Dar Commission rejects linguistic provinces for now

Who: Three Commissioners named by the President of the Constituent Assembly: S. K. Dar, a retired judge of the Allahabad High Court, as Chairman, with Dr Panna Lall and Jagat Narain Lal; B. C. Banerji was Secretary. Associate members from the regions concerned sat with them but did not sign the report.

What: By a notification dated 17 June 1948 the Commission was asked to report on whether to form new provinces of Andhra, Karnataka, Kerala and Maharashtra, on their boundaries and on the financial and administrative consequences. The Parliamentary Committee on the demand for Punjabi Suba later gave the date as a Government of India order of 19 June 1948. The Commission held its first meeting on 19 July 1948 and toured Vizagapatam, Madras, Madura, Mangalore, Calicut, Coimbatore, Nagpur, Hubli, Poona and Bombay. About 1,000 written memoranda were received and over 700 witnesses heard. The report, signed on 10 December 1948, is unanimous.

It concluded that the formation of provinces on exclusively or even mainly linguistic considerations was not in the larger interests of the Indian nation and should not be taken in hand, and that no new provinces from those referred to it should be formed for the present. Language could be one factor among others but not the decisive or main one. It said the first and last need of India was to be made a nation. Among the weaknesses of the demand it listed that recognising a province governed by a linguistic group paved the way for other group governments, naming government by Southerners in the South, "government by Sikhs and Jats in the north of India" and government by non-Brahmins.

Where: New Delhi, where it met, with tours of cities in the south and west.

Why it mattered: The Punjab was not in its terms. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism says that "it seems" northern India was deliberately kept out of the purview of the commission so that problems like those of Punjab, and issues pertaining to Sikhs, would not arise. Soon after the report, the Congress appointed the J.V.P. Committee at its Jaipur session in December 1948 to review the position in the light of it. The Commission's principles came back when Sikhs demanded a Punjabi-speaking State: in 1955 the States Reorganisation Commission wrote that the Dar Commission had rightly said no linguistic State should be imposed on substantial minorities, and rejected the Punjabi-speaking State for lack of general support. The 1966 Parliamentary Committee recalled that the Dar Commission named "administrative convenience" and "homogeneity of language" as the two principles for new States.