Gulzari Lal Nanda

Gulzari Lal Nanda was Union Home Minister from 1963 to 1966, a Congress leader who twice served as acting Prime Minister. Rediff says he was born on 4 July 1898 in what is now Pakistan and died at Ahmedabad on 15 January 1998, aged 99. He was Home Minister in Lal Bahadur Shastri's Cabinet, and after Shastri's death in January 1966 he joined Indira Gandhi's Cabinet.

For Sikhs he is the minister across the table in the Punjabi Suba talks of 1965 and 1966. The Sikh-side accounts are Gurmit Singh's History of Sikh Struggles, which reprints the documents, and Sardar Hukam Singh's own account. We found no statement of Nanda's own beyond what they quote.

Key moments

• 7 and 8 August 1965: Nanda took part in the talks between Sant Fateh Singh and Prime Minister Shastri, and met Sant Fateh Singh at Shastri's residence. In the record Gurmit Singh reprints, Nanda tells Shastri that the Sikh demand is constitutional and just and, told of sacrilege at the Golden Temple's sarovar, says he will take the matter up himself and dictates a note. Gurmit Singh says Nanda told the Sant that the Government was not afraid of Master Tara Singh's threats but had no faith in anything Master Tara Singh said, and reads this as a strategy to widen the rift between the two.
• 28 September 1965: Nanda announced in the Lok Sabha a Cabinet sub-committee of Indira Gandhi, Y. B. Chavan and Mahavir Tyagi and a Parliamentary Committee under the Speaker, Hukam Singh.
• Autumn 1965 to early 1966: Gurmit Singh writes that after the war with Pakistan Nanda, with the help of the Punjab Chief Minister, tried to torpedo the chances of a solution by making prejudicial speeches, and tried to reduce the committee's status by declaring that it was not a State Reorganisation Commission. Hukam Singh answered that it would report to Parliament, not to the Government, and the Home Minister, Gurmit Singh writes, ultimately yielded.
• Hukam Singh's own account says Shastri told him that Nanda had complained that he had proposed Hukam Singh as chairman believing Hukam Singh thought Punjabi suba would not help the Sikhs, but that Hukam Singh now seemed set on a report in its favour. Hukam Singh concluded that the Government meant to use him to get an adverse report and then reject the demand.
• 18 April 1966: Nanda told the Lok Sabha that the Government had decided to appoint a commission to examine the boundary between the Hindi and Punjabi regions of the state.
• 6 September 1966: on the Punjab Reorganisation Bill, Nanda told the Lok Sabha that the Government had accepted all the unanimous recommendations of the commission and that Chandigarh should be kept as a separate entity.

Remembered for: calling the Sikh demand constitutional and just in August 1965, then, in Gurmit Singh's account, working against the committee that examined it, and in 1966 announcing the boundary commission and presenting the bill that created the Punjabi-speaking state.