border villages in khanapur cry for development

Caught in the border dispute on linguistic grounds for the last seven decades, the Khanapur Assembly constituency located in Belagavi district of northern Karnataka is crying for development and people are pinning hopes on Prime Minister Narendra Modi for early resolution.Khanapur with Marathi-speaking majority people is one of the 264 villages which the Mahajan Commission had recommended should be transferred to neighbouring Maharashtra way back in 1967. It also includes the Nippani Assembly segment.
Sadly, the dispute over the transfer of the number of linguistic majority villages to both Karnataka and Maharashtra has gradually become a politically sensitive issue with neighbouring Maharashtra asserting its claim over more area.
And the Maharashtra Ekikaran Samithi (MES), a pro-Marathi socio-political organisation which operates from Belagavi and enjoys support from across party lines from Maharashtra, has been fighting for this cause and even been contesting Assembly polls in Karnataka. “MES has always fought the Assembly election in Khanapur raising the linguistic issue, not development. Three generations have suffered without seeing any development,” Vittal Mahadev Karambalkar, Vice-President of Mahalaxmi Group that owns a sugar factory in this region, told.
Since the start of the Assembly polls in 1960s in Karnataka, MES has won the maximum number of times from the Khanapur Assembly seat but no candidate has been re-elected so far. The BJP first won the seat in 2008, while the Congress did so in 2018.