By December 3, 1952, the telegrams reaching Jawaharlal Nehru had become frantic. Potti Sriramulu was on the 46th day of a fast unto death. He wanted a state for the Telugu-speaking districts of Madras. Nehru told Chief Minister C Rajagopalachari that he was “totally unmoved” and would ignore the fast.

The telegrams kept coming. Madras Governor Sri Prakasa warned of the consequences if Sriramulu died. Union Labour Minister VV Giri said delays would deepen bitterness in Andhra. Nehru’s own words soon revealed his unease: the Andhra dispute had become a “festering sore”.

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On December 9, Nehru told the Council of States that the government was prepared to create Andhra from the uncontested Telugu-speaking areas, excluding Madras city. Six days later, Sriramulu died on the 58th day of his fast. Hartals and violence followed. Nehru recorded disturbances at Vijayawada railway station; Parliament received notices of damage to railway property, disrupted communications and some police action.

In a letter to Rajaji the day after, Nehru maintained that the proposed step followed his December 9 statement and was not prompted by the death. Speaking in Parliament, however, he recognised what the country had seen: the Andhra question had become “entangled with the self-sacrifice” of Sriramulu. By December 20, the hesitation in his letters had given way to haste. The government had taken its first definite step towards Andhra, he told Rajaji, and the sooner it was completed, the better.

In 17 days, Nehru’s refusal to be spurred by the fast had become an insistence on speed. The Union government was forced to face a question it had postponed since Independence. Would states built around language pull India apart, or would the refusal to create them provoke greater unrest?

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The Congress had not always feared the answer. In Nagpur in 1920, it reorganised its provincial committees along linguistic lines. Campaigning in languages people spoke helped it become a mass movement. Gandhi supported linguistic provinces, though he warned against weakening Indian unity. Then came Partition. Princely States had only been integrated. The government feared that a province with a dominant language might begin to see itself as a nation. In 1948, the Linguistic Provinces Commission, led by Justice SK Dar, advised against reorganising provinces primarily by language. A year later, the JVP Committee of Nehru, Vallabhbhai Patel and Pattabhi Sitaramayya recommended postponement, while accepting that insistent public sentiment might prevail. The Constituent Assembly had already ensured that India’s internal borders would not be permanent. Members debated whether Parliament should need a state’s consent before changing its name, area or boundary. Article 3 required the state legislature to be consulted but gave it no veto. Parliament had the power to redraw the map.

Once Andhra state was created on October 1, 1953, demands from Marathi, Kannada and Malayalam speakers could no longer be dismissed. Nehru asked Justice Fazl Ali to chair the States Reorganisation Commission. The assignment, he wrote, might involve “the drawing up of a new map of India”. HN Kunzru and KM Panikkar joined Fazl Ali. The three commissioners spent two years listening to competing versions of the map. Even after the deadline, memoranda, resolutions and telegrams kept arriving. The Commission received 1,52,250 documents, travelled over 38,000 miles and interviewed over 9,000 people.

Their report explained why language could no longer be ignored. Universal adult franchise required the government to work in languages voters understood. In multilingual provinces, communities also suspected one another of monopolising public jobs, development funds and political power. The commissioners stopped short of treating language as the only test. A new state also needed revenue, administrative capacity and safeguards for minorities. They warned that if a linguistic state were treated as the exclusive homeland of its largest community, people speaking other languages could be reduced to “alien settlers”. A state could conduct business in the regional language without treating some residents as guests.

Bombay showed how difficult that balance would be. In his 1948 memorandum, Maharashtra as a Linguistic Province, BR Ambedkar supported a united Maharashtra with Bombay as its capital. On the city’s Gujarati commercial interests, he borrowed Lord Birkenhead’s reply to Irish leader John Redmond: there were cases where “a minority is a majority”. By 1955, however, Ambedkar had changed his proposal — he now favoured several Marathi-speaking states and a separate city-state centred on Bombay.

The quarrel spilt out of the meeting rooms into the streets. The Samyukta Maharashtra movement claimed Bombay for Maharashtra; the Mahagujarat movement pressed the Gujarati claim. CD Deshmukh resigned as Nehru’s Finance Minister over provisions concerning Bombay in the States Reorganisation Bill. By February 1956, even Nehru’s language had changed. He wrote of of Bombay “wounding itself”. The question was no longer simply where the city would fall on the map, but whether its people could live together after the line had been drawn.

When the States Reorganisation Act and the Constitution’s Seventh Amendment came into force on November 1, 1956, India had 14 states and six UTs. Marathi- and Gujarati-speaking regions were placed together in an enlarged bilingual Bombay state.

The arrangement was soon tested. After the 1957 election, Nehru told Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit that Congress had been “very badly beaten” in Maharashtra proper and much of Gujarat. The leadership had believed that the bilingual state was broadly acceptable. The results in Maharashtra and much of Gujarat showed otherwise. In 1960, Parliament returned to the map, creating Maharashtra and Gujarat. This August 31 marked 70 years since the Act received presidential assent.

Sriramulu did not live to see Andhra appear on the map. The Parliament would draw some lines drawn in 1956 again. India’s leaders had feared that linguistic states would pull the country apart. Instead, the map gave its diversity room to breathe.

The writer is a constitutional lawyer