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Tuesday, April 04, 2006

Congress party's 'anti-Urdu' policies: BBC planning to launch Urdu TV channel

Once again I feel frustrated at the brazen opportunism of the Congress party.

For more than a decade all the major languages have television channels run by government except Urdu.

Several months back the government promise that it will start the DD Urdu channel. There is no channel in sight even now.

Meanwhile, Sahara group is all set to launch Urdu channel and now the BBC is also planning the same along with a Hindi channel.

This is the same Congress that came on pro-minority plank. It appointed a governor in UP that did his best to stall the establishment of Maulana Mohammad Ali Jauhar University at Rampur.

For decades it was in power in UP and systematically killed Urdu. This linguistic genocide is unprecedented in world history. Overnight Urdu medium was abolished in lakhs of schools and UP with 35 million Muslims remain the only state in India where there is a clause that does not allow running schools in any language other than Hindi and English.

This Congress party has a government in Delhi that gave Urdu the status of official language and what has happened. Another famous Urdu school in the walled city is on the brink of closure. No new schools are opening.

They sound pro-Muslims but are responsible for keeping Muslims backward, betrayin them, making them insecure with the veiled threat of BJP and think the Muslim vote is their birthright. Leaders like Gulam Nabi Azad, Salman Khurshid and Ahmad Patel who can't win Lok Sabha election  and don't speak the language of Indian Muslims or feel their pain and happiness are the Muslims faces of Congress.

UPDATE

This is an old article, written in 2006. A few years later the Doordarshan's Urdu channel was launched. Read a post about DD URDU on this blog.