Thaindian News

Mumbai, Dec 19 (IANS) Three days after the Maharashtra assembly passed a unanimous resolution demanding that Marathi-speaking areas of neighbouring Karnataka’s Belgaum be declared a union territory, the estranged Thackeray cousins Monday separately called for an urgent solution to the simmering boundary disputes.

While Maharashtra Navnirman Sena chief Raj Thackeray announced plans in Mumbai to meet Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) president Nitin Gadkari in Nagpur Wednesday on the issue, Shiv Sena executive president Uddhav Thackeray claimed at a function in Thane that an “emergency-like” situation prevailed in Belgaum.

Emerging from a meeting with a delegation of the Maharashtra Ekikaran Samiti (MES), Raj also said that he was prepared, if required, to meet Chief Minister D.V. Sadananda Gowda of Karnataka, where the BJP heads the government.

Pointing out that the issue could have been easily resolved if the Shiv Sena had taken steps when it was in the national Democratic Alliance government, Raj expressed apprehensions over the fate of the long-pending boundary issue with the neighbouring state.

Urging for a “practical” instead of an “emotional” approach to resolve the issue, Raj claimed that Maharashtra government lawyers allegedly remained absent on eight occasions when the state’s petition on the boundary row came up before the Supreme Court.

He also advised the MES delegation that staging protests, demonstrations or indulging in acts of vandalism could not go on foreover.

“I clearly told them that the Karnataka government was targeting them because the people in border districts like Belgaum spoke Marathi or wanted to merge with Maharashtra. But, since they are living in Karnataka, they must know the Kannada language, just as people in Maharashtra should know Marathi,” Raj said in his blunt style.

Simultaneously, he wondered if the 2.5 million-plus Marathi-speaking population joined in Maharashtra, they would have to face many problems, like power shortages.

Meanwhile, vowing that the Shiv Sena would always protect the interests of the Marathi-speaking people in the border areas, Uddhav termed the superseding of Belgaum’s Marathi-dominated civic body as nothing short of “an emergency, worse then that imposed by former prime minister, the late Indira Gandhi in 1975″.

He said that the Sena would soon announce plans for an agitation in the state in support of the Marathi-speaking people in Karnataka and efforts at the centre to resolve the issue.