Surendra Nath Dwivedy

Surendra Nath Dwivedy was an Odisha politician and journalist who sat in Parliament for more than twenty years. Wikipedia gives his birth as 11 February 1913 at Khandasahi, near Cuttack, and his death at Rourkela on 1 October 2001. A website devoted to him says he left school in 1930 to join the Civil Disobedience Movement and was a Congress and then a Congress Socialist Party man. Wikipedia says he led the Praja Socialist Party in Parliament from 1962 to 1970, sat in the Rajya Sabha from 1952 to 1956 and in the Lok Sabha for Kendrapara from 1957, and was Governor of Arunachal Pradesh from 1991 to 1993.

In 1965 and 1966 he was one of the Lok Sabha members of the Parliamentary Committee on the Demand for Punjabi Suba, the 22-member committee chaired by the Speaker, Sardar Hukam Singh. The committee reported on 15 March 1966 and recommended that the Punjab be reorganised on a linguistic basis: a Punjabi-speaking state, a Haryana state and the merger of the hill areas with Himachal Pradesh. Dwivedy added a note of his own to the report.

What his note says (March 1966)

• He was in general agreement with the recommendations, but would have liked the committee to say clearly and categorically that a Haryana Prant should be formed, and to recommend a time limit for finishing the reorganisation.
• He strongly deprecated and deplored the Government's attitude after the committee was formed: a regular pressure tactic to make it subordinate to the Government, and a hue and cry to create hostility towards it. He called the Congress Working Committee's own sub-committee on the question a deliberate attempt to bypass the committee, and held that its vague declaration was largely responsible for the unfortunate incidents in Punjab and Delhi afterwards.
• He wrote that he saw no alternative to a full-fledged Punjabi-speaking state, and called the case on the merits irrefutable, on par with other linguistic states. He rejected the idea of three zones under a common Governor, saying the Praja Socialist Party had been the first to suggest something like it, ten years earlier in its memorandum to the States Reorganisation Commission, and the Government had not accepted it then.
• He wrote that Master Tara Singh's leadership had been repudiated by the Sikh masses, and pointed to the conduct of the Sikh peasantry on the Indo-Pakistan border in the recent war as proof of their loyalty; opposing a Punjabi-speaking state on the ground that it was communal or secessionist was, he wrote, a slur on their patriotism.
• He recommended carving out the Punjabi-speaking state before the next general elections, with an expert boundary commission to fix its exact boundaries.

What he is remembered for. In this record he is the socialist member from outside Punjab who backed the demand on its merits in the committee's report and protested against the Government's handling of the committee. The sources found here say nothing of his later part in the reorganisation.