The Punjabi Suba and the Reorganisation of 1966

What was left after 1947

Partition cut the Punjab in half and moved most of its Sikhs east into a truncated Indian Punjab, where they were a large minority in a state that also contained Hindi-speaking, Hindu-majority districts to the south and east.

Every other major linguistic community in India was, through the 1950s, getting a state of its own. The States Reorganisation Commission of 1955 redrew most of the map on language — and declined to do it in the Punjab.

Nineteen years

The demand for a Punjabi Suba, a Punjabi-speaking state, was pressed mainly by the Akali Dal — the party that had come out of the Gurdwara Reform movement forty years earlier. The methods were the ones that movement had used: mass agitation, courting arrest in numbers, and hunger strikes by leaders including Master Tara Singh and Sant Fateh Singh.^1,3

The central government’s resistance rested on an argument that the demand was religious rather than linguistic — a Sikh state asked for in a language the constitution would permit. The argument was not baseless: the Akali Dal was a Sikh party and the state that resulted did have a Sikh majority.

Nor was it straightforward. The 1961 census recorded large numbers of Punjabi-speaking Hindus in the region returning Hindi as their mother tongue, on the urging of organisations that opposed the redrawing — which meant the linguistic case was being undercut by people declaring a language they did not speak at home.^1,2

The Act

The Punjab Reorganisation Act was passed on 18 September 1966 and took effect on 1 November. Punjab kept the Punjabi-speaking districts. The Hindi-speaking southern districts became the new state of Haryana. Some hill territory went to Himachal Pradesh.^1,3

Chandigarh — the new capital designed to replace the Lahore that Partition had taken — was made a union territory and the shared capital of both states, belonging to neither.

What was settled and what was not

For the first time since the fall of the Sikh Empire in 1849, there was a political unit in which Sikhs were a majority. That is the substance of what was won, and it is not small.

Almost everything around it was left open. Chandigarh’s status was framed as temporary and has never been resolved. The allocation of river waters between Punjab and its neighbours was not settled by the Act and has been in dispute ever since. Punjabi-speaking areas that the Akali Dal argued should have come to Punjab did not.

Those unresolved questions are the substance of the Anandpur Sahib Resolution the Akali Dal adopted in 1973, and of the agitation of the early 1980s — which is the road that leads to 1984.