M.S. Aney

Madhav Shrihari Aney, known as Dr M.S. Aney, was a veteran Congress leader from Berar who became a champion of smaller States, above all of a separate Vidarbha. He sat on the Parliamentary Committee on the Demand for Punjabi Suba of 1965 to 1966, and his note is the first of those added to its report.

Wikipedia gives his birth in 1880 at Wani in Berar and his death on 26 January 1968. It says he joined the Congress in 1924, sat on the Viceroy's Executive Council from 1941 to 1943, was High Commissioner to Ceylon until 1947, and was Governor of Bihar from 12 January 1948 to 14 June 1952. He led the Vidarbha statehood movement from 1954 and sat in the Lok Sabha for Nagpur, winning a by-election in 1959 and the seat again in 1962 as a candidate of the Nag Vidarbha Andolan Samiti. The committee's report lists him among its Lok Sabha members.

His note. The note is dated 15 March 1966, the day the report was adopted, and runs from page 29 to page 31 of the report. In it he wrote:

• He gave full support to the conclusions in paragraph 69 of the report.
• He wanted to clarify the position of the Government of India on the principle of linguistic provinces. The report, in paragraph 16, quoted the Congress committee of Jawaharlal Nehru, Vallabhbhai Patel and Pattabhi Sitaramayya, the J.V.P. Committee of 1948. He wrote that the extracts quoted did not show how strongly that committee had opposed the linguistic principle, and he reproduced a passage of the States Reorganisation Commission's report that called language a separating as well as a binding force.
• He recalled that the J.V.P. Committee had said that if public sentiment was insistent and overwhelming, democrats had to submit to it, and that it had said the districts of Vidarbha could not be merged in Maharashtra unless they themselves wished it, which he called the Magna Carta of the people of Vidarbha.
• Judging by the evidence before the committee, he wrote, the Punjabi Suba demand had the support of a very great majority of the people of Punjab, and a Punjabi Suba, Haryana and Himachal Pradesh was the only co-operative solution.
• He wrote that large and unwieldy States were a growing source of discontent, that creating three small States would be a good start, and that the Government should consider the reorganisation of the States once more, naming Vidarbha, the merger of Goa and the boundary between Maharashtra and Karnataka.

What he is remembered for. In the story of Punjabi Suba he is the committee member who used his note to say that smaller States were welcome and that the Government should reconsider other reorganisations, naming Vidarbha, Goa and the Maharashtra-Karnataka boundary.