Woman's Post Facing Discrimination As North Indian in Bengaluru Sparks Debate On Twitter

The language discrimination in Karnataka is becoming a big problem for people who are not from the state and don’t know how to speak Kannada. And people are facing these incidents on social media very often, and now a new case of this language discrimination has surfaced in the SM in which a female X user has shared her experience of living in Bengaluru and alleged an auto driver for asking why she is in Bengaluru when she belonged to North India. 

Moreover, they also struck up a conversation, asking if she was learning the local language, Kannada, or if she liked anything apart from the weather in the city. Also, as she was newly married, the auto drivers used to ask her for extra charges and pretend that they didn't understand a single word as she couldn’t speak anything apart from Hindi or English.

X user @Shaninani shared her experience of living in Bengaluru for 1.5 years. She got married in Punjab and started wearing the chooda, the traditional bangles, which makes it evident that she belongs to North India, due to which she faced harassment. 

In her post on X, she wrote, “What a harassment it was to commute in auto from flat to office and back. The audacity of local auto drivers to strike a conversation on why I was in Bangalore when I belonged to North, if I was learning Kannada, asking if I like anything apart from weather, asking for more money as I was newly married and pretending not to understand a word when I would talk in Hin/Eng.”

And it didn’t end there; she said once she called BESCOM, Bangalore Electricity Supply Company Limited, to complain about the power cut, but the operator cut the call, saying, “No Hindi, no English, only Kannada.”

Later on in the thread, she also shared the experience of bad weather not getting cabs, but the cabs will take hours to reach the destination due to the traffic and waterlogging. 

After all of this, she left the job, shifted to Gurugram, and also shared the experience. 

Users in the comment section had mixed views on this; some of them shared their experience of the same, and some people who were from the state supported this, and some of the users also supported this.