By TwoCircles.net staff reporter

Meerut : Majlis Falah-e-Insaniyat president Maulana Abdullah Saleem has lamented the government's bid to neglect Urdu and Ulema in the celebrations of First War of Independence 1857.

"While May 1857 incidents are completing 150 years and the entire country is celebrating this first war of independence, it is a matter of grave concern that Ulema and leaders of Muslim organisations have neither been invited to participate in the celebrations nor even consulted in the process of devising these programmes," Maulana Saleem noted in a meeting of the organisation's executive committee held at its headquarters here Wednesday.

"Urdu, the language which gave the most popular slogan of Inquilab Zindabad, is also being wilfully neglected," he added.

Maulana Saleem urged the government to get the advertisements of 1857 celebrations printed in Urdu besides Hindi.

Addressing the meeting, president Gorakhpur Division of the Majlis Maulana Muhammad Sho'ban al-Qasmi said the first right to celebrate the first war of independence goes to Ulema and Islamic seminaries, for it is the Ulema who sacrificed their all, even their lives, to free India.