NEW DELHI: Karnataka chief minister DK Shivakumar on Friday announced that Tulu, spoken in the state’s Dakshina Kannada and Udupi districts, would be recognised as an additional administrative language in the region, fulfilling a long-standing demand.“Today, we have decided to make Tulu applicable to Udupi and Dakshina Kannada districts and declare it the state’s second additional administrative language,” Shivakumar told reporters after a marathon cabinet meeting in Mangaluru.According to a cabinet note shared by the chief minister’s office, Tulu would be Karnataka’s “second additional administrative language” in Dakshina Kannada and Udupi.The 2011 national census recorded more than 18 lakh native Tulu speakers in Karnataka, whose population was recorded at over six crore at the time. Kannada is the state’s most-widely spoken and its primary official language.This was also the first time a cabinet meeting was held in Mangaluru and not in Bengaluru.
Eye on BJP’s coastal bastion
The political significance of Shivakumar taking his cabinet to Mangaluru becomes clearer against the BJP’s electoral dominance in the region.Coastal Karnataka, particularly Dakshina Kannada and Udupi, has long been one of the BJP’s strongest pockets in the state. In the 2023 Karnataka assembly election, BJP won 11 of the 13 seats across the two districts, taking all five seats in Udupi and six of the eight in Dakshina Kannada. The Congress won only two constituencies.This was despite Congress sweeping to power across Karnataka with 135 seats, against 66 for the BJP.The BJP’s hold remained intact in the 2024 Lok Sabha election. It won both parliamentary seats covering the region, with Brijesh Chowta defeating Congress’s Padmaraj R by over 64,000 votes in Dakshina Kannada. Kota Srinivas Poojary won Udupi-Chikkamagaluru by more than 2.5 lakh votes.The BJP responded to the Tulu announcement by alleging that Shivakumar was “peddling soft Hindutva to make a dent in the BJP’s vote bank.”“Shivakumar has never made any secret of his firm belief in Hinduism and frequently visits temples, performs rituals publicly and quotes scriptures. He is now peddling soft Hindutva. This was also evident from his rendition of ‘Namaste Sada Vatsale’ inside the Karnataka assembly,” a BJP leader told PTI, referring to an August 2025 incident in which Shivakumar sang a few lines of the RSS anthem.The RSS is the BJP’s ideological mentor.But there is a political twist to the Tulu issue itself. The BJP had previously taken up the demand while in power in Karnataka.In January 2023, the then BJP government led by Basavaraj Bommai constituted a committee to examine granting Tulu the status of a second official language in the state, months before the assembly election.
More than just Tulu
Significantly, Shivakumar’s announcements went beyond granting Tulu the status of a second administrative language.The Cabinet meeting in Mangaluru marked the Shivakumar government’s first meeting outside Bengaluru, the state capital. Shivakumar claimed the move was intended to recognise the region’s contribution and address its development needs.
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The chief minister added that a draft notification would soon be issued to invite public feedback on renaming the Dakshina Kannada district to Mangaluru district.He also announced a host of policies for the coastal Karnataka region, introducing a dedicated tourism policy for the coastal areas to treats tourism projects as infrastructure initiatives while offering investors special incentives and extended loan repayment windows.Additionally, the government approved the Karnataka Marine Biotechnology Policy, 2026-31, which paves the way for upgrading the existing fisheries college into the Fisheries, Marine and Blue Economy University and expanding its student intake from 60 to 200 seats.Beyond these policies, the administration unveiled new urban development planning, fisheries sector incentives, and major financial allocations totaling around Rs 32,611 crore—split evenly between rural development and regional growth for Mangaluru, Udupi, and the coastal region.The announcements further included plans to hold decentralised Cabinet meetings across 10 to 12 locations in the state over the next 15 months and the sanctioning of a new medical college worth approximately Rs 450 crore for the region.
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