CM Siddaramaiah with proposed state flag on Thursday.
The Karnataka government has decided to accept the proposal for a state flag designed by a nine-member committee constituted by the state Kannada and Culture department.
CM Siddaramaiah who met a delegation of Kannada activists at his office Thursday displayed the red, white and yellow flag proposed to be used as the official state flag if it accepted by the Union government. He said the state had accepted the proposed flag to be the official flag in place of an unofficial red and yellow flag that is currently used in the state to signify local pride.
The move to accept a separate flag for the state is seen as a strategy adopted by the Congress and Siddaramaiah to tap into local Kannada pride ahead of the state Assembly elections.
‘’We have decided to accept this flag as the official state flag but the state cannot unilaterally declare this as its official flag. It has to be declared by the Union Home Ministry. We will ask the ministry to declare this flag as the official flag of Karnataka,” Siddaramaiah said after unveiling the flag on Thursday.
If adopted with clearance from the Home Ministry, Karnataka will become the second state after Jammu and Kashmir to have an official state flag.
Karnataka has had an unofficial state flag since the mid-1960s when pro-Kannada groups, including veteran activist Vatal Nagaraj, were agitating against the screening of non-Kannada films in the state. The unofficial flag was created by Kannada writer and activist Ma Ramamurthy for a pro-Kannada political party called the Kannada Paksha. This unofficial flag is flown every year on November 1 — the state’s formation day.
The move to create an official state flag began with a request made in 2014 by Patil Puttappa, a 96-year-old journalist and Kannada activist, and Bheemappa Gundappa, a 56-year-old RTI activist, to the Congress government headed by Siddaramaiah, a former chairman of Kannada protection committee, which was the pre-cursor to the current Kannada Development Authority.
On June 6, 2017, the Kannada and Culture Department set up a nine-member panel to examine the feasibility and legal issues around the demand. The setting up of the panel resulted in a controversy with BJP accusing Congress of subverting the national flag.
“A state flag will not disrupt the unity and integrity of the country,” Siddaramaiah said last year. The opposition BJP has in the past accorded official status to the unofficial state flag. In 2012, the BJP government gave official status to the state flag through a notification. The notification was withdrawn after state high court raised questions on the legality of states having their own flags.
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