Appachu Ranjan(left) with R Ashoka . File photo
Claiming that Tipu Sultan was no freedom fighter, Rajan visited Bangalore to hand over a letter to Education Minister S Suresh Kumar requesting the minister to remove a chapter in the school book which claims that Tipu was a freedom fighter.
The MLA claimed that Tipu Sultan had changed the state language from Kannada to Persian, had plundered temples, had forcibly converted Christians and Coorgs and also changed the names of towns and localities to Persian.
He claimed that there is ample records for Tipu Sultan’s misdeeds and the Sultan should not be glorified in the school textbooks as a freedom fighter.
The Congress government had started Tipu Jayanti on 2015 to celebrate Tipu’s birth claiming that the Mysore sultan was a freedom fighter.
Violence broke out during the celebrations in 2015 at Coorg. 3 people lost their lives during that time and a curfew was imposed in the district.
In 2016, the Chief Justice of Karnataka High Court Subhro Kamal Mukherjee had questioned the then Government’s logic behind celebrating Tipu Jayanti.
Tipu was not a freedom figher, but a monarch who fought the opponents to safeguard his interests,
observed the Chief Justice.“He was a ruler of a princely state (Mysore). What’s the use of doing this (Tipu Jayanti)? Even if Nizam of Hyderabad had come, he (Tipu) would have countered him in the same way to defend his territory,” he said at the time.
The HC refused to grant a stay on the controversial issue of celebrating of Tipu Sultan’s birth anniversary in the state as it was the state government’s prerogative.
