What Dutta said, February 1948

Notes from History
What Dutta said, February 1948
Editorial Desk, Daily Star, On February 25, 1948, Dhirendranath Dutta, a lawmaker from East Bengal in the Constituent Assembly of the new state of Pakistan, rose in the House to move an amendment demanding that the Bengali language be adopted as a medium of expression, along with English and Urdu, in the assembly.
Dutta argued that though Bengali was one of the provincial languages of Pakistan, it happened to be the mother tongue of the Bengalis, the majority segment of Pakistan's population. Dutta went beyond the proposition that Bengali should be a language of the legislature and suggested that it ought to be the language of the state itself. And this is how he put it: More........