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speaking state. The Hindu organizations in Punjab opposed the Sikh demand by
disowning Punjabi as their mother tongue and registering Hindi to be their language
instead. The idea was to give a majority to the Hindi speaking people in the
state. Nehru told the Parliament that he would not concede the Sikh demand even if
the Sikhs launched a civil war. Nehru had become the Prime Minister, as Gandhi’s
protegee, by skillfully employing his nationalistic charisma. Once in power,
he viewed himself as the last British viceroy and ruled India in the authoritarian
tradition with no patience for the politics of ‘small-loyalties’. 44
Nehru died in May 1964, two years after India’s humiliating military defeat at
the hands of the Chinese. The Congress chief minister of Punjab, Pratap Singh
Kairon, who was also a staunch critic of the Sikh agitation, resigned from office a
month later when a commission of inquiry indicted him on charges of corruption.
Eight months later, Kairon fell to the bullets of an unidentified assassin when he
was traveling from Delhi to Chandigarh in his car. 45
An imminent war with Pakistan in 1965 made the Central government conscious
of the fact that the Sikh soldiers were disaffected by its antagonistic relations
with the Sikh leaders. To buy their cooperation, it promised that it would soon
create a Punjabi speaking state.
At the end of the war, the government separated the Hindi speaking areas of the
province to come under a new state of Haryana. Himachal Pradesh took the hilly
regions of Punjab on the foothills of the Shivalik range. Chandigarh became a Union
territory and the joint capital for the new states of Punjab and Haryana. The State of
Punjab with an area of 50, 255 sq. kilometers, created in September 1966, had a
population of 14 million out of which 55.48 per cent were Sikhs.
Before 1947, Sikhs had formed 15 per cent of the total population of undivided
Punjab against 55 per cent of Muslims and 30 per cent of Hindus. Forced migration
of Muslims from east Punjab to Pakistan and the influx of Sikh refugees from west
Punjab changed the demographic character of the state after the Partition. They
comprised of 40 per cent of the population in the Indian Punjab. With the creation
of a Punjabi speaking state, their number rose to roughly 60 per cent. If the government
had honestly applied the criterion of linguistic homogeneity to reorganize
Punjab, the population of the new Punjab would have remained predominantly Hindu.
Many districts of Punjab like Ambala and Karnal, which went to Haryana, and the
hilly sub-division of Hoshiarpur and Gurdaspur districts, which were taken over by
Himachal Pradesh, were Punjabi speaking. However, the Hindu organizations had
campaigned from 1951 onwards and had succeeded in persuading most Punjabi
speaking Hindus to register their mother tongue as Hindi. It was this mischief that
now boomeranged on them. The linguistic reorganization of the state became its
communal truncation. In the democratic game of numbers, the Sikh position in
Punjab appeared to have become viable for the first time. 46 Instead of reconciling
themselves, the Hindu political groups led by the Jana Sangh, which is now known
as the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), chose to agitate against the formation of the
Punjabi speaking state. Yagya Dutt Sharma, a prominent Jana Sangh leader from
44
Stanley Wolpert, Nehru: A Tryst with Destiny, Booknotes Transcript, -
http://www.booknotes.org/transcripts/50133.htm page 11 of 21.
45
Ram Narayan Kumar & Georg Sieberer, The Sikh Struggle: Origin, Evolution and Present Phase,
Chanakya Publications, Delhi, 1991, pp. 177-183.
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