New Delhi, March 14, 2023 (PPI-OT): Indian writer, poet and songwriter Javed Akhtar, while making a case for Urdu as an Indian language made a reference to the dispute over Jammu and Kashmir between Pakistan and India. Akhtar and his wife Shabana Azmi attended an event to launch Urdu poetry album, titled ‘Shayarana – Sartaj’, where they spoke about the importance of the language. He said, it is wrong to link languages with religion as language is not related to religion but to regions.
Commenting on Indians who believe Urdu is just a language of Pakistan, he asked them why they did not, then, accept the Pakistan’s stand that “all of Kashmir is a part of it”. By this, he perhaps meant the Partition Plan, which stated that all Muslim majority areas would join Pakistan. “Urdu language should be given importance; the new generation of India has forgotten the Urdu language. Today more focus is on English,” he said.
During the ceremony, Akhtar said that Urdu “did not come from outside, it is our own language, it is not spoken outside Hindustan,” he argued. Elaborating his point, he said, Pakistan came into existence after the Partition, so the Urdu language “wasn’t spoken outside [erstwhile] Hindustan”.
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