Bengaluru: Karnataka chief minister Siddaramaiah has asked the Central government to remove Hindi sign boards from Bengaluru Metro following a campaign against the language. In a letter to the housing and urban affairs minister Narendra Singh Tomar, Siddaramaiah raised recent protests and instances of vandalism provoked by the usage of Hindi.
"It campaign against Hindi started as a campaign in the social media followed by protests and submission of memoranda... Presently it has begun to take a violent turn with activists trying to deface the Metro name boards/signages," he said.
"Although the state government has strictly dealt with those who defaced the signages and maintained law and order around metro stations... you would agree that in the face of a continuous agitation... it is counter-productive to insist on use of three languages, including Hindi," he wrote.
The chief minister said the state government was therefore "compelled" to ask the metro authorities to "temporarily re-design the signages" without using Hindi. Objections to the use of Hindi signs in the Metro stations had flared online in June around a campaign called #NammaMetroHindiBeda or "We don't want Hindi in our metro".
Reacting to the controversy, officials at the Bangalore Metro Rail Corporation Limited or BMRC said: "We are following the three language formula as directed in a circular from the Ministry of Urban Development. Hindi, along with Kannada and English, is there on the front of the stations. Inside it is mostly two languages - Kannada and English. A Parliamentary Committee had come to check the observation of the 3 language formula. The Metro is funded by the Centre also."
But after groups like the Karnataka Rakshana Vedike began protesting on the roads and at stations, Hindi signs at some stations were covered - although it was not clear who had covered them. The protesters say that Hindi is not a national language and see no need for it to be given priority over other Indian languages. They also argue that the three-language system amounted to an "imposition" of Hindi and the language was not used in Metro stations in neighbouring Tamil Nadu and Kerala.
