Ethnic divide creates ripples among Pakistani community

The Peninsula

Publishing Date: Monday, September 5 2005

Ethnic divide in the 50,000 strong Pakistani community in Qatar has come to the fore with a noted literary body of Pathans deciding to keep away from a community function being held this month to mark their country's independence day. The organisation was irked after the Pakistani embassy in Doha asked it to align its celebrations with non-Pashtu groups. Pak Pashto Adabi Tolna has been holding cultural and literary functions since the middle of 1980s to mark Pakistan's independence and national days in August and March every year.

The organisation held programmes in Pahstu, the mother tongue of millions of Pathans spread across the north-west of Pakistan and large parts of neighbouring Afghanistan. It invited noted literary figures, among them poets and writers, and musicians and singers from their region in Pakistan and several other countries to hold functions. However, this year the Pakistani embassy asked all community organisation to align their celebrations.

Adabi Tolna was upset as it did not want to hold Pashtu programmes with those of Urdu. Its president, Firoz Khan Afridi said: "Not only that we have decided to keep away from the independence day celebrations this year, but in future too, we will never hold functions to mark either Pakistani's freedom anniversary or national day". "We will, however, keep conducting literary and cultural programmes in Pashtu," he added.

Asked why they cannot hold celebrations with other groups from their own country, Khan commented: "We will not hold our Pashtu programmes with those in Urdu". Khan said that a meeting of officials from social and cultural organisations of Pakistanis in Qatar was convened at the country's embassy later in July this year and it was there that mission officials asked him to reschedule Adabi Tolna's (Pakistan's) independence day fixtures.

"We were asked to do this in order to present a broader and nationalistic picture of our country," said Khan. The Pakistani embassy, when contacted, said the rescheduling was done merely for convenience and not with any specific intention. Pakistani social and cultural organisations line up their celebrations (of Pakistan's independence day) mostly on Thursdays and Fridays and invite embassy officials, and this leads to a clash.

"Sometimes we have to attend two functions the same evening, so what we did this year was to invite the officials of these organisations and requested them to schedule their celebrations in consultations with us," said A A Siddiqui, community attaché at the Pakistani embassy. "Instead of many programmes, we decided to have a consolidated function where every body could be represented, "And, not only Urdu but programmes in other languages like Punjabi and Sindhi were also lined up for this function," said Siddiqui. Tolna was invited to take part in a multi-lingual mushaira (poetry session) in which many noted literary figures have been invited from Pakistan, he added.

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