How an article on Bengaluru bus conductor spurred controversy on Kannada

The police registered an FIR for offending a class or community

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There has been endless debate on whether or not migrants within India should learn the local language. The title of a post by the website Logical Indian has started yet another one, and heated comments have ended in an FIR against a man in Bengaluru.

​Samanya Kannadiga, a Kannada organisation, has lodged a complaint against Pritish Kumar Patil for comments the latter made on the comment thread on Facebook. The Gangammana Gudi police statio​n has registered an FIR under Section 505 of IPC (offending a class or community).

​All this started after The Logical Indian posted an article "My story: I Gave Her A Hundred Rupee Note & She Started Yelling At Me In Her Local Language"(original title) written by Nupur Anand on January 3.

The article was an account of how she was mocked by a bus conductor after she handed a Rs 100 note instead of change of Rs 2 that she owed the conductor. After few hours of posting the article Logical Indian changed the articl's title to “My story: I Gave Her A Hundred Rupee Note & She Started Yelling​".

A little later Samanya Kannadiga wrote an open letter to Logical Indian and Nupur Anand on their blog.

When the second article was posted on Logical Indian's Facebook page on January 4, a man named Pritish Kumar Patil commented on the thread. Using distasteful language and abusive words, he expressed his unwillingness to learn the local language.

​"We were just going through the comments on the post and we came across such hateful comments from this person. We traced the person to Jalahalli, where we tried to file a complaint," said Sandeep a member of the organisation.

Pritish wrote an apology letter addressed to the members of the organisations. However, the members went ahead with lodging the complaint the on January 4.

​"Though he wrote an apology letter, I wanted this to be a lesson to people who look down up on or feel inferior putting an effort towards learning a language that is local to the city they have migrated to for various reasons," Sandeep said.​