Stalin drops Re from Budget logo amid language fight
Toughening its stance amid the language tussle with the Centre, the MK Stalin government in Tamil Nadu has replaced the rupee symbol for the Indian currency with Tamil alphabet ‘Ru’ in the state Budget logo.
While the move drew the ire of the opposition BJP, the ruling DMK said there was no rule that barred such a depiction. The logo for the Budget, released by the government on Thursday, carried ‘Ru’, the first letter of the Tamil word ‘rubaai’ that denotes the Indian currency in the vernacular language. The logo also had the caption “everything for all”, indicating what the DMK claims is its “inclusive model of governance”.
Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said the move signalled a “dangerous mindset that weakened Indian unity and promoted secessionist sentiments under the pretence of regional pride”. BJP Tamil Nadu chief K Annamalai said, “The rupee symbol was designed by a Tamilian and adopted by the whole of Bharat and incorporated into our currency. Thiru Udhay Kumar, who designed the symbol, is the son of a former DMK MLA. How reckless can you become, Thiru @mkstalin?”
DMK spokesperson Saravanan Annadurai said no law “opposed or stopped using Ru in Tamil”. “Then why such anger,” he asked Annamalai in a post on X. State Finance Minister Thangam Thennarasu is slated to table the Budget on Friday. The logo for the last Budget carried the Indian currency symbol, an amalgam of Devanagari ‘Ra’ and the Roman capital ‘R’. The change came in the middle of the language war underway between the DMK and the BJP-led Centre over the National Education Policy, which mandates, among other contentious points, students in Class VIII and above to study a third language from a list of 22 that includes Hindi.
The Tamil Nadu Government has objected to the third language requirement, pointing out that the existing two-language policy — under which students are taught Tamil and English—had served the state well all these years. The BJP, however, maintained its formula would benefit people travelling to other states. It also argued the NEP did not force a student to study Hindi.
Stalin, who is also fighting the BJP over delimitation, has written to Prime Minister Narendra Modi to seek his intervention. “Not an education policy, but a saffron policy,” Stalin on Thursday said about the NEP while addressing an event.
The southern states fear delimitation would leave them at a disadvantage in Parliament in comparison to those in the north, many of which have emerged as BJP bastions.
