THE Central Administrative Tribunal’s (CAT) order scrapping Urdu as a compulsory language requirement for a Revenue Department post in Jammu and Kashmir has renewed debate on the issue in the Union Territory.
While the BJP, which had been protesting against the notification since it came out and calling it “illegal”, welcomed the CAT decision, Chief Minister Omar Abdullah said non-Urdu speakers would not be “efficient” in the posts since most land records are in Urdu.
Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) chief Mehbooba Mufti, who made the same argument, added that it was “deeply unfortunate” that the judiciary appears to be “influenced by divisive politics”.
What was the contested notification?
On June 9, the Jammu and Kashmir Service Selection Board (JKSSB), one of the two government recruitment agencies, issued a notification for a written exam for 75 posts of Naib Tehsildar in the UT’s Revenue Department. As always, the JKSSB specified that the second paper of the written exam for the posts will test the candidate’s “working knowledge of Urdu”.
Urdu has been the official administrative language of J&K since before Partition. While Persian was the official language of J&K in the early Dogra period, Maharaja Pratap Singh made Urdu as the sole official language over a century ago.
It was during Maharaja Partap Singh’s time that the first land settlement of J&K was carried out by Sir Walter Lawrence, an Indian Civil Service (ICS) officer, who was also a member of the British Council of India. Lawrence, who was appointed as the first Settlement Commissioner, started the process in 1889, completing it in five years. Thus, the first official land settlement in J&K was recorded in the Urdu language.
Since the Lawrence period, all the revenue records of J&K were registered in Urdu. The pre-Partition revenue records are kept at Srinagar’s Muhafiz Khana, which also has the original and official pre-Partition land records for the Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (PoK) region.
Hence, working knowledge of Urdu has always been a prerequisite for recruitment in the J&K Revenue Department because all land records in the UT are in this language.
In the wake of the abrogation of Article 370, which granted J&K special status, in August 2019, the Jammu and Kashmir Official Languages Bill, 2020, was passed by the BJP-led Central government in Parliament, which added four more languages – Kashmiri, Dogri, Hindi and English – to already existing Urdu as J&K’s official languages.
The Bill said that these five languages will be “used for all official purposes” in the UT.
What happened after the notification?
The BJP immediately called for the scrapping of the notification making Urdu mandatory for for the post of Naib Tehsildars. Senior BJP leader and Leader of the Opposition (LoP) in the J&K Assembly, Sunil Sharma, met Lt Governor Manoj Sinha to seek his intervention to drop this eligibility criterion.
Sharma’s contention was that making working knowledge of one of the J&K’s five official languages mandatory for Naib Telsildar aspirants “violates constitutional principles and administrative impartiality, and creates an unfair barrier”. He also claimed this would put candidates from Jammu at a “disadvantage”.
The NC and PDP, immediately countered the BJP’s stance. “Urdu is not associated with any class, region, or religion, but is a historical and administrative language used in Jammu and Kashmir for over 130 years. During the reign of the Maharaja, all administrative work was conducted in Persian but later Urdu was adopted as a unifying language,” NC chief spokesperson Tanvir Sadiq pointed out.
“It is wrong to view every issue through a religious lens. The shajras (or the ancestral land records) have long been written in Urdu and it is not possible to change all those documents now. There is a need to acknowledge Urdu’s historical role in administration, including judiciary and revenue,” Sadiq said.
Subsequently, a petition was filed by job seekers with the CAT over the order.
What did the tribunal say?
A Bench comprising Member (Judicial) Rajinder Dogra and Ram Mohan Johri (Member Administrative) said the notification was discriminatory in light of the provisions of the Jammu and Kashmir Official Languages Act, 2020, and stayed “the operation of the relevant provisions of the Jammu and Kashmir Revenue (Subordinate) Service Recruitment Rules of 2009” that spoke of Urdu as the required language.
Abdullah and Mufti both reiterated the importance of Urdu for understanding land records.
“Even before Independence, our revenue records were in Urdu. How will a staff member in the Revenue Department work if he/she doesn’t know Urdu? I don’t think staff members of the Revenue Department who don’t know Urdu can be efficient,” Abdullah said.
“It is only logical that applicants for the post of Naib Tehsildar possess basic proficiency in the language,” Mufti said.