It goes both ways, the quota system eliminated a lot of good urdu speakers from the system.
It was an urdu speaker who headed the Abdali and Ghaznavi programs and it was an urdu speaker who laughed while the tanks at Kemari burned under Indian missiles...
I am an Urdu speaker. And I bear witness to an entire generation wasted by Altaf Hussain.
My father was a staunch supporter, and I grew up fanatically looking up to Altaf Hussain. Until ninth grade when the mum of my Punjabi friend got to know about my affiliations. She sat down with me and painstakingly explained the problems with Altaf Hussain. She witnessed his antics first hand during early 80s in Karachi Uni. His favorite act was breaking soft drink bottles on the heads of opponents. His entire rise to power was based on brutality. Even during his escape, he had the guards accompanying him to the airport executed. That knocked a lot of sense into my head. I can't say the same for my father who remained a supporter till death.
My uncle was a sector incharge. He managed to reach Canada. He tells the story of a friend there who used to spontaneously fall into prostration all the time. When quizzed, he revealed that he tied someone behind a car/motorcycle and dragged him around. Each time he remembered that, he fell into prostration.
My cousin joined a technical college in Karachi. On his very first day, he was quizzed by a guy holding a very large knife. During one clash with JI students, the MQM APMSO gang fired a burst of AK-47 fire into a JI student's head, due to which his brain literally splattered on the wall.
The guy who used to come to tutor us at home was a previous unit incharge at a Karachi college. He used to boast about armed clashes with JI. They used to form positions around the college, the girls filling up magazines while the guys fired. Once during a takeover they tried breaking in using a car. His friend received a full burst to the stomach that caused the guts to spill out. He literally pushed them back with hands and rushed to the hospital.
There are a thousand and one such stories involving an entire generation. And there are reasons behind it.
During the early seventies, my father hobnobbed with Sindhi elite in a social club at a five star hotel. He spoke Sindhi so fluently, you could not discern he is actually an Urdu speaker. He heard people saying we are going to push these Muhajirs into the Arabian Sea. Fast forward to circa 2001 my cousin, who similarly speaks Sindhi, heard the exact same words in the Sindh Secretariat.
This exploitation isn't limited to only MQM. I got on the radar of JI activists during my college days. On day, a car started following me as I walked to college and the person driving insisted that I get in. Eventually I got into the car. Luckily he did drive me to the college but he also offered me to join JI which I tactfully refused. Then one day, I was reading in the library when two JI students sat next to me. They started talking to each other saying things like what is the use of studying? Why waste time with books? Blah blah. Thankfully I survived college.
I consider myself very different from most Urdu speakers. But decades if poisonous propaganda and organized marginalization have left them in a very bad intellectual state. Which is why we need education.
Education. Education. Education. That is what we need.
