Indira Gandhi was bitterly opposed to the creation of Punjab on linguistic lines as she used to closely identify with her minority Hindu supporters in the state.
Barely six months before her assassination, the prime minister sought to assure the majority community that “if there is injustice to them or if they did not get their rights, then it would be dangerous to the integrity of the country.” (Cited by AG Noorani in Economic and Political Weekly on November 3, 1990)
Indira had just taken over as prime minister in March 1966 when a demand for creation of a Punjabi Suba was conceded. In her book, My Truth (Vision Books), published in 1980, Indira had recalled her concerns of 1965 when she was Minister for Information and Broadcasting in the Lal Bahadur Shastri cabinet and a committee under then Lok Sabha Speaker Sardar Hukum Singh had favoured the creation of Punjabi Suba.
Indira wrote that she was opposed to the formation of Punjab on the basis of language as it had let down Congress’ Hindu supporters. In her own words, “To concede the Akali demand would mean abandoning position to which it (Congress) was firmly committed and letting down its Hindu supporters in the projected Punjabi Suba…. This startling reversal of Congress police was totally unexpected.”
After the 1947 Partition of Punjab, Sikhs intensively demanded the formation of a Punjabi-speaking state, but the First Reorganisation of State Commission, 1956 under Justice Fazal Ali failed to address their concerns. Influential Akali leaders Fateh Singh and Tara Singh spearheaded a movement for a separate state in which Sikh religious, cultural and linguistic integrity could be preserved.
When the 1961 Census was conducted, Akali leadership alleged that an overwhelming number of Hindus listed Hindi as their mother tongue, just to stall the formation of a Punjabi-speaking state or prevent Sikhs who formed 58 percent of the population, to run the state. In 1966, Punjab was split into three states of Punjab, Haryana and Himachal Pradesh
