Support this demonstration in Lahore
Thursday October 20th at 12pm
In front of BSS Head Quarters
The Sahiwal Campus of Beaconhouse School System (BSS) has issued a notice to students prohibiting them to speak ‘foul language’; and, being helpful, has offered this definition of it: ‘Foul language includes taunts, abuses, Punjabi and the hate speech’.
The school has denied the allegations, and has provided an explanation, saying that it was a mistake. They need not insist on that since this is one of the most employed tool of colonization where local cultures are crushed and then dominated by demonizing local languages. In Canada’s residential schools, Indigenous kids were prohibited from speaking or learning any of the Indigenous languages because those were classified by settler-colonizers as foul, savage, uncivilized, inferior, and most were not even accepted as languages but brushed aside as mere ‘dialects’. So, the Bullshit School System continues to remain faithful to its roots.
The absolute colonial brazenness of the BSS notice has lit a fire under the dash of every Punjabi i know, and that’s the good news because the act has thrown blinding light on something that we try not to see: the state of our language rights in the Punjab province of Pakistan. All shades of Punjabis are coming together to protest; Author Parveen Malik has pulled the BSS into court from Punjabi Adbi Board. Maybe now the affluent elite Punjabis will begin to acknowledge their historic ditching of their mother language in favor of Urdu after the 1947 partition of India, and they will begin to use their influence, resources and political clout to make sure that Punjabi is taught in Punjab’s all government-owned and private educational institutions.
Uddari is delighted to support the demonstration planned in Lahore today- let’s make our feelings known.
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