Crystallization of the Demand for ‘Punjabi Suba’

With no political safeguards in the Indian Constitution, Master Tara Singh was convinced that ‘Punjabi Suba’ was the only alternative left for the Sikhs. In March 1950, he asked the Akali legislators to resign from the Congress legislative party. On Sardar Patel’s bidding, Baldev Singh managed to persuade the Akali legislators not to resign. In September 1951, Nehru declared an all-out war on what he termed ‘communalism’. In January 1952, he declared that he would use the might of the Indian state to suppress the demand for a Punjabi-speaking state. He felt gratified that the Congress had ‘curbed Sikh and Hindu Communalism’ in the general elections of 1952. Sardar Hukam Singh, President of the Akali Dal, attributed its defeat to the division between the Sikhs and the Hindus ‘engineered’ by the Congress. Formation of the Punjabi-speaking province, he said, was ‘the most fundamental demand of the Sikhs’.