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.

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