1951 census: Hindi or Punjabi as mother tongue

Who: Hindus of Punjab and PEPSU who were urged to record Hindi, not Punjabi, as their mother tongue; the Arya Samaj and Hindu newspapers that campaigned for this; Sikh leaders and the Akali Dal, whose demand for a Punjabi-speaking state depended on how many people were counted as Punjabi speakers; and the central government, which stepped in.

What: Early in 1951, in the first census of independent India, newspaper campaigns led by the Arya Samaj urged Hindus even in Punjabi-speaking areas to disown Punjabi and register Hindi. Gurmit Singh writes that Punjab's Hindus by and large returned Hindi, that Hindu census officials took part in falsifying returns, and that a quarrel between Hindus and Sikhs in a village of Jalandhar district ended in a killing and led to disorder at several places. C. Rajagopalachari, then Home Minister, told Parliament that the language returns in a large part of Punjab were believed to be incorrect. The Prime Minister then directed that the recording of the language column be stopped.

The same repudiation of Punjabi was repeated in the 1961 census.

Where: Punjab and PEPSU. The clash described by Gurmit Singh took place in a village in Jalandhar district.

Why it mattered: The Akali demand was for a state in which Punjabi was the language of the majority, and the census was the official count of who spoke it. Sikh anger over the returns fed the Akali manifesto of 1952, which repeated the demand for a Punjabi-speaking state. Not every Punjabi Hindu took the Hindi line. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism records that Seth Ram Nath, a Punjabi Hindu, openly backed the cause of a Punjabi-speaking state, and Wikipedia's account of the movement notes that the RSS chief M. S. Golwalkar said in 1960 that Punjabi was the mother tongue of every Punjabi. The same account describes the Arya Samaj campaign as an effort to weaken the language basis of the Punjabi Suba demand.