Demand for Linguistic States: Reasons, Apprehensions & Resolution

The boundaries of provinces in pre-1947 India had been drawn in a haphazard manner as the British conquest of India had proceeded for nearly a hundred years. No heed was paid to linguistic or cultural cohesion so that most of the provinces were multilingual and multicultural.

The demand of linguistic provinces emerged because of following Reasons:

1. Language is closely related to culture and therefore to the customs of people.
2. The massive spread of education and growth of mass literacy can only occur through the medium of the mother tongue.
3. Democracy can become real to the common people only when politics and administration are conducted through the language they can understand.
4. During the national movement, Congress undertook political mobilization in the mother tongue and in 1921 amended its constitution and reorganized its regional branches on a linguistic basis.

However, soon after the independence, the national leadership was reluctant to reorganize Indian states on the basis of language due to the following Apprehensions:

1. Partition had created serious administrative, economic and political dislocation.
2. Independence, coming immediately after the War, was accompanied by serious law and order problems.
3. There was the vexed Kashmir problem and a war-like situation vis-a-vis Pakistan.
4. Immediately after independence, the most important task for the present was to consolidate national unity and any effort undertaken immediately to redraw the internal boundaries might dislocate administration and economic development, intensify regional and linguistic rivalries, unleash destructive forces, and damage the unity of the country.
5. S.K. Dar committee opined that such reorganization might threaten national unity and also be administratively inconvenient.
6. JVP committee advised against the creation of linguistic states for the time being, emphasizing on unity, national security and economic development as the needs of the hour.

Resolution

1. Due to the growing protest and after the death of freedom fighter Patti Sriramalu on the issue of creation of Andhra Pradesh, the national government conceded the demand for a separate state and Andhra.
2. Pradesh was created in 1953. To meet the demand halfway and to delay matters, Nehru appointed in August 1953 the States Reorganization Commission. SRC’s recommendations were accepted and were quickly implemented.
3. The States Reorganization Act was passed by parliament in November 1956. It provided for fourteen states and six centrally administered territories.

The reorganization of 1956 was followed by further creation of linguistic states like Maharashtra and Gujarat; Haryana and Punjab; some north-east states. While the linguistic criteria has no doubt fulfilled the aspirations of people and accommodated plurality of country, but has also has strengthened regionalism to some extent.

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