The Chief Justice of Pakistan, Jawwad S. Khawaja, made history with his judgment of September 8, 2015, ordering that within a period of three months Urdu will be made the official language of Pakistan. The short order is 12-page long and much of it repeats well-known facts and arguments.

The facts are that the Constitution of 1973 in its Article 251 clearly laid down that Urdu will replace English as the official language within 15 years, i.e, by 1988. It never did and the court lays the blame entirely on the government. The arguments advanced by the court are familiar too as Dr Syed Abdullah in his Pakistan Mein Urdu ka Masla (1974) presented them so polemically.

The arguments are summed up as follows: using a colonial language degrades our language and our people who feel that they are being addressed by foreign rulers; it maintains the sense of superiority which the elite have; it increases the gulf between the ruler and the ruled; it creates and maintains an elite system of education which does not give equal access to everybody as far as employment is concerned.

I, too, have given the same arguments for the last about 19 years when I published Language and Politics in Pakistan (1996). But, while Syed Abdullah only mentions Urdu, I say that Punjabi, Sindhi, Pashto, Seraiki, Balochi and Brahvi, too, deserve to be national languages to be used at the basic level in education and to be given some presence in Pakistan’s linguistic landscape. The court order does mention Punjabi but only to chide the Punjab government which gives it no role in the formal domains of power.

In the end, the order mentions a letter by the Cabinet Division (dated July 6, 2015) which says: All policies of the institutions working under the federal governments should be translated into Urdu; all forms should be in Urdu in addition to English; Urdu signboards should be erected outside all public institutions (hospitals, schools, police stations etc); passport and other offices should issue all forms in Urdu in addition to English; all websites of state institutions should be in Urdu; road signs should be in Urdu; all public events of government and semi-government institutions should be in Urdu; the president, prime minister and government representatives should give speeches in Urdu; the national language authority should be given crucial importance to carry out the above policy.

A three-month deadline is given with a certain bureaucratic peremptoriness. The court reproduces the above orders, adding that the laws, too, should be translated into Urdu; the federal and provincial governments should coordinate with each other about the script to be used; that Urdu should be used for the competitive examinations; judgments should be given in Urdu, and so on. The court also repeats the three-month deadline which the Cabinet Division letter gives.

Now the point is (1) whether it is doable? (2) whether it should be done, and, if so, how? The two are different matters so let us consider them separately. First, is it doable? Yes, it is perfectly doable as a number of bodies, including the Osmania University, Urdu Science Board, Urdu Dictionary Board, Karachi University Bureau of Translation, the GHQ and the Muqtadra Qaumi Zuban (NLA) have created scientific and administrative terms in Urdu which can take care of all administrative work and the teaching of school subjects.

In 1981, Muqtadra Qaumi Zaban issued a letter, reproduced in the court’s order, requesting the president of Pakistan to issue an order to enforce Urdu. Professor Fateh Mohammad Malik, its director, told me on several occasions that the work had been finished at his end and the government was simply dragging its feet, not wanting to displace English from its privileged status.

So, it is doable but what does the court really want? Actually, nothing much. Most of the things contained in the court order are really trivial and symbolic in nature. Since Ayub Khan’s days, heads of the state do make speeches in Urdu. Now if they start doing the same abroad it will merely be propaganda and a symbolic shift with no real consequences for the public.

As for forms, passports, websites, road signs, etc, they are already in Urdu. Nobody has mentioned office files but they can also be in Urdu. The judges have not clarified whether the arguments in court will be made in Urdu or English; if they are to be made in Urdu that will be a real change.

Nobody has mentioned what language of the officer corps of the armed forces will be. If that, too, changes to Urdu, which it can, that will be a real change. In short, most of the changes in the Cabinet Division letter and the court order are symbolic at best and they cannot change the structure of power which is based on English.

So what is missing? The elephant in the room, which no official document discusses, is education. The real issue is that the elite has invested so heavily in English that it is a well-guarded elite preserve. Moreover, the urban elite have many aspirants to come into their shoes and all of these are impressed by English and invest in English for their children. That is why cities and towns are so full of so-called English-medium schools.

The armed forces, in fact, are the biggest owners and patrons of English-medium schools. Their cadet colleges, public schools, and army schools as well as their six or seven universities are tremendous investments. Then there are the chains of elite schools in the cities which educate the children of the urban elite. These are not mentioned in the orders of the court but one can bet they will keep up their function of teaching English to an elite to differentiate it sartorially, linguistically, and culturally from the non-elite.

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English is a status symbol and a mark of elite identity, and constitutes a kind of cultural capital which has been acquired and the elite will not give it up. Thus, while government switches over to Urdu, the corporate sector, NGOs, banks and elite educational institutions will keep functioning in English. The class divide, expressed through language, will remain and the court’s concern with the growing class gap will not be addressed.

So, what is to be done? Should we switch to Urdu? And if so, how? In my view, if the state is really resolute -- which it does not seem to be so far -- it should switch over to Urdu and the indigenous languages of Pakistan as follows. Besides the token measures mentioned in the orders of the court, all state examinations and interviews, including the selection for the armed forces, should be in Urdu.

At the basic level (up to class 3) the schooling system should be in the mother-tongues of the children as far as possible though, in large cities, the main language of the province (Punjabi in Lahore) should be taught uniformly to all children in all schools. After the basic stage of schooling, Urdu may be the major medium of instruction (in Sindh it may remain Sindhi though) but again for all children with no exemptions for elite or military or any other kind of schools.

At the university level, however, the medium of instruction should remain English and the few degrees which are being offered nowadays in Urdu (BA and MA degrees in Punjab and Karachi universities) should now be offered in English. I emphasise this because English is the language of scholarship all over the world and scholarly papers are published in English. Moreover, international lectures and students’ studies abroad are also in English.

Will this forceful change of medium of instruction in schools be resisted by the owners of English-medium schools? Of course, it will. But since they will continue to own their schools, they will not lose their property. Moreover, their schools will retain their facilities and prestige as well as better teachers so they will not lose their elite students either.

Indeed, parents will choose them since, even if Urdu is the medium of instruction, they will teach English very well and they can use supplementary material for all subjects in English. Thus, there will not be much resistance from owners though I do anticipate resistance from parents. This resistance will be based on snobbery and class interest mostly.

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But is Urdu a retrogressive language? There is no such thing. Language can be used to express retrogressive or progressive ideas. However, those who point out that English has a large number of tolerant, liberal-humanist, pro-peace and pro-women texts while Urdu texts are mostly the opposite are right.

Thus, while the English texts taught by liberal teachers may promote peace and multiculturalism, Urdu texts will create hatred for minorities and India and may create or strengthen an anti-India mindset which may eventually precipitate a war. This criticism is partly true though wars are too complex to be caused by just one factor.

However, this is not an argument not to use Urdu as a medium of instruction. It is an argument to produce peace-oriented texts as Dr A.H. Nayyar and Ahmed Salim pointed out in 2004 in their report entitled, The Subtle Subversion.

Historically, Urdu was deliberately linked to religion, war and nationalism in Pakistan though it could also be linked to love (as in the ghazal) and progressive ideas (as in the taraqqi pasand adab). The politics of the period was responsible for this link and now the politics of the moment, which is for peaceful co-existence within the country and the region, demands that Urdu is linked to progress and peace.

Moreover, English should be taught in all schools, at all levels and highly efficiently (through films, songs, drama, and so on) as a subject. In short, we need not give up English though we should give more respect and status to Urdu and our indigenous languages by using them in the formal domains of power and school education -- school but not university.

In short, the Supreme Court order, even if implemented, will not really change the power equation in the country nor will it remove the linguistic privilege of the haves over the have-nots. The measures I have suggested above may, however, really bring Urdu and our own languages in public life and will even dilute (though will not eliminate) the linguistic privilege of the elite.