laddakh district is shown by a double line boundary. The approximate map of 25-year-old Kargil district is shown south of the Line of Control (LOC) by a single line. The town of Skardu that lies north-west of Kargil town across the LoC is the capital of Baltistan. Pakistanâs tourism promotion website refers to Baltistan as âLittle Tibetâ (see Fig 2, a page from Pakistani tourism website). Fig 3 shows an enlargement of Pakistanâs depiction of PoK and Baltistan within it. Baltis call their land by a Tibetan name âBaltiyulâ which is derived from the original Tibetan script called âBaltiâ that was prevalent in the area before Islamization (to Shia faith) took place in the 16th century during the reign of king Ghota-Cho-Senge. Islamization took place late in these parts, about three centuries later than in Kashmir valley. Thereafter the Arabic Nasq script was introduced. A Buddhist minority exists even now in Baltistan of PoK, although very thin on the ground. The part of Ladakh district that came to India has in its north-western part, around the town of Kargil, a Muslim majority. As one moves in the south-easterly direction the Buddhist population increases and in Zanskar and Leh they become a majority. Buddhists of Ladakh retained the traditional script called Bodhi (alternatively, Ladakhi) of Tibetan origin and they call their language Ladakhi. The Nasq (Arabic) script became popular with Muslims, and since it came to India via Persia, it is often called Persian script. The language written in Nasq is called Balti. In a sense the relationship between Nasq-Balti and Bodhi-Ladakhi is similar to that between Nasq-Urdu and Devnagari-Hindi.
Initially the sparsely populated Ladakh region consisted of a single district called âLadakhâ (as shown in Fig. 1) with its capital at Leh. When Sheikh Abdullah was brought out of imprisonment and re-instated as the Chief Minister in the later half of the 1970s, he created a few new districts and sub-divisions along communal lines in different parts of the state. A Muslim-majority sub-division called Gool was carved out of composite Reasi sub-division in Jammu region and Ladakh district was bifurcated into Muslim-majority Kargil and Buddhist-majority Leh. Further, Buddhist-majority Zanskar subdivision was mischievously included in Kargil district instead of in Leh district. So now there remains no district called Ladakh, which was the original name. However, the whole composite region is still called Ladakh, as before, and that has significant legal implications.
<b>Language and script </b>
Between Balti and Ladakhi all verbs and 90 per cent of words are in common (Kazmi 1996). The following tables from Kazmi (1996) give an illustrative sample.
These tables serve to illustrate two important features. Firstly, the languages of Baltistan. of PoK and Ladakh of India are practically identical and should be classified as two dialects of the same language. They are given two different names because they are written in two different scripts. Secondly, they are a world apart from the north Indian languages such as Kashmiri, Urdu, Hindi etc of the Indo-European family. The centre of Balti is the Skardu town of POK and the centre of Ladakhi is the Leh town of Laddakh. The Kargil town of Ladakh lies in between geographically. Hence its language too should be somewhere in between Balti and Ladakhi. This implies that the Kargil speech and Leh speech are practically indistinguishable.
<b>Education</b>
Traditionally, the Buddhist Gompas taught one son of every family how to read the scriptures. Western education was started first by Moravian Mission in Leh in 1889. The subjects taught were Ladakhi, Urdu, English, Geography, Nature Study, Arithmetic, Geometry and Bible Study. It is to be noted that mother tongue Ladakhi and two other useful languages were included in the curriculum (Wikipedia 2006).
After Independence, the Jammu and Kashmir government started opening schools that taught the pupils in Urdu medium till age 14 and thereafter switched to English medium. It is obvious that the Jammu and Kashmir government made a deliberate policy of dropping the mother tongue. On the other side of LoC Pakistan government was doing the same thing by imposing Urdu on the Balti-speaking people of the so-called âLittle Tibetâ of Baltistan (Kazmi 1996). Studentsâ Educational and Cultural Movement of Ladakh (SECMOL) was started in 1988 that campaigned to shape public opinion for education reform. As a result of their movement, the mother tongue started replacing Urdu as the medium since 1993. The Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Council (LAHDC) came into existence in 1995 after the act concerned was passed in the Legislative Assembly.
Urdu and the Arabic script have had a long spell since 1947, owing to the language policy of the state government. Hence it is likely that in Kargil district the script is Arabic (Nasq) in the Muslim-majority north-western parts and Bodhi in Zanskar, the Buddhist-majority south-eastern sub-division. The language is either called Balti or Ladakhi, depending on the script used. Since 2001 a series of steps have been taken, which spells doom for the language of Kargil, and makes separation of Kargil from Ladakh and its merger with Kashmir almost inevitable.
<b>Impending separation</b>
Since 2001 the Indian army has been opening Urdu-medium primary schools in Kargil to promote literacy, as a part of its Sadbhavana (meaning goodwill) program (Jha 2001). Evidently this was on advice from Jammu and Kashmir government, while the Central government was oblivious and lacked any coherent language policy. It should be noted that SECMOLâs mother-tongue-first policy, which was supported by LAHDC, had been in place for previous 8 years. Yet the Indian army followed a policy that ran counter to SECMOLâs. Why didnât the army start schools in Balti medium in Kargil? There is only one answer to this question. There is an all pervasive language ideology permeating the Central government, Jammu and Kashmir Government and the Indian Army. It says, âUrdu is the language of the Muslimâ.
(The author is a Professor and can be contacted at Aerospace Engineering, IIT Kanpur; email: kunal@iitk.ac.in)
http://www.organiser.org/dynamic/modules.p...pid=188&page=30
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Above has tables showing words in Balti and Ladakhi with English meanings.
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Kargil, Ladakh and Kashmir:
<span style='font-size:14pt;line-height:100%'>Role of Urdu and divisive politicsâII</span>
Unfortunately and ironically, Pakistan is also an adherent of this ideology and had tried to impose Urdu on Bengali Muslims of erstwhile East Pakistan, leading to break up of Pakistan and creation of Bangladesh.
Imposition of Urdu would break a linguistic continuity and distance the people of Kargil from Leh. In July 2003, the Congress-PDP (Peopleâs Democratic Party) coalition government created a separate development council for Kargil, with a strange name, âLadakh Autonomous Hill Development Council for Kargilâ. The PDP, headed by father and daughter duo, Mufti Mohammad Sayeed and Mehbooba Mufti, appointed a seven-member committee to prepare a position paper on self-rule of Jammu and Kashmir (Chatterjee 2006). In a recent speech in New Delhi, Mehbooba outlined her ideas about self-rule: âPDP would like the state to be divided into three regions, Leh-Ladakh, Kashmir and Jammu, each having its own legislature (Chatterjee 2006).â
Mehbooba has coined a new term âLeh-Ladakhâ. She is silent on Kargil. The implications are ominous. Presumably Kargil would be merged with Kashmir under one legislature. It should be noted that as a whole Kargil district of Ladakh has a Muslim majority, although its Zanskar sub-division is predominantly Buddhist. The process of separating the Muslim-dominated area of Ladakh from Ladakh started early and developed in four phases so far. The following are the âlandmarkâ events in this process:
<b>First Phase: </b>
As has already been mentioned, it was Sheikh Abdullah who set the ball rolling by creating the separate Muslim-majority district called Kargil. Since then a terminological shift has been promoted in the mass media. A practice has developed in the media to identify Leh district alone as Ladakh, and treat Kargil as a separate entity outside Ladakh. The latest war between India and Pakistan is called Kargil war, instead of Ladakh war. A popular misconception has been promoted all over India as if Kargil is not a part of Ladakh.
<b>Second Phase: </b>
In 2001, this process received a windfall in the form of the âSadbhavnaâ programme, launched by General Arjun Ray of the Indian Army, in Kargil district (Hindustan Times 2001). The programme is a praiseworthy initiative aiming to win the hearts and minds of the people. However, as a part of the programme Urdu-medium schools are being opened in the region and that is unfortunate, because the people of Kargil are primarily Balti-Ladakhi speakers. There is a linguistic continuum from Pakistan-occupied Baltistan (a part of the northern areas of Jammu and Kashmir, with Skardu as capital) to Ladakh and further east into Tibet. Ladakhi is a regional variant of western Tibetan and Balti of Baltistan in turn is a variant of Ladakhi. Kazmi (1996) a citizen of Baltistan (PoK) observes the following on the relationship between Balti and Ladakhi:
âApparently, Balti is, at the moment, cut off from its sister languages of Ladakh but has 80-90 per cent of nouns, pronouns, verbs and other literary and grammatical characters in commonâ¦. We can, however, term Balti and Bodhi of Ladakh as separate dialects, but not separate languages.â
As far as script duality for the same language is concerned, the Balti-Ladakhi pair is similar to the Urdu-Hindi pair. However, there are major differences. Excepting verbs and pronouns, almost all vocabulary of Indian origin (Sanskrit and non-Sanskrit) has been expelled from Urdu and replaced by Persio-Arabic (Ghosh 1994, Ghosh and Kumar 2005). That is not the case with Balti as vocabulary of Tibetan origin is very much retained. The differences between Balti and Ladakhi are mostly regional. Between Urdu and Hindi that is not the case, and the differences between them are extensive and an all-India phenomenon.
Whatever view one takes, the language of Kargil is either Balti or Ladakhi. Both Balti and Ladakhi are well-developed languages of Tibeto-Burman origin. Maharaja Hari Singh imposed Urdu on a Kashmiri speaking populace by starting Urdu primary schools. At least Kashmiri and Urdu belong to the same North Indian family of languages and there is some remote affinity. For instance, the verbs and pronouns are derivatives of Sanskrit words in both Kashmiri and Urdu, as the table shows:
English Sanskrit Kashmiri Urdu
You twam tsa tum
He sah sa wah
Eat khad khun khana
Do karan karan karna
On the other hand, Balti/Ladakhi being of Tibeto-Burman family is as far from Urdu as chalk is from cheese. Verbs, pronouns, nouns, adjectives are all different. The uninformed and short-sighted move of General Arjun Ray has interrupted a linguistic continuity from Baltistan of PoK to Ladakh of India to western Tibetan plateau. In fact imposition of Urdu on Kargil is bound to affect the morale of Balti people in PoK who are struggling against Urdu imposition themselves (Kazmi 1996). And it is likely to demoralize people of Leh who are trying to earn a place for their language in the state of Jammu and Kashmir and who too may be the next victim of Urdu hegemony.
<b>Third Phase: </b>
The third phase started when the present PDP-Congress coalition came into power in Jammu and Kashmir in 2002. The Common Minimum Programme (CPM) of the coalition says (Hindu 2002):
âThe government shall grant full powers to the Autonomous Hill Council for Leh, which has hitherto been deprived of its legitimate powers. Efforts will be made to persuade the people of Kargil to accept a similar Autonomous Hill Council for Kargil.â
When the CMP was written, there was no Autonomous Hill Council for Leh. There was only the Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Council (LAHDC). Why did the two parties use this mischievous and deceitful language? What was the ulterior motive? There is only one conclusion that can be drawn. Both Congress and PDP were conspiring to politically separate the Muslim-majority Kargil from Buddhist-majority Ladakh. Another interpretation is possibleâPDP set this as a condition for alliance and the Congress swallowed it for its greed of political power. It is noteworthy that there was no demand for a separate council from the people of Kargil. Even then, a separate council was being foisted on them from above. The intention was to create a religio-political division where only a religious difference with strong syncretic and even marital links between Buddhists and Muslim existed. This action of the Congress is comparable to its political move in Kerala in the 1950s and 1960s, whereby the ban on the Muslim League was removed, a coalition government with it was formed and eventually a Muslim-majority district of Malappuram was created.
The promise of the CMP was fulfilled in July 2003 when the coalition Government formed the Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Council for Kargil (LAHDC for Kargil). A strange name indeed! It formed also the Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Council for Leh (LAHDC for Leh). Why such strange and tortuous names? If we call âKanpur Development Authorityâ by the name Uttar Pradesh Development Authority for Kanpurâ, it would be considered absurd. According to a bill passed in Jammu and Kashmir Assembly an autonomous council is legally valid only for Ladakh. Hence an entity called âAutonomous Development Council for Kargilâ would be legally invalid. This explains the ridiculous contortions in nomenclature which is seemingly legally valid (although I am not sure and it should be challenged in a court) and at the same time serves the purpose of separation of Kargil. The religion-based division of Ladakh has been extended to a sub-division of Kargilâonly three council seats out of 30 have been allocated to the overwhelmingly Buddhist Zanskar subdivision. The aggrieved people of Zanskar, both Buddhists and Muslims, boycotted the July 2003 election to LAHDC-for-Kargil (Hindu 2003).
<b>Fourth Phase: </b>
The fourth phase has started with the declaration of Mehbooba Mufti outlining her ideas about so-called âself-ruleâ. Leh-Ladakh would get a separate Legislative Assembly. But Kargil will likely be joined with Kashmir under the jurisdiction of the Legislative Assembly at Srinagar. If this scenario comes true, then the following is likely to happen:
Leh-Ladakh Assembly will function in Ladakhi and Jammu Assembly will function in Dogri. Kashmir will continue to be administered in Urdu. It cannot possibly switch over to Kashmiri with Balti-speaking Kargil on tow. So people of Kashmir will once again be deprived of the right to education and administration in Kashmiri, their mother tongue. It should be remembered that Kashmiris have always described Kashmiri as their mother tongue, and not Urdu, in census after census. (This should be contrasted with the fact that Muslims of Andhra and Karnataka declare Urdu their mother tongue, although what they speak can at best be called pidgin Urdu and they are more fluent in Telugu and Kannada.)
If Kashmir retains Urdu and abandons Kashmiri, Muslim-majority Doda district of Jammu is likely to demand to be separate form Jammu and merged with Kashmir. It would be persuaded to opt for Urdu written in Arabic script instead of Dogri written in Devnagari, although its speech is Dogri. Little differences with Dogri will be invented and separation will be demanded. PDP surely and even National Conference probably would encourage this tendency with Congress as always playing an opportunistic unprincipled role.
<b>Conclusion </b>
People of Baltistan (of PoK), Kargil and Leh, all parts of the original Ladakh district, speak the same language, but employ two different scripts, Ladakhi (Bodhi) and Arabic (Nasq). Pakistan has a long-standing policy of imposing Urdu while suppressing vernaculars. This stems from the language ideology that Urdu alone is the language of the Muslims of the subcontinent. The language policy of the Jammu and Kashmir government seems to be no different. It is busy suppressing the use of the mother tongue in Kargil district. This policy is unfair to the people of Kargil and particularly so to the people of Zanskar subdivision who are predominantly Buddhist. Clever steps are being taken to extend Kashmiri political hegemony over Kargil to reinforce the Urdu hegemony. The result would be separation of Kargil from Ladakh, where lie its racial and linguistic roots. Kargil people would eventually lose their language.
(The author is a Professor and can be contacted at Aerospace Engineering, IIT Kanpur, kunal@iitk.ac.in)
http://www.organiser.org/dynamic/modules.p...pid=189&page=26
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Kargil, Ladakh and Kashmir:
<span style='font-size:14pt;line-height:100%'>Role of Urdu and divisive politics</span>
By Dr Kunal Ghosh
In India we usually call the Pakistan occupied part of the state of Jammu and Kashmir PoK. Baltistan is that part of PoK that is contiguous with the Kargil region of north western Ladkh. In turn the north-eastern part of Laddakh is contiguous with the western Tibetan plateau. The status of Baltistan and western Tibetan plateau are disputed between Pakistan and India and India and China. Baltistan, Ladakh and western Tibetan plateau are now under the control of three different countries, but peoples of these three regions are of the same race and speak the same language. Baltistan was part of Ladakh district before 1947. Fig 1 shows a map of the state of Jammu and Kashmir in which these three regions can be seen. The original Laddakh district is shown by a double line boundary. The approximate map of 25-year-old Kargil district is shown south of the Line of Control (LOC) by a single line. The town of Skardu that lies north-west of Kargil town across the LoC is the capital of Baltistan. Pakistanâs tourism promotion website refers to Baltistan as âLittle Tibetâ (see Fig 2, a page from Pakistani tourism website). Fig 3 shows an enlargement of Pakistanâs depiction of PoK and Baltistan within it. Baltis call their land by a Tibetan name âBaltiyulâ which is derived from the original Tibetan script called âBaltiâ that was prevalent in the area before Islamization (to Shia faith) took place in the 16th century during the reign of king Ghota-Cho-Senge. Islamization took place late in these parts, about three centuries later than in Kashmir valley. Thereafter the Arabic Nasq script was introduced. A Buddhist minority exists even now in Baltistan of PoK, although very thin on the ground. The part of Ladakh district that came to India has in its north-western part, around the town of Kargil, a Muslim majority. As one moves in the south-easterly direction the Buddhist population increases and in Zanskar and Leh they become a majority. Buddhists of Ladakh retained the traditional script called Bodhi (alternatively, Ladakhi) of Tibetan origin and they call their language Ladakhi. The Nasq (Arabic) script became popular with Muslims, and since it came to India via Persia, it is often called Persian script. The language written in Nasq is called Balti. In a sense the relationship between Nasq-Balti and Bodhi-Ladakhi is similar to that between Nasq-Urdu and Devnagari-Hindi.
Initially the sparsely populated Ladakh region consisted of a single district called âLadakhâ (as shown in Fig. 1) with its capital at Leh. When Sheikh Abdullah was brought out of imprisonment and re-instated as the Chief Minister in the later half of the 1970s, he created a few new districts and sub-divisions along communal lines in different parts of the state. A Muslim-majority sub-division called Gool was carved out of composite Reasi sub-division in Jammu region and Ladakh district was bifurcated into Muslim-majority Kargil and Buddhist-majority Leh. Further, Buddhist-majority Zanskar subdivision was mischievously included in Kargil district instead of in Leh district. So now there remains no district called Ladakh, which was the original name. However, the whole composite region is still called Ladakh, as before, and that has significant legal implications.
<b>Language and script </b>
Between Balti and Ladakhi all verbs and 90 per cent of words are in common (Kazmi 1996). The following tables from Kazmi (1996) give an illustrative sample.
These tables serve to illustrate two important features. Firstly, the languages of Baltistan. of PoK and Ladakh of India are practically identical and should be classified as two dialects of the same language. They are given two different names because they are written in two different scripts. Secondly, they are a world apart from the north Indian languages such as Kashmiri, Urdu, Hindi etc of the Indo-European family. The centre of Balti is the Skardu town of POK and the centre of Ladakhi is the Leh town of Laddakh. The Kargil town of Ladakh lies in between geographically. Hence its language too should be somewhere in between Balti and Ladakhi. This implies that the Kargil speech and Leh speech are practically indistinguishable.
<b>Education</b>
Traditionally, the Buddhist Gompas taught one son of every family how to read the scriptures. Western education was started first by Moravian Mission in Leh in 1889. The subjects taught were Ladakhi, Urdu, English, Geography, Nature Study, Arithmetic, Geometry and Bible Study. It is to be noted that mother tongue Ladakhi and two other useful languages were included in the curriculum (Wikipedia 2006).
After Independence, the Jammu and Kashmir government started opening schools that taught the pupils in Urdu medium till age 14 and thereafter switched to English medium. It is obvious that the Jammu and Kashmir government made a deliberate policy of dropping the mother tongue. On the other side of LoC Pakistan government was doing the same thing by imposing Urdu on the Balti-speaking people of the so-called âLittle Tibetâ of Baltistan (Kazmi 1996). Studentsâ Educational and Cultural Movement of Ladakh (SECMOL) was started in 1988 that campaigned to shape public opinion for education reform. As a result of their movement, the mother tongue started replacing Urdu as the medium since 1993. The Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Council (LAHDC) came into existence in 1995 after the act concerned was passed in the Legislative Assembly.
Urdu and the Arabic script have had a long spell since 1947, owing to the language policy of the state government. Hence it is likely that in Kargil district the script is Arabic (Nasq) in the Muslim-majority north-western parts and Bodhi in Zanskar, the Buddhist-majority south-eastern sub-division. The language is either called Balti or Ladakhi, depending on the script used. Since 2001 a series of steps have been taken, which spells doom for the language of Kargil, and makes separation of Kargil from Ladakh and its merger with Kashmir almost inevitable.
<b>Impending separation</b>
Since 2001 the Indian army has been opening Urdu-medium primary schools in Kargil to promote literacy, as a part of its Sadbhavana (meaning goodwill) program (Jha 2001). Evidently this was on advice from Jammu and Kashmir government, while the Central government was oblivious and lacked any coherent language policy. It should be noted that SECMOLâs mother-tongue-first policy, which was supported by LAHDC, had been in place for previous 8 years. Yet the Indian army followed a policy that ran counter to SECMOLâs. Why didnât the army start schools in Balti medium in Kargil? There is only one answer to this question. There is an all pervasive language ideology permeating the Central government, Jammu and Kashmir Government and the Indian Army. It says, âUrdu is the language of the Muslimâ.
(The author is a Professor and can be contacted at Aerospace Engineering, IIT Kanpur; email: kunal@iitk.ac.in)
http://www.organiser.org/dynamic/modules.p...pid=188&page=30
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Above has tables showing words in Balti and Ladakhi with English meanings.
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Kargil, Ladakh and Kashmir:
<span style='font-size:14pt;line-height:100%'>Role of Urdu and divisive politicsâII</span>
Unfortunately and ironically, Pakistan is also an adherent of this ideology and had tried to impose Urdu on Bengali Muslims of erstwhile East Pakistan, leading to break up of Pakistan and creation of Bangladesh.
Imposition of Urdu would break a linguistic continuity and distance the people of Kargil from Leh. In July 2003, the Congress-PDP (Peopleâs Democratic Party) coalition government created a separate development council for Kargil, with a strange name, âLadakh Autonomous Hill Development Council for Kargilâ. The PDP, headed by father and daughter duo, Mufti Mohammad Sayeed and Mehbooba Mufti, appointed a seven-member committee to prepare a position paper on self-rule of Jammu and Kashmir (Chatterjee 2006). In a recent speech in New Delhi, Mehbooba outlined her ideas about self-rule: âPDP would like the state to be divided into three regions, Leh-Ladakh, Kashmir and Jammu, each having its own legislature (Chatterjee 2006).â
Mehbooba has coined a new term âLeh-Ladakhâ. She is silent on Kargil. The implications are ominous. Presumably Kargil would be merged with Kashmir under one legislature. It should be noted that as a whole Kargil district of Ladakh has a Muslim majority, although its Zanskar sub-division is predominantly Buddhist. The process of separating the Muslim-dominated area of Ladakh from Ladakh started early and developed in four phases so far. The following are the âlandmarkâ events in this process:
<b>First Phase: </b>
As has already been mentioned, it was Sheikh Abdullah who set the ball rolling by creating the separate Muslim-majority district called Kargil. Since then a terminological shift has been promoted in the mass media. A practice has developed in the media to identify Leh district alone as Ladakh, and treat Kargil as a separate entity outside Ladakh. The latest war between India and Pakistan is called Kargil war, instead of Ladakh war. A popular misconception has been promoted all over India as if Kargil is not a part of Ladakh.
<b>Second Phase: </b>
In 2001, this process received a windfall in the form of the âSadbhavnaâ programme, launched by General Arjun Ray of the Indian Army, in Kargil district (Hindustan Times 2001). The programme is a praiseworthy initiative aiming to win the hearts and minds of the people. However, as a part of the programme Urdu-medium schools are being opened in the region and that is unfortunate, because the people of Kargil are primarily Balti-Ladakhi speakers. There is a linguistic continuum from Pakistan-occupied Baltistan (a part of the northern areas of Jammu and Kashmir, with Skardu as capital) to Ladakh and further east into Tibet. Ladakhi is a regional variant of western Tibetan and Balti of Baltistan in turn is a variant of Ladakhi. Kazmi (1996) a citizen of Baltistan (PoK) observes the following on the relationship between Balti and Ladakhi:
âApparently, Balti is, at the moment, cut off from its sister languages of Ladakh but has 80-90 per cent of nouns, pronouns, verbs and other literary and grammatical characters in commonâ¦. We can, however, term Balti and Bodhi of Ladakh as separate dialects, but not separate languages.â
As far as script duality for the same language is concerned, the Balti-Ladakhi pair is similar to the Urdu-Hindi pair. However, there are major differences. Excepting verbs and pronouns, almost all vocabulary of Indian origin (Sanskrit and non-Sanskrit) has been expelled from Urdu and replaced by Persio-Arabic (Ghosh 1994, Ghosh and Kumar 2005). That is not the case with Balti as vocabulary of Tibetan origin is very much retained. The differences between Balti and Ladakhi are mostly regional. Between Urdu and Hindi that is not the case, and the differences between them are extensive and an all-India phenomenon.
Whatever view one takes, the language of Kargil is either Balti or Ladakhi. Both Balti and Ladakhi are well-developed languages of Tibeto-Burman origin. Maharaja Hari Singh imposed Urdu on a Kashmiri speaking populace by starting Urdu primary schools. At least Kashmiri and Urdu belong to the same North Indian family of languages and there is some remote affinity. For instance, the verbs and pronouns are derivatives of Sanskrit words in both Kashmiri and Urdu, as the table shows:
English Sanskrit Kashmiri Urdu
You twam tsa tum
He sah sa wah
Eat khad khun khana
Do karan karan karna
On the other hand, Balti/Ladakhi being of Tibeto-Burman family is as far from Urdu as chalk is from cheese. Verbs, pronouns, nouns, adjectives are all different. The uninformed and short-sighted move of General Arjun Ray has interrupted a linguistic continuity from Baltistan of PoK to Ladakh of India to western Tibetan plateau. In fact imposition of Urdu on Kargil is bound to affect the morale of Balti people in PoK who are struggling against Urdu imposition themselves (Kazmi 1996). And it is likely to demoralize people of Leh who are trying to earn a place for their language in the state of Jammu and Kashmir and who too may be the next victim of Urdu hegemony.
<b>Third Phase: </b>
The third phase started when the present PDP-Congress coalition came into power in Jammu and Kashmir in 2002. The Common Minimum Programme (CPM) of the coalition says (Hindu 2002):
âThe government shall grant full powers to the Autonomous Hill Council for Leh, which has hitherto been deprived of its legitimate powers. Efforts will be made to persuade the people of Kargil to accept a similar Autonomous Hill Council for Kargil.â
When the CMP was written, there was no Autonomous Hill Council for Leh. There was only the Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Council (LAHDC). Why did the two parties use this mischievous and deceitful language? What was the ulterior motive? There is only one conclusion that can be drawn. Both Congress and PDP were conspiring to politically separate the Muslim-majority Kargil from Buddhist-majority Ladakh. Another interpretation is possibleâPDP set this as a condition for alliance and the Congress swallowed it for its greed of political power. It is noteworthy that there was no demand for a separate council from the people of Kargil. Even then, a separate council was being foisted on them from above. The intention was to create a religio-political division where only a religious difference with strong syncretic and even marital links between Buddhists and Muslim existed. This action of the Congress is comparable to its political move in Kerala in the 1950s and 1960s, whereby the ban on the Muslim League was removed, a coalition government with it was formed and eventually a Muslim-majority district of Malappuram was created.
The promise of the CMP was fulfilled in July 2003 when the coalition Government formed the Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Council for Kargil (LAHDC for Kargil). A strange name indeed! It formed also the Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Council for Leh (LAHDC for Leh). Why such strange and tortuous names? If we call âKanpur Development Authorityâ by the name Uttar Pradesh Development Authority for Kanpurâ, it would be considered absurd. According to a bill passed in Jammu and Kashmir Assembly an autonomous council is legally valid only for Ladakh. Hence an entity called âAutonomous Development Council for Kargilâ would be legally invalid. This explains the ridiculous contortions in nomenclature which is seemingly legally valid (although I am not sure and it should be challenged in a court) and at the same time serves the purpose of separation of Kargil. The religion-based division of Ladakh has been extended to a sub-division of Kargilâonly three council seats out of 30 have been allocated to the overwhelmingly Buddhist Zanskar subdivision. The aggrieved people of Zanskar, both Buddhists and Muslims, boycotted the July 2003 election to LAHDC-for-Kargil (Hindu 2003).
<b>Fourth Phase: </b>
The fourth phase has started with the declaration of Mehbooba Mufti outlining her ideas about so-called âself-ruleâ. Leh-Ladakh would get a separate Legislative Assembly. But Kargil will likely be joined with Kashmir under the jurisdiction of the Legislative Assembly at Srinagar. If this scenario comes true, then the following is likely to happen:
Leh-Ladakh Assembly will function in Ladakhi and Jammu Assembly will function in Dogri. Kashmir will continue to be administered in Urdu. It cannot possibly switch over to Kashmiri with Balti-speaking Kargil on tow. So people of Kashmir will once again be deprived of the right to education and administration in Kashmiri, their mother tongue. It should be remembered that Kashmiris have always described Kashmiri as their mother tongue, and not Urdu, in census after census. (This should be contrasted with the fact that Muslims of Andhra and Karnataka declare Urdu their mother tongue, although what they speak can at best be called pidgin Urdu and they are more fluent in Telugu and Kannada.)
If Kashmir retains Urdu and abandons Kashmiri, Muslim-majority Doda district of Jammu is likely to demand to be separate form Jammu and merged with Kashmir. It would be persuaded to opt for Urdu written in Arabic script instead of Dogri written in Devnagari, although its speech is Dogri. Little differences with Dogri will be invented and separation will be demanded. PDP surely and even National Conference probably would encourage this tendency with Congress as always playing an opportunistic unprincipled role.
<b>Conclusion </b>
People of Baltistan (of PoK), Kargil and Leh, all parts of the original Ladakh district, speak the same language, but employ two different scripts, Ladakhi (Bodhi) and Arabic (Nasq). Pakistan has a long-standing policy of imposing Urdu while suppressing vernaculars. This stems from the language ideology that Urdu alone is the language of the Muslims of the subcontinent. The language policy of the Jammu and Kashmir government seems to be no different. It is busy suppressing the use of the mother tongue in Kargil district. This policy is unfair to the people of Kargil and particularly so to the people of Zanskar subdivision who are predominantly Buddhist. Clever steps are being taken to extend Kashmiri political hegemony over Kargil to reinforce the Urdu hegemony. The result would be separation of Kargil from Ladakh, where lie its racial and linguistic roots. Kargil people would eventually lose their language.
(The author is a Professor and can be contacted at Aerospace Engineering, IIT Kanpur, kunal@iitk.ac.in)
http://www.organiser.org/dynamic/modules.p...pid=189&page=26
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