Patel answers the Sikh charge of broken promises

Who: Vallabhbhai Patel, Deputy Prime Minister and Home Minister, who had chaired the Constituent Assembly's committees on minorities; and the Akali members Hukam Singh and Bhupinder Singh Mann.

What: On 14 October 1949 the Constituent Assembly was dealing with safeguards for minorities. The Sikh members argued that protections the Assembly had already agreed were being taken back. The Advisory Committee report of August 1947, presented under Patel's chairmanship, had covered representation, cabinet seats and service reservations. On 26 May 1949 the Assembly had declared that statutory reservation of seats for religious minorities should be abolished, reversing its own resolution of August 1947.

Hukam Singh said the Sikhs were being told that circumstances had changed. He asked whether the only change was that the Muslims had got Pakistan, and whether that meant the Sikhs had ceased to be a minority. Bhupinder Singh Mann raised a point of order that the House could not undo its own decisions in this way. Patel said he did not know what promises were meant, that not a single Sikh voice had been raised against partition, and that a charge of breach of faith was not right for the Sikh community. Gurmit Singh, who reports the exchange, rejects this and points to the Congress resolution of 1929 and the Akali Dal's resolution of March 1948.

Where: The Constituent Assembly of India, New Delhi.

Why it mattered: The Akali leadership had relied on the Congress's commitments from before independence, as its own resolution of March 1948 shows. Here the Home Minister said he did not know what promises were meant. The Sikh members won no safeguards. Hukam Singh and Bhupinder Singh Mann did not sign the Constitution, a protest recorded in a separate event. Three months earlier, on 17 July 1949, Patel had written to Nehru that Punjabi was a dialect and not a language.