Parliamentary Committee recommends a Punjabi-speaking state

Who: The Parliamentary Committee on the Demand for Punjabi Suba: 22 members of both Houses, chaired by Sardar Hukam Singh, the Speaker of the Lok Sabha. Home Minister Gulzarilal Nanda asked for it. Indira Gandhi, Y. B. Chavan and Mahavir Tyagi of a Cabinet committee attended its first meeting on 9 October 1965.

What: On 6 September 1965 Nanda told the Lok Sabha that the whole question of a Punjabi-speaking state could be examined afresh. On 23 September he asked the Speaker and the Rajya Sabha Chairman to set up the committee. It received 7,184 written memoranda, held 28 sittings and heard 25 bodies and individuals, among them the Chief Ministers of Punjab and Himachal Pradesh. Ten invited bodies did not appear. Hearings paused for the death of Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri on 11 January 1966 and resumed on 27 January.

The report was adopted on 15 March 1966. It found that “an overwhelming majority” of the people in the state now supported reorganisation on a linguistic basis, and that the bulk of the evidence refuted the argument that the demand was basically a communal one. It recommended a unilingual Punjabi State from the Punjabi Region of the 1957 Regional Committees Order, a merger of the hill areas next to Himachal Pradesh with Himachal, a Haryana State from the rest of the Hindi-speaking region, and a committee of experts to adjust boundaries at once.

Eight members added notes. Atal Bihari Vajpayee, a Rajya Sabha member, wrote that he could not be party to the report. The Punjab Jana Sangh, the Punjab Hindu Sabha and several other bodies declined to appear before it, his note says, because its makeup had aroused misgivings. Both Akali Dal groups also stayed away, for different reasons.

The Congress Working Committee had already adopted its own motion for a Punjabi-speaking state: on 9 March according to the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism and J. S. Grewal, and on 2 March according to Gurmit Singh. On 21 March 1966 the Government of India accepted in principle that Punjab be reorganised on a linguistic basis, with experts fixing the boundaries.

Where: New Delhi. The report is dated at New Delhi, 15 March 1966.

Why it mattered: In 1955 the States Reorganisation Commission had turned the demand down because, it said, it lacked the general support of the people of the area. This committee found the opposite. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism says Hukam Singh secured a unanimous vote from a mixed committee, though the printed report carries Vajpayee's refusal. Hukam Singh later wrote that the Government had meant to use him to secure an adverse report. The Government accepted the principle within a week, the Shah Commission was then appointed to fix the boundaries, and the new state came into being on 1 November 1966.