Shah Commission draws the borders of Punjab and Haryana

Who: The Punjab Boundary Commission, known as the Shah Commission after its chairman, Justice J. C. Shah of the Supreme Court. Its other members were Subimal Dutt and M. M. Philip, whom J. S. Grewal calls two retired officials. Home Minister Gulzarilal Nanda announced it. It was appointed to carry out the Parliamentary Committee's recommendation of a committee of experts to adjust boundaries.

What: On 18 April 1966 Nanda told the Lok Sabha that on 21 March the Government had decided in principle to reorganise Punjab on a linguistic basis, with boundaries fixed with the help of experts. The Commission was to examine the boundary between the Hindi and Punjabi Regions and apply the linguistic principle “with due regard to the census figures of 1961”, weigh administrative convenience and communications, and ordinarily avoid breaking up existing tehsils. It was to report by the end of May.

Kapur Singh asked the House that day whether the Government wanted a linguistic state or “a Sikh quarantine area”, since the 1961 language figures, he said, were communal statistics. Gurmit Singh writes that Master Tara Singh declared a boycott of the Commission's proceedings, that the Sant Akali Dal rejected the terms of reference on 26 April, and that the Chief Khalsa Diwan said the 1951 and 1961 language returns had been recorded on communal lines.

The Commission reported on 31 May 1966, unanimously except on Kharar tehsil. It placed the districts of Gurdaspur, Amritsar, Kapurthala, Jullundur, Ferozepore, Bhatinda, Patiala and Ludhiana, with parts of Sangrur, Hoshiarpur and Ambala, in the Punjabi-speaking state. The hill areas went to Himachal Pradesh, and Hissar, Mohindergarh, Gurgaon, Rohtak and Karnal to a Hindi-speaking state. By two votes to one it put Kharar tehsil, including the Chandigarh Capital Project, in the Hindi-speaking state. Dutt dissented: he wrote that the rural population of Kharar was 56.2 per cent Punjabi-speaking and that the Sachar Formula of 1949 had placed the tehsil in the Punjabi region.

On 6 September 1966 Nanda told the Lok Sabha that the Government accepted all the unanimous recommendations. On Kharar it decided that Chandigarh, which lay in neither region, “should be kept as a separate entity” and that the rest of the tehsil be divided between Punjab and Haryana along the regional boundary. Section 4 of the Punjab Reorganisation Act then made Chandigarh a Union territory.

On 20 July 1966 the Akali Dal led by Master Tara Singh resolved that areas the Commission had left out of the new Punjab, which it said were deliberately cut off, be added to it to form a Sikh Homeland within the Union, among them Dalhousie, Chandigarh, Una and Sirsa, and that the new Punjab be given autonomous status on the analogy of Jammu and Kashmir. On 6 September Kapur Singh told the Lok Sabha that the Commission's three guidelines were “heavily loaded against the Punjab State”.

Where: New Delhi, where the Home Minister announced the Commission in the Lok Sabha.

Why it mattered: The Commission's map became the map of the new state. The Punjab Reorganization Bill, introduced on 3 September 1966, embodied the Commission's unanimous recommendations, and the new state came into being on 1 November 1966. Using the 1961 census and the tehsil as the unit left out areas the Sikh bodies counted as Punjabi-speaking, and making Chandigarh a Union territory began a dispute that is still open. The Government's 1984 White Paper recalls that the Commission had recommended Chandigarh go to Haryana, and that in 1970 Indira Gandhi announced it would go to Punjab.