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khair_ctg , this language issue like the unfair economic treatment issue between two wings, was blown out of proportion, in my opinion, to rile up the Hujuge Bangali and brainwash our people, starting with the leaders and then using these leaders, the masses, to prepare them for "independence" and eventual breakup of Pakistan.
I really don't know the details of how things were done back then, but if it was up to me, I would do it like this:
- Use English as the official language (for official work)
- keep all others Bengali, Punjabi etc., including Urdu as provincial language, keeping them as official languages for regions where they were mother tongue. So in this scheme, only Karachi city would get Urdu as their official language, as the majority there I believe are migrants and Urdu speakers
Just because Bengali speakers were majority, they had no right to impose their language on entire Pakistan, just like Urdu speakers had no right to establish their language as the official or state language, forcing people to learn it, even if they did not want to.
Having said that, if Pakistan stayed intact, then I believe Urdu would automatically become the "unofficial" common language, just like it used to be in all of South Asia, before the partition of 1947, as it was somewhat understood by majority speakers in both Western and Eastern wing.
Of course Indians did not like Muslim rule influenced Urdu, so they created a new sanskritized version called Hindi and changed the script to Devnagari, just so they can utilize this living common language. Hindi is a project that keeps evolving with dropping of original Persian, Turkic and Arabic words of Urdu, replacing them with Sanskrit words.