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Kannada groups begin stir amid textbook row
Hamsalekha said Basavanna and Kuvempu were the equivalent of Kannada and Karnataka and any insult to them warrants an agitation. “When both are insulted, what is the point of us?” he said. His statements come even as the Basavaraj Bommai-led Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has been forced onto its back foot in the textbook row that continues to burn across the state.
The contentious issue of school textbook revision continued to flare up in the state as pro-Kannada groups on Wednesday started an agitation against the “insult” meted out to eminent personalities, including Kuvempu - one of the state’s most loved, respected and revered writers.
“From guru’s home, we are giving out a war cry. It is ‘Kuppalli Kahale’ (war cry from Kuppalli). Then it was ‘Gokak Chaluvali’ (Gokak agitation for Kannada language rights), today it is Kuppalli Kahale which should bloom across the state,” Hamsalekha, one of Karnataka cinema’s biggest music directors, said on Wednesday.
Kuppali Venkatappa Puttappa or Kuvempu is known as “rashtra kavi” and his “Jaya Bharata Jananiya Taujathe” is the “naada geethe” or state anthem is played and sung as a ritual in almost every single state government programme.
Hamsalekha said Basavanna and Kuvempu were the equivalent of Kannada and Karnataka and any insult to them warrants an agitation. “When both are insulted, what is the point of us?” he said.
His statements come even as the Basavaraj Bommai-led Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has been forced onto its back foot in the textbook row that continues to burn across the state.
The textbook committee under Rohit Chakrathirtha, an unknown personality, who was given the job as an academic expert, has since been disbanded after almost all communities in the state threatened to agitate against the insulting and derogatory portrayal of several eminent personalities.
There are several chapters which are alleged to be distorted and the BJP has been accused of trying to “saffronise” the textbooks, according to accusations levelled by activists, opposition parties and several writers in Karnataka.
“There is an attempt to break Kannada and we should do a 100-year agitation,” Hamsalekha said.
The pro-Kannada groups hailed Tamil Nadu for its aggressive stand each time there was some perceived attack on Tamil language.
“The Karnataka Rakshana Vedike demands that the order be withdrawn and the official, who gave these recommendations only to select students who know Hindi for the excursion, be suspended,” said Praveen Shetty, the president of the pro-Kannada group. He said the minister should resign from his post if he too was a part of this.
Shetty said there were millions of students in the state who belong to farming households, poor and children of labourers and others who went to these government schools and did not know Hindi and “such orders were a way of imposing Hindi” that will warrant an agitation if it continues.
Siddaramaiah, the leader of the opposition and Congress legislator, said: “(BC) Nagesh is unfit to be a minister. First, he said, there were no distortions, then agreed. Said they will change.”
He said there were several seers and eminent writers also who had raised objections against the contents of the new textbooks. “They don’t know history but know only how to distort it,” Siddaramaiah alleged.
Forced on the back foot, Bommai had disbanded the revision committee and even ordered changes to change portions of the chapters which had distorted versions on Basavanna.
Primary and secondary education minister Nagesh on Wednesday hit back at Siddaramaiah stating that it was under the latter’s rule that several chapters of Kuvempu was removed from school textbooks and that the Congress government tried to push leftist thinking as against nationalist thinking.
“When they get nothing, they have a habit of calling it saffronisation. They talk about Chaddi and RSS. They have no issues to talk about. They cannot digest the development under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, BS Yediyurappa and Bommai that is why they lie. Let them (Congress) first explain what saffronisation means and what we have done. They have nothing,” Nagesh said.
