Bengaluru: Jnanpith awardee and playwright Girish Karnad has recieved a death threat from a Twitter account by few miscreants over his controversial speech at the Tipu Sultan birth anniversary celebration on November 10.

The tweet read, “Girish Karnad will meet the same end like kalburgi if he enrages kannadigas by replacing Kempegowda (sic) with Tipu Sultan.”

A senior police officer said that the tweet was posted by someone with the user name Intolerant Chandra and has assured  action if necessary.

Earlier a complaint was registered against the writer for “insulting Hindus and the Vokkaliga community (Kempegowda belonged to it) and disrupting social harmony”.

The Playwright on the day of Tipu birth anniversory celebrations had made a controversial statement :”What Raja Ram Mohan Roy is to Bengal, BR Ambedkar to Maharashtra and Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru to Uttar Pradesh, Tipu is to Karnataka. The international airport in Bengaluru should be named after Tipu as Kempegowda was no doubt the founder of Bengaluru, but was not a freedom fighter. I’m aware what I’m saying now will be debated. Kolkata airport is named after Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose and Mumbai airport after Shivaji Maharaj, but in Karnataka we have named it after Kempegowda. If Tipu had been a Hindu and not Muslim, he would have attained the position in Karnataka that Shivaji Maharaj enjoys in Maharashtra.”, he said.

After the statement went viral several protests erupted across the state demanding him to return prestigeous Jnanpith award.

“I don’t know whether we have become intolerant or not, but it has become difficult to speak anything at all in the country,” Karnad told Indian Express on Wednesday after protests erupted against him. He said his statement “deliberately or otherwise”, had been turned into an anti-Kempegowda remark.

“I had  only said that it would have been nice if the airport at Devanahalli was named after Tipu Sultan, since it was the place where he was born,” he said.