Always simmering in the background, the border dispute between Maharashtra and Karnataka has reared its head again after a bus conductor from Karnataka was allegedly assaulted in Belagavi on Friday for not speaking to a couple of students in Marathi. Both states have halted bus operations and the matter was also raised at the Akhil Bharatiya Sahitya Sammelan in Delhi even as a conductor from Maharashtra was attacked and his face blackened in Chitradurga on Saturday.
The long-drawn boundary dispute between the two sides dates back to the reorganisation of states along linguistic lines following the passage of the States Reorganisation Act of 1956. Since its creation on May 1, 1960, Maharashtra has claimed that 865 villages, including Belagavi (earlier known as Belgaum), Nipani, and Carvar should be part of Maharashtra, a claim Karnataka contests.
On October 25, 1966, the Centre constituted the Mahajan Commission headed by then Supreme Court Chief Justice Mehr Chand Mahajan at the insistence of Maharashtra. While rejecting Maharashtra’s claim over Belagavi, the commission recommended that 247 villages and places in Maharashtra, including Jatt, Akkalkot, and Solapur, be made part of Karnataka. It also proposed that 264 villages or places, including Nippani, Khanapur and Nandagad be handed over to Maharashtra. Maharashtra rejected the report outright, saying the commission did not adequately address its concerns and favoured Karnataka.
Since then, Maharashtra has made repeated attempts, adopting legal and political platforms, to highlight its concerns and reclaim the Marathi-speaking villages along the border. In 2004, the Maharashtra government filed a petition in the Supreme Court laying a claim on the villages and the petition has been pending since then. Karnataka has also hardened its position over the decades, first by renaming Belgaum as Belagavi and making it the seat of the winter session of its legislature. There have also been calls to make it the second capital of the state in a tactical move to negate Maharashtra’s claim.
In 2010, the Centre in its affidavit to the Supreme Court said the transfer of certain areas to then Mysore (now Karnataka) was neither arbitrary nor wrong. It also underlined that both Parliament and the Union Government had considered all relevant factors in the States Reorganisation Bill of 1956 and the Bombay Reorganisation Bill of 1960.
Most recently the border row flared up in 2022 when then Maharashtra CM Eknath Shinde held a meeting in Mumbai to review the status of the border dispute and announced that freedom fighters in Belagavi and other Marathi-speaking areas in Karnataka would be eligible for pension and free medical care under the Jyotiba Phule Jan Arogya Scheme.
Irked by this, then Karnataka CM Basavaraj Bommai announced grants for all Kannada schools in Maharashtra. At the time, both the state governments had BJP — on its own in Karnataka and in alliance with Shinde’s Shiv Sena in Maharashtra. Bommai also said his government was thinking of staking claim on 40 villages in the Jatt taluka in Maharashtra’s Sangli district. Bommai said Karnataka would also claim rights over border villages in Solapur.
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On December 27, 2022, the Maharashtra Assembly unanimously passed a resolution on the dispute. The Assembly said the cities of “Belgaum, Nippani, Carvar, Bidar, and Bhalki, along with all Marathi-speaking villages in Karnataka” were part of the state and the government would “pursue legal provisions effectively in the Supreme Court”.
In both states, political parties across party lines and ideological differences have made the border Maharashtra and Karnataka dispute a common cause, aligning with their state’s position.
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