BENGALURU: The Karnataka Sanskrit University has said that a lot of the information going around on the building of its Magadi campus comes from misconceptions. Several Kannada activists, including KPCC spokesperson A N Nataraj Gowda and Popular Front of India, had spoken out against the government allegedly recently allocating land and funds for the building of the Karnataka Sanskrit University (KSU) campus in Magadi. According to those opposing the move, around Rs 359 crores had been spent funding the new campus, as well as 100 acres of land only recently being allotted by the government.
However, KSU Vice-Chancellor, Prof K E Devanathan, has said that a number of misconceptions have led to this information being spread. “We haven’t received any kind of funding from the government to build a campus and the land had been allotted to us back in March 2013 to build a new campus, but we could not go through with it due to a lack of funding,” he said.
Further, he said that the campus at Magadi was, in fact, Karnataka State Open University (KSOU) regional centre that was being built on the land allotted to KSU. Since the land had been allotted to KSU, the KSOU regional centre being built on the land would also house facilities for KSU. “Last week, KSOU held a bhoomi pooja before commencing on construction, since it is land allocated to KSU, the university will also be provided facilities and space to conduct our own classes and function as a campus alongside the regional centre,” Prof Devanathan told TNIE.
“It is unfortunate that there are so many lashing out at the university, but we have nothing to say about them. Everyone has their opinions on where Sanskrit stands as a language, whether it is acceptable or not,” he said. “However, Karnataka has been the only state in India which Sanskrit has been allowed to flourish, with over 50,000 Sanskrit students, which I think is a great thing,” he said.
Dissent has also come from the Popular Front of India as well, with PFI Karnataka State President Yasir Hasan saying that though there are no qualms about accepting Sanskrit as one of many languages, Kannadigas must defeat the ruse of Hindi/Sanskrit imposition undertaken to establish upper-class hegemony.