The National Council for Promotion of Urdu Language (NCPUL) requires authors of Urdu books to declare annually that the content will not be against the government or the country. It further requires them to provide signatures of two witnesses. Writers in Bengaluru have protested against this (“Now, declaration form for Urdu writers”, April 3). The mere fact that NCPUL is government-funded is no reason to gag or muzzle authors.
The government needs to constantly keep in mind that healthy criticism is the very foundation on which the edifice of democracy rests and that the freedom of speech and expression, as enshrined in Article 19 of the Constitution, and which also includes the right to dissent, is its mainstay. The said order raises another issue. With no boundaries earmarked or defined as to what would constitute being anti-government or not, who is to determine fate of the book? It is of course a different matter that ready access to the Internet renders such bans meaningless. What is even more disturbing is that the ban has come from a government whose leaders suffered the worst kind of persecution during the Emergency merely because they did not agree with the policies of the then government and held a contrarian view.
The sense that one gets from the news item is that Urdu authors alone have been targeted. Urdu was born in India and is our inheritance. Let us preserve it.
Rekha Sharma,
New Delhi
