Noted Hindi pundit and former Rajya Sabha member Prof Yarlagadda Lakshmiprasad urged the two Telugu chief ministers to stop the Telugu Ganga water to Chennai in protest against the anti-Telugu stand taken by their Tamil Nadu counterpart J Jayalalithaa. He said Tamil Nadu government should be taught a fitting lesson for attempting insult the Telugu Language which was lauded by great Tamil poet Subramanya Bharti. Chief minister Jayalalitha, he said should recall the long tradition of interaction between the two cultures before taking anti-Telugu stand.
” This is the time time chief ministers of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana took a hard stance to preserve the Telugu culture and rights of Telugu People living the neighboring Tamil state. In order to protect the Telugu language from anti-Telugu policy of Tamil Nadu, the chief ministers should not hesitate to take retaliatory steps by stopping the supply of drinking of Krishna water to Chennai through Telugu Ganga canal,” he said in Delhi. The decision of Tamil Nadu government making writing examinations in Tamil compulsory for all non-Tamil students studying in the state had thrown the fate of 92,000 non-Tamil students from 900 schools into confusion, he said.
He said Tamil leaders had consistently been working against the interests of Telugu people. “Dayanithi Maran, when he was in the union cabinet, scuttled our attempts to get classical language status to Telugu by increasing the eligible antiquity of the language to 2000 years. The name of Telugu Ganga canal has been changed to Krishna Project when the canal reaches Tamil Nadu jurisdiction. The Jaya government chose to ignore the letter written by chief minister Chandrababu Naidu and a personal visit to Chennai by state information minister Palle Raghunatha Reddy on restoration of Telugu as medium of instruction. This adamancy should be retaliated with similar hard stance by stopping supply of drinking water to Chennai from Telugu Ganga,” Yarlagadda suggested.
