States reorganisation & the federal evolution
Traces India's linguistic reorganisation from the Dhar and JVP Committees to the SRC of 1955 and the federal balance under Articles 1-4.
The Constituent Assembly's Caution
The Indian National Congress had endorsed linguistic provinces since its Nagpur session of 1920, and the party reorganised its own provincial committees on a language basis. Yet at the moment of independence the leadership recoiled. The trauma of Partition made the architects of the Republic fear that drawing fresh internal boundaries on the emotive criterion of language would fracture a fragile nation. Accordingly the Constituent Assembly appointed the Linguistic Provinces Commission under S.K. Dhar in June 1948. The Dhar Commission reported in December 1948 against language as the basis of reorganisation, recommending instead administrative convenience, geographical contiguity, financial viability and capacity for development.
The JVP Committee and the Andhra Catalyst
To address the resulting disquiet the Congress constituted the JVP Committee in December 1948, named for Jawaharlal Nehru, Vallabhbhai Patel and Pattabhi Sitaramayya. Reporting in April 1949, it too rejected language as the governing principle, conceding only that public sentiment might be accommodated if it were overwhelming. The decisive rupture came from the Telugu-speaking districts of Madras. The Gandhian leader Potti Sriramulu undertook a fast unto death for a separate Andhra and died on 15 December 1952 after 56 days. The agitation that followed compelled Nehru to announce the creation of Andhra State on 1 October 1953, the first state carved out on a purely linguistic basis. Andhra became the precedent that the government had hoped to avoid, and it made comprehensive reorganisation politically unavoidable.
The States Reorganisation Commission of 1953
In December 1953 the Union appointed the States Reorganisation Commission (SRC) chaired by Fazl Ali, with H.N. Kunzru and K.M. Panikkar as members. Its report, submitted on 30 September 1955, accepted language and culture as a major basis while rejecting the principle of "one language, one state" and weighing national unity, financial and administrative considerations alongside it. Parliament enacted the States Reorganisation Act, 1956, and the Seventh Constitutional Amendment, 1956, which abolished the fourfold classification of Part A, B, C and D states inherited from 1950 and reconstituted India into 14 states and 6 union territories with effect from 1 November 1956. The settlement was not final: the bilingual State of Bombay was split into Maharashtra and Gujarat on 1 May 1960 after the Samyukta Maharashtra and Mahagujarat movements, and Punjab was bifurcated into Punjab and Haryana on 1 November 1966 following the Punjabi Suba agitation, with the Shah Commission demarcating boundaries. Reorganisation thus shifted from a feared threat to the routine instrument by which the Indian Union has continuously remade itself.