In J&K, why Urdu is a new flashpoint amid BJP, Valley row over job exam

On Thursday, senior BJP leader and Leader of the Opposition (LoP) in the J&K Assembly, Sunil Sharma, met Lt Governor Manoj Sinha, to seek his intervention to drop the working knowledge of Urdu as an eligibility criterion for the post of Naib Tehsildars.

Sharma’s contention was that making working knowledge of one of the J&K’s five official languages mandatory for Naib Telsildar aspirants “violates the constitutional principles and administrative impartiality and creates an unfair barrier”. He also claimed this would put the candidates from Jammu at a “disadvantage”.

The NC and the PDP, however, immediately came out to counter the BJP’s stance and castigate the party.

“Urdu is not associated with any class, region, or religion, but is a historical and administrative language used in Jammu and Kashmir for over 130 years. During the reign of the Maharaja, all administrative work was conducted in Persian but later Urdu was adopted as a unifying language,” NC chief spokesperson Tanvir Sadiq said.

“It is wrong to view every issue through a religious lens. The shajras (or the ancestral land records) have long been written in Urdu and it is not possible to change all those documents now. There is a need to acknowledge the Urdu’s historical role in administration including judiciary and revenue,” Sadiq said.

On June 9, the Jammu and Kashmir Service Selection Board (JKSSB), one of the two government recruitment agencies, issued a notification for a written exam for 75 posts of Naib Tehsildar in the UT’s Revenue Department. As always, the JKSSB specified that the second paper of the written exam for the posts will test the candidate’s “working knowledge of Urdu”.

Urdu has been the official administrative language of J&K since the pre-partition era. While Persian was the official language of J&K in the early Dogra period, Maharaja Pratap Singh made Urdu as the sole official language over a century ago.

It was during Maharaja Partap Singh’s time that the first land settlement of J&K was carried out by Sir Walter Lawrence, an Indian Civil Service (ICS) officer, who was also a member of the British Council of India. Lawrence, who was appointed as the first Settlement Commissioner, started the process in 1889, completing it in five years. Thus, the first official land settlement in J&K was recorded in the Urdu language.

Since the Lawrence period, all the revenue records of J&K were registered in Urdu. In fact, the pre-partition revenue records are kept at Srinagar’s Muhafiz Khana, which also has the original and official pre-partition land records of the Pakistan occupied Kashmir (PoK) too.

The working knowledge of Urdu has always been a prerequisite for recruitment in the J&K Revenue Department because all the land records in the UT are in this language.

In the wake of the abrogation of Article 370, which granted J&K a special status, in August 2019, the Jammu and Kashmir Official Languages Bill 2020 was passed by the BJP-led central government in Parliament in September 2020, which added four more languages – Kashmiri, Dogri, Hindi and English – to the already existing Urdu as J&K’s official languages. The Bill said that these five languages will be “used for all official purposes” in the UT.

While there had not been any call for dropping the criterion of working knowledge of Urdu for the Naib Tehsildar posts from any J&K region in the past, the BJP’s demand has been seen by the parties in the Valley as an alleged attempt to “undermine the Urdu language”.

“When the erasure of Persian started and it was being replaced by the Ganga-Jamuni language in India, Jammu and Kashmir moved to Urdu because it was easy and accessible,” said senior PDP leader Naeem Akhtar. “This (BJP’s current demand) is part of the erasure of Jammu and Kashmir’s cultural legacy, the relationship with its roots,” he alleged.