H D Kumaraswamy, the leader of the JD(S) legislative party, requested on Monday that Basavaraj Bommai postpone the September 14 celebration of Hindi Diwas in Karnataka.
"India is the great union of more than 560 principalities that are socially, culturally diverse and include thousands of languages and sub-languages. To extol only one language will truly be supreme injustice done to people," Kumaraswamy, a former CM, stated in a letter to Bommai.
"On September 14, it will be injustice to Kannadigas when the Union government will force Hindi Diwas to be celebrated by the state government. The tax money paid by the people of our state shouldn't be used by the Karnataka government to celebrate Hindi Diwas," Kumaraswamy insisted.
The JD(S) is trying to position itself as a pro-Kannada regional party and Kumaraswamy has, for the past few years, opposed the celebration of Hindi Diwas.
Last week, Chief Secretary Vandita Sharma issued a circular making it mandatory for Kannada to be used in all events organised by the union and state governments inside Karnataka. “Kannada must be our priority, not a choice,” Sharma said in the circular, which she issued based on a petition by the Kannada Development Authority.
On September 14, 1953, the first Hindi Day was observed when Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, the country's prime minister at the time, chose to mark this day as Hindi Diwas. The Constituent Assembly approved Hindi written in the Devanagari script as India's official language on September 14, 1949.
Thus, Hindi written in Devanagri script combined with English will be adopted as the functional language of India, according to the Constituent Assembly. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru decided to designate September 14 as the Hindi Diwas because the Indian government saw the need to encourage the usage of Hindi.
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