Defaming a warrior, Tipu Jayanti's kin to drag Anant Kumar Hegde to court
Bengaluru: With the advent of Tipu Jayanti - celebrated on November 10 - communal tensions are being stoked once again in Karnataka with Union Minister Anant Kumar Hegde voicing his opposition to the celebrations, calling Tipu Sultan anti-Hindu and asking that he be left out of the invitee list for the November 10 celebrations this year, through a letter to the Karnataka Chief Minister's Secretariat.
This year, however, Tipu Sultan's descendants, who live in Kolkata and here in Bengaluru, have decided to take legal and government recourse. "I have a meeting with Home Minister Ramalinga Reddy tomorrow (Tuesday) morning," said Sahebzada Mansoor Ali, a seventh generation descendant of Tipu Sultan. "Tipu Jayanti is being used as a political weapon, both by those who celebrate it and those who try to stop the celebrations from happening. It all boils down to the Muslim vote. People should not be allowed to make baseless comments against Tipu Sultan - Hegde's statements have no validation in our history books."
The family is also planning to file a defamation case against Hegde. "As a Union Minister, a representative of Uttara Kannada district at the Centre, he has embarrassed not just the family but the state as a whole," said Ali. "All he wants to do is create differences between the different communities."
On Friday, the Union Minister had taken to twitter, causing an uproar with his seething comments against the controversial Tiger of Mysore. “(I have) conveyed (to) Karnataka government not to invite me to shameful event of glorifying a person known as brutal killer, wretched fanatic and mass rapist,” he wrote. This isn’t Hegde's first brush with controversy. In 2016, he was arrested for threatening to disrupt Tipu Jayanti in Uttara Kannada district.
Ali, who lives in Bengaluru, has conducted a study of his family legacy. His decision to marry at his forefather's tomb, reviving a family tradition that had been out of sight for 200 years, led him to the deep communal divides that exist around the erstwhile Sultanate of Mysore. He has, ever since, attempted to amend this narrative and on May 4 this year, Tipu’s death anniversary, Ali released a website that details his much-misunderstood rule. The website, which can be translated into 153 languages, provides readers access to local archives.
