Maratha king Shivaji was ‘Kannadiga’, claims Karnataka Deputy CM

Belagavi, Jan 31 : Slamming Maharashtra Chief Minister Uddhav Thackrey for raking up the inter-state border row, Karnataka Deputy Chief Minister Govind Karjol on Sunday claimed that the Maratha king Chhatrapti Shivaji was a ‘Kannadiga’.
“Thackrey does not know history. Shivaji’s forefather Belliyappa was a Kannadiga from Soratur in Karnataka’s Gadag district. When drought struck Gadag, he (Belliyappa) migrated to Maharashtra, and Shivaji was the fourth generation of his family,” Karjol told reporters in Karnataka’s Belagavi.
At a book launch on the border dispute between the two states in Mumbai on January 27, Thackeray said areas dominated by Marathi-speaking people in Karnataka like Belagavi, Karwar and Nippani should be declared as the ‘Union Territory’ till the Supreme Court gave its final verdict in the decades old case.
Asserting that the Mahajan Commission’s report in 1968 upheld Karnataka’s claim on Belagavi, Karwar, Nippani and 800 villages in the border areas,” Karjol said that Thackeray had been raising the issue to divert attention from the ‘infighting’ in the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) coalition government, which was formed by Shiva Sena, Congress and Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) on November 28, 2019 in Maharashtra.
“Thackrey should at least know now that Shivaji, who is Shiv Sena’s icon and named the party after the Maratha king was a Kannadiga by origin,” reiterated Karjol, who hails from Bijapur (Vijayapura) in the state’s north west region.
Considered to be the founder of the Maratha empire, Shivaji Bhonsale (1630-1680) was crowned emperor (Chhatrapati) in 1674 at Raigad in the Konkan region of Maharashtra.