K. M. Panikkar

Kavalam Madhava Panikkar (3 June 1895 to 10 December 1963) was a historian, journalist and diplomat born in Travancore. For the Panth he matters in two places: his service in Patiala, the leading Sikh princely state, and his seat on the States Reorganisation Commission, whose 1955 report refused a Punjabi-speaking state.

Career. He studied at Madras Christian College and Christ Church, Oxford, taught at Aligarh Muslim University and the University of Calcutta, and was editor of the Hindustan Times from 1925. For about twenty years he served the princely states, as secretary to the chancellor of the Chamber of Princes and as foreign minister of Patiala and of Bikaner, and he became Dewan of Bikaner in 1944. He wrote The Indian Princes in Council, an account of the chancellorship of the Maharaja of Patiala, Bhupinder Singh, in 1926 to 1931 and 1933 to 1936. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism records that Bhupinder Singh was elected Chancellor of the Chamber ten times. After 1947 Panikkar was India's ambassador to China (1950 to 1952), then to Egypt and France, and a Vice-Chancellor of Kashmir and Mysore universities.

The States Reorganisation Commission. The Government of India appointed the Commission on 29 December 1953. Its members were Saiyid Fazl Ali (chairman), Hriday Nath Kunzru and Panikkar, and the report is dated 30 September 1955. On the Punjab it said that a Punjabi-speaking state would not solve the language problem, that the tension in the area followed communal and not territorial lines, and that the case for such a state lacked the general support of the people. It proposed instead to merge the Punjab, PEPSU and Himachal Pradesh into one state. Panikkar's own separate note in the report concerned Uttar Pradesh, not the Punjab.

The Sikh answer. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism records that on 16 October 1955 a representative Sikh convention at Amritsar, with nearly 1,300 invitees, rejected the Commission's recommendations and authorised Master Tara Singh to pursue the Sikh grievance.

Key moments

• 1925: becomes editor of the Hindustan Times.
• 29 December 1953: the Commission is appointed.
• 30 September 1955: the report is signed.
• 16 October 1955: the Sikh convention at Amritsar rejects its Punjab recommendations.
• 1 November 1966: the Punjabi-speaking state the Commission refused comes into being.

What he is remembered for. Mainly as an Indian diplomat and historian. In the Panth's record he is one of the three members of the Commission whose report denied the Punjabi Suba in 1955, a refusal the Akali morchas contested until the state was formed in 1966.