Surjit Singh Majithia

Sardar Surjit Singh Majithia was a Congress politician and diplomat. The website All About Sikhs says he was born on 8 August 1912, studied at Khalsa College, Amritsar, served in the Indian Air Force and became a member of the Central Legislative Assembly in 1945. It says he was India's ambassador to Nepal from 1947 to 1949, won a Lok Sabha seat in 1952, 1957 and 1962, served as deputy defence minister from 1952 to 1962, and became president of Khalsa College, Amritsar, in 1944, holding the post for more than three decades. Wikipedia names Tarn Taran as his constituency and gives his death as 27 September 1995. The same sources name his father as Sir Sundar Singh Majithia, who the website says was a member of the Imperial Council and later a minister in the Punjab government.

In 1965 and 1966 he was one of the Lok Sabha members of the Parliamentary Committee on the Demand for Punjabi Suba, chaired by Sardar Hukam Singh. The committee reported on 15 March 1966.

Key moments

• 17 March 1966: in a note to the report he agrees with the conclusion in paragraph 69 that the present State of Punjab be reorganised on a linguistic basis. He adds that the reorganisation should not "open the flood gates" for changing the boundaries of adjoining states that have enjoyed stable administration. His example is Rajasthan, formed seventeen years earlier mainly by merging former princely states, which he says should not be disturbed by loss or addition of territory as a result of dividing Punjab.
• The committee's own paragraph 71 says that adding parts of Rajasthan to the new Punjabi state or to Haryana was beyond its competence, and that it did not examine the question.

What he is remembered for. He was a Congress parliamentarian and former minister who backed the committee's conclusion while putting one reservation about other states' boundaries on the record. The sources found here say little of his own views on the Punjabi Suba demand beyond this note.