Bengali Language Movement

On February 21, 1952 police fired on a student procession in Dhaka that was defying a ban on public meetings, killing several students and others, among them Abdus Salam, Rafiq Uddin Ahmed, Abul Barkat and Abdul Jabbar, though accounts of exact numbers differ. The students were demanding that Bengali be made a state language of Pakistan, alongside Urdu.²

Pakistan was formed with two wings 1,600 kilometres apart, and a majority of its population, more than half, lived in East Bengal and spoke Bengali. In March 1948 Muhammad Ali Jinnah told an audience in Dhaka that Urdu alone would be the state language, and in January 1952 Prime Minister Khawaja Nazimuddin repeated it. Student groups and the Language Action Committee organised strikes and a defiance of the ban. The deaths set off a mass movement. A memorial, the Shaheed Minar, was put up and torn down, and rebuilt later. In 1954 the Bengali-based United Front won the provincial election, and in 1956 the constitution recognised both Bengali and Urdu. The movement planted the idea that Bengalis needed their own political voice, which led to Sheikh Mujibur Rahman's Six Points of 1966 and the independence of Bangladesh in 1971. In 1999 UNESCO proclaimed February 21 International Mother Language Day.¹²³