BJP Protested and demanded cancellation of the government order which made Urdu a compulsory subject for Naib Tehsildar recruitment examination in Jammu and Kashmir.
PDP It termed it a deliberate attempt to sideline and erase Urdu from the administrative structure of the region, even as the BJP called it a “curriculum reform”, insisting that proficiency in any one of the five official languages in Jammu and Kashmir should be made a criterion to qualify for revenue services.
PDP president Mehbooba Mufti said Urdu has been the backbone of revenue records, land documents and official communications in the UT for generations. He said, “Weakening its role is not only culturally insensitive but also administratively wrong. Removing Urdu from revenue services will create practical challenges in handling existing records and undermine the continuity of governance.” He said the PDP sees the decision as part of a broader pattern of weakening the linguistic and cultural identity of Jammu and Kashmir.
BJP general secretary Ashok Kaul said, “Urdu has not been removed. It has been removed as the only mandatory language for qualification.” He said that since there are five official languages in Jammu and Kashmir, candidates should have knowledge of any one language to qualify and land records should be made available in all official languages.
The controversy started on April 10 after the Revenue Department issued a draft
Jammu and Kashmir Revenue Service Recruitment Rules for Non-Gazetted Posts, Objections invited within 15 days of notification. According to the draft, the minimum qualification for direct recruitment has been kept as “Graduation from any university”. Earlier, along with graduation, knowledge of Urdu was an essential criterion for recruitment.
National Conference has not commented on this issue.
Urdu has an old connection with Jammu and Kashmir. In 1889, Maharaja Pratap Singh, the third ruler of the Dogra dynasty, adopted Urdu in place of Persian as the court language in the region. After 1947, the Constituent Assembly of Jammu and Kashmir recognized Urdu as the contact language of the erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir, including Ladakh, and retained it as an official language.
Over time, English gradually replaced Urdu in official communication, especially after the expansion of central services in the region in 1962. As IAS and IPS officers were deployed to Jammu and Kashmir, English rapidly became the preferred administrative language.
This arrangement remained in force until September 2, 2020, when the Union Cabinet approved the Jammu and Kashmir Official Languages Bill, 2020, declaring Urdu, Hindi, Kashmiri, Dogri and English as the official languages of the region. The bill was later passed in the Rajya Sabha by voice vote, effectively ending Urdu’s 131-year-old status as the sole official language in Jammu and Kashmir. Experts say that apart from Jammu and Kashmir, the five official languages are not in use in any other region of the country.
