We already let India have the association with the Indus river and all its history and now you want to give up urdu as well? Might as well become a British colony again.
Languages don't disappear unless they are viciously persecuted by the state because of fascist politics. Urdu In India and Urdu in Pakistan are two entirely different situations. The old Indian Urdu has long since been finished off. But Pakistan has been a gracious host and refuge to Urdu, and has adopted it as a language of communication. Pakistan did not need to do this. It could have gone the ridiculous way India went. India adopted Sanskritized Hindi as the National Language and the lawmakers in the Indian Parliament from Southern and North Eastern states now need interpreters speaking over headphones. When they can't understand one another they take off their headphones and hurl them at one another. With so many languages India should have stuck to English but may the blight be on them !
Pakistan has fared much better, It has developed a national language and headphones are not needed in the National Assembly. Urdu serves its purpose.
Urdu is of course far more than merely a language of communication with vibrant literary heritage. It is also the language of political change and revolutionary ideas.
This does not mean that Urdu will displace local language and culture. Sindhi,Baluchi,Punjabi, Pashto and the hundreds of dialects that make our country so rich in culture will remain vibrant and flourish. A person from Baluchistan visiting Punjab will obviously speak in Urdu to the front desk clerk when he checks into his hotel ( or he could speak in English ). The person from Baluchistan doesn't have to memorize the entire
Diwan of Ghalib to communicate with the hotel clerk.
I think it should be English. In fact as thing stand English is used by military, courts, science etc. Urdu only opens a window to Utter Pradesh or Bollywood. English opens the window to the WORLD. Even with our friends Chinese we will use English. English is the global lingua franca. Chinese are right now busy learning English. If you can speak English you can get a job as English teacher as soon as you land in China, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, Vietnam etc
Look at PDF. It's surviving on English. It is the medium of members from across the world. If PDF was Urdu all you would have is some Paks and Indians.
We can't deny that learning English is essential to higher technical education as languages in the sub-continent have not developed sufficiently to full fill that role. But there are just not enough English teachers in Pakistan to teach the entire population English to an acceptable proficiency. English education is confined to a tiny fraction of the population that is either wealthy enough to afford sending their children to English language schools or are even more wealthy by settling abroad In English speaking countrie. Pakistan has two possible routes. The Singapore way where Singapore faced with multiple languages massively invested in English language education by first hiring teachers from UK and then training their own teachers. The emphasis was on functional English, not learning Milton, Keats and Shakespeare. Finding teachers who could teach functional English was relatively easier than finding professors of English literatur.
The result was a highly educated and productive work force generation.
The other route has been taken by Russia ( Soviet Union) and most noticeably China.
After their revolutions both China and Russia found themselves with a serious literacy and education problem which was an impediment to national unity and growth. Higher and quality education in Russia had been in French, the language of the elite, and in China with so many different versions of Mandarin and a difficult script quality modern education had for long been conducted in English. The revolutions and political upheavals caused a flight of French teachers from Russia just as China lost the majority of its English teachers. Russia and China both took massive language reforms simplifying and modernizing their languages such that it could be taught and understood across their vast diverse territories and education could be imparted to produce a technically competent work force. China simplified its script to "9 strokes" and developed
pinyin giving a phonetic base to the script so that a document read in one part of the country sounded the same. Russia moved its language away from just literature adopting and including scientific legal and technical terms, massively translating every scientific, engineering, medical book and research paper from English, German, French and Spanish. The Russian peasant who would be the first literate person in his family generation could now study engineering after passing from a Russian language school and perform a finite element analysis on an aerospace structure. Likewise the Chinese peasant could graduate with an engineering degree and design a missile. These people did not need to go to aristocratic high class English language schools. With primary and secondary educational reforms to the language of education illiteracy was wiped out and these nations emerged from the dark abyss of underdevelopment to become mighty industrial and military powers. Turkey did the same thing even changing the script for easier printing and publishing.
Today Chinese, and Russian stand level with English, French and German as technology languages.
Pakistan can go the same route by the modernization Urdu. English can be taught as a third language after 5th class.China and Russia teach one foreign language ( usually English or French) in the upper grades.
Children learn best in their mother tongues.