Language row at SBI office | Pro-Kannada groups protest at multiple bank branches

Bengaluru: Members of Karnataka Rakshana Vedike and Namma Karnataka Sena staged a protest at State Bank of India's (SBI) local head office on St Marks Road on Wednesday, after a video of a SBI employee refusing to speak Kannada with a customer, went viral on social media yesterday.

A video of the incident, which took place at the Surya Nagar branch on Anekal Road, shows a woman employee, the branch manager, arguing with a customer over the use of Kannada. “I will never speak Kannada,” she says. The employee has since been transferred from Karnataka.

The women members of the pro-Kannada organisation also staged a protest at SBI’s Surya Nagar branch. Both the groups presented a memorandum to SBI officials, requesting all bank employees across Karnataka get a mandate to learn Kannada to converse with the locals.

“This is a peaceful request. If the same problems continue, we won’t be peaceful anymore. Just like how Maharashtra’s Shiv Sena takes matters into their own hands, we too will,” members of Karnataka Rakshana Vedike threatened SBI employees in the presence of about 50 police officials. Police vans were deployed to take the protestors to the Cubbon Park Police Station.

CM Siddaramaiah condemned the action of the bank employee and appreciated SBI’s swift action in transferring the official. He urged the Finance Minister and Department of Financial Services to mandate cultural and language sensitisation training to all bank staff across India, on X.