The border dispute is at present before Supreme Court, through a Maharashtra government petition against the 1967 Mahajan Commission Report. The Mahajan Commission had recommended the transfer of 264 disputed villages in Karnataka to Maharashtra and 247 disputed villages in Maharashtra to Karnataka. The commission, however, rejected Maharashtra’s claim to Belgaum city. This September, with legal processes in the dispute gathering steam, the Karnataka government, often accused of neglecting Belgaum, took an unprecedented step to show solidarity with the northern district. Chief Minister H.D. Kumaraswamy, shrugging off a series of corruption charges against his government and egged on by chauvinists, got a historic four-day legislature session convened in Belgaum city on September 25.

It was the first time a Karnataka legislature session had moved out of the confines of the Vidhana Soudha in Bangalore. Despite the waste of over Rs 10 crore on the travelling legislature, the move has been widely appreciated in political circles as a masterstroke.

The historic Belgaum session has yielded several announcements including one to make Belgaum the winter capital of Karnataka. Regular legislature sessions and a Vidhana Soudha for Belgaum are among the other announcements made at the session. For the fifth time in the four decades since the Mahajan report, the Karnataka legislature passed a resolution of acceptance of the commission’s recommendations.

The Belgaum issue will continue to remain in the public eye through the first week of October too, thanks to a Karnataka bandh called by Kannada groups on October 4 to protest against the UPA government’s alleged tacit support for Maharashtra on the issue. The Karnataka government is covertly supporting the bandh.

Strangely, coinciding with the Belgaum legislature session has been the decision of the government to shut down 1416 schools across the state for imparting education in English, rather than Kannada — as prescribed by a 1994 government notification. Since 1994, at the beginning of every academic year, successive governments have issued warnings to the schools teaching in English — after being allowed to open as Kannada medium schools.

This year, for the first time, that too in the middle of the academic year, the state has decided to strictly enforce the ‘Kannada only’ rule for the post-1994 schools. When over 2.73 lakh schoolchildren return from Dussehra vacations in the second week of October, they are likely to be shunted to schools other than the ones they attended prior to the Dussehra break on September 21.

Parents have questioned the government’s mid-term decision to ban the schools and the reasoning behind the punishment of children for the mistakes of school managements. The primary education minister Basavaraj Horatti has argued that the government must start drawing the line on the policy at some point of time. Several ministers in the government, from the BJP and the JDS, are however of the view that the schools must be given a longer rope.

The question of introduction of English language in state syllabus schools in Karnataka has been a hotly debated one, especially after the fruits of the globalised economy began appearing in the form of jobs in Bangalore and other urban centres in the state. Karnataka is incidentally the only state in the country to introduce English in government schools as late as the fifth standard. A proposal has been doing the rounds for over a year now to introduce English from an earlier first or third standard.

The Kannada literary world has also been divided on the issue of introduction of English in primary schools. In a series of debates on the issue organised in 2005, some writers argued that the introduction of English at an early stage in schools in poor rural areas will be a burden on the parents who have little education themselves. The government must first focus on strengthening the quality of its schools, they said. Others pointed out that children would be equipped to compete in the globalised world only with an early training in English. For now, Chief Minister Kumaraswamy has promised to resolve the English schools closure issue without harming the interests of parents and students. But that, given the context of Karnataka’s charged politics, is easier said than done.