21st February International Mother Language Day
21st February is one of the most significant day in Bengali calendar. It is "International Mother Language Day". Spanning back to the history, on 21st February, 1952 (8 Falgun 1359 – as it corresponds to the Bengali calendar), the police guns of East Pakistan' force went bang on a procession of students, thereby killing four of them, who set out with a demand to establish Bengali as the official language. This was an incident that occurred in Dhaka, when the nation wide revolution led to recognition of Bengali as an official language of Pakistan. But it was not until 17th November 1999 that UNESCO declared the day "21st February" to be the International Mother Language Day. At a public meeting on 21 March, 1948, the Governor General of Pakistan, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, declared that there could be no language, other than Urdu to be used as the national language for both East and West Pakistan. People of East Pakistan -- whose main language was Bengali – launched a ...