States Reorganisation Commission

The States Reorganisation Commission (SRC), also called the Fazl Ali Commission, was the three-member body the Government of India appointed to examine the reorganisation of the States of the Indian Union. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru announced it in Parliament on 22 December 1953, and a Home Ministry resolution of 29 December 1953 named its members: Saiyid Fazl Ali (chairman), then Governor of Orissa; Hriday Nath Kunzru, a member of the Council of States; and K. M. Panikkar, then India's ambassador to Egypt. Gurmit Singh notes that no Sikh was nominated although Punjab was then the most controversial question.

How it worked: a press note of 23 February 1954 dropped a questionnaire and invited written memoranda from the public and from associations. The Commission began its all-India tour on 8 April 1954. It was to report by 30 June 1955, a date extended to 30 September 1955.

What it said about Punjab

• The Shiromani Akali Dal's memorandum asked for a Punjabi-speaking State. As Gurmit Singh summarises it, the State would join the Punjabi-speaking areas of Punjab, PEPSU and Rajasthan, because Punjabi is a distinct language, recognised by the Constitution, with its own script, Gurmukhi.
• The report called the problem "sui generis", because the demand was "strongly opposed by large sections of people speaking the Punjabi language" in the proposed area (para 519), and said the language problem was "primarily one of scripts" (para 527).
• It found that the internal tension in the area "follows communal and not territorial lines" (para 537) and that the case for a Punjabi-speaking State "lacks the general support of the people inhabiting the area" (para 540). It noted that the Sikh side cited the recent SGPC election results as proof of backing, and said it would not judge the rival claims of popularity (paras 538 and 539).
• Instead it backed the bilingual arrangement of the Sachar-Gyani formula (para 533), the merger of PEPSU into Punjab (paras 546 to 552) and, against the dissent of its chairman, the merger of Himachal Pradesh with Punjab (paras 563 and 579).

The Sikh response: Master Tara Singh called the report a "decree of Sikh annihilation" and said that had there been no Sikhs, Punjabi would have had a State of its own (Gurmit Singh, vol. I, p. 118). A representative Sikh convention at Amritsar on 16 October 1955, with nearly 1,300 invitees, unanimously rejected the recommendations and accused the Commission of "undisguised bias" against Sikh claims, according to the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism.

What followed: the Akali Dal's first Punjabi Suba morcha, a disobedience movement against a ban on Punjabi Suba slogans, ran from 10 May to 12 July 1955, while the Commission was still at work (Gurmit Singh, vol. I, pp. 119 to 120). The States Reorganisation Act, 1956 (section 11) formed a new Punjab from the existing Punjab and PEPSU on 1 November 1956. The struggle went on through the morcha of 1960 to 1961, and the Punjabi-speaking State came into being on 1 November 1966.