WAR OF WORDS-LANGUAGE AND THE LAND
It’s a war of words that began close to a century ago, and the debate is still alive today. Is language a binding force, or is it divisive? Does the sense of cultural identity it forges transcend national identity and secular ideals?
Gandhi believed the states should be carved on linguistic lines because language was the basis of identity. In a piece in The Times of India in 1947, which also appeared in ‘Harijan’, he wrote, “Without (linguistic) redistribution, it would be very difficult to enforce all teaching through provincial languages in our schools and colleges and it would not be easy to oust English from the position it unlawfully occupies today.”
The architect of the Constitution, B R Ambedkar, while advocating a separate Maharashtra with Bombay as the capital, wrote in The Times of India in 1953 that there should be “definite checks and balances to see that a communal majority does not abuse its power under the garb of a linguistic state”.
Jawaharlal Nehru and Vallabhbhai Patel stood strongly against linguistic divisions. They believed the nation had just been torn apart by religious differences and that the way forward was to promote secular ideas of peace and economic development. Multicultural, multilingual states would help build a united India.
Congress had committed to linguistic provinces in free India in the 1920s and, accordingly created Pradesh Congress Committees in different regions. But after Independence, there was hesitation, causing friction within and outside: Former Madras chief minister T Prakasam resigned from Congress over the demand for an Andhra state while C Rajagopalachari and RSS chief M S Gowalkar backed Nehru saying linguistic states would undermine unity.
In June 1948, the Constituent Assembly set up the Linguistic Provinces Commission with retired Allahabad high court judge S K Dhar, lawyer J N Lal and retired bureaucrat Panna Lall. The three travelled the country collecting evidence, holding public meetings and private interviews. They came to the conclusion that formation of provinces “on exclusively or even mainly linguistic considerations is not in the larger interests of the Indian nation”. Instead it recommended reorganization of Madras, Bombay and Central provinces and Berar on basis of geography and ease of administration.
But no one in the Congress liked the idea and Nehru, Patel and Congress president Pattabhi Sitaramayya formed the JVP committee to study the recommendations. They decided the time was not right for formation of new provinces, but added “if public sentiment is insistent and overwhelming, we, as democrats, have to submit to it, subject to certain limitations.”
In the end, language — and popular sentiment — prevailed, but only after Potti Sriramulu had fasted to death in 1952. Andhra was the first to be formed in 1953 and then the States Reorganisation Commission was set up to draw more such lines on the Indian map. But every time, the question that Patel asked at a public meeting in Ernakulam in 1950 arises: “Why should you have the idea that you are separate? We should cease thinking in terms of people of different states... instead, we should think that we are all Indians.”
