The State government has offered to host the World Urdu Conference against the backdrop of the success of the World Telugu conference at Tirupati in December.
This announcement was made by Chief Minister N. Kiran Kumar Reddy at the ‘Urdu Virasat Karavan’ (Urdu Heritage Caravan) organised by Andhra Pradesh Urdu Academy here on Saturday.
Huge success
Mr. Reddy said the World Telugu Conference was a huge success with the participation of five lakh people though the expected number of people was 25,000 on each of the three days.
He regretted that the bottleneck in promotion of Urdu in the State was the desire of parents speaking the language to send their children to English medium schools due to lack of employment opportunities in their mother-tongue.
This problem is not just with Urdu but Telugu also, he lamented.
In his native Piler Assembly constituency of Chittoor district, the Muslim population requested him to convert the only Urdu medium school to English medium.
Chairman of the Press Council of India, Markandey Katju, urged Mr. Reddy to make Urdu and Sanskrit compulsory subjects from classes three to seven.
They can be made optional from class eight.
Curriculum
He made out a case for the inclusion of Urdu in the school curriculum because the language ‘gives strength to thoughts originating from the heart’.
He said there was a notion that Sanskrit was identified with Hinduism and said only a small percentage of the language alone had religious connotations.
Sanskrit and Urdu are cultural languages at the national level, he said.
Editor of ‘Siasat Daily’, Zahid Ali Khan, said all the madarsas in Old City were either closed down or carried out instructions in Telugu.
The former Vice-Chancellor of Aligarh Muslim University, Mahmood-ur-Rahman, said there was a human element in Urdu and the Vice-Chancellor Delhi Urdu Academy Akhtar-ul-Wasey referred to Justice Katju’s ruling as a judge of Allahabad High Court that Urdu be made compulsory in schools of Uttar Pradesh for classes six and seven.
