Punjabi Suba to Anandpur Sahib: The Promises, the Fasts and Punjab’s Fight for Its Own State, 1929–1982

Amritsar, October 1969. In a hospital bed lies a thin old man with a white beard who has not eaten since the middle of August. His name is Darshan Singh Pheruman, and he is in his eighties.

He has spent much of his life in jail for causes. In 1921 the British locked him up in the fight for the keys of the Golden Temple treasury. In 1924 he led a jatha into the Jaito agitation. Then came Gandhi’s campaigns, more jails, Quit India, and a seat in Parliament. Now he is starving himself for a city: Chandigarh.

He is also shaming his own side. Sant Fateh Singh, the leader of the Akali Dal, had vowed in 1966 to burn himself alive for Chandigarh, and then called it off. Pheruman accused him of breaking his ardas, a solemn vow made in prayer before the Guru, and announced a fast unto death of his own.

On 27 October 1969, the 74th day of his fast, he died. Chandigarh did not go to Punjab. Fifty-seven years later, it still has not.

Why would an old freedom fighter die for a city of concrete? The answer starts forty years earlier, with a promise made on the banks of the Ravi.

Lahore, December 1929. The Congress gathered by the Ravi and, on the last night of the year, Jawaharlal Nehru raised the tricolour for Purna Swaraj, complete independence.

At the same session the party made another vow. It assured the Sikhs, Muslims and other minorities that it would accept no future constitution unless it gave them ‘full satisfaction’. The Sikhs had just rejected the Nehru Report, and the Congress had dropped it. Sikh leaders took the pledge as a promise to their community.

The men who heard it belonged to the Akali Dal, born in 1920 to free the gurdwaras from corrupt mahants. Its rising leader was a schoolmaster from Rawalpindi district, born Nanak Chand into a Hindu family, who had become Tara Singh as a ninth-grader in 1902.

In July 1946, a year before independence, Nehru went further. He said the ‘brave Sikhs of Punjab’ were entitled to special consideration, and that he saw nothing wrong in an area and a set-up in the north where the Sikhs could ‘experience the glow of freedom’. Sikh leaders read it as a promise of self-rule inside India.

Then came Partition. The Sikhs lost Nankana Sahib, Guru Nanak’s birthplace, and the rich canal colonies their grandfathers had farmed. Master Tara Singh had fought the idea of Pakistan to the end. Afterwards, Sikh leaders said, Nehru told them circumstances had now changed.

New Delhi, 21 November 1949. In May the Sikh members had asked for minority safeguards or, if those were refused, arbitration, as the Congress had once assured them. Neither came.

Hukam Singh, a lawyer and Akali member, rose to speak for his community.

My community cannot subscribe its assent to this historic document.Hukam Singh, Constituent Assembly, 21 November 1949

Beside him sat Bhupinder Singh Mann, the other Akali member. The Sikhs of East Punjab, he told the house, could not give the Constitution unstinted support or full approval. When the members signed, neither man put his name to it. One clause in Article 25 still grates: for some laws on religious institutions, it counts Sikhs, Jains and Buddhists along with Hindus.

The majority saw it differently. After Partition, it argued, separate safeguards for religious communities had helped divide the country, and equal rights for every citizen were the safer guarantee. India became a republic on 26 January 1950. Many Sikhs felt a promise had been broken before the ink was dry.

In December 1952 a Gandhian named Potti Sriramulu died in Madras after fasting for more than 50 days for a Telugu-speaking state. Andhra was created within a year, and Delhi set up the States Reorganisation Commission, under Justice Fazl Ali, to redraw India by language.

The Akali Dal asked it in May 1954 for a Punjabi-speaking state, a Punjabi Suba. Congress members from the Hindi-speaking south-east asked for a separate Haryana. The Jana Sangh and many Hindu Congressmen wanted the opposite, a ‘Maha Punjab’ that would swallow PEPSU and Himachal as well.

The report came out in October 1955. Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam and Marathi speakers would get, or soon win, their states. Punjab would not. The commission said Punjabi was not distinct enough from Hindi, that the demand lacked support among the area’s Hindus, and that granting it would invite more such claims.

While others got States for their languages, we lost even our language.Hukam Singh, on the 1955 report

Master Tara Singh called the verdict a decree of Sikh annihilation. The Akalis said the truth was simpler: a Punjabi state would have been granted without a second thought if Sikhs were not going to be its majority.

Even before the report was out, the fight had come to Amritsar. Bhim Sen Sachar’s Congress government had banned a slogan, ‘Punjabi Suba Zindabad’. From 10 May 1955 the Akalis marched out of the Golden Temple complex in batches to shout it and be arrested. By the end of July somewhere between 12,000 and 21,000 Sikhs were in jail.

On the night of 4 July 1955, police under Deputy Inspector General Ashwini Kumar went into the complex itself. They arrested the granthis of the Harmandir Sahib and the Akal Takht, volunteers, even the cooks in the langar. Tear gas shells landed around the sarovar and damaged its edges. Among those taken that night was a jatha from Ganganagar led by a quiet preacher named Fateh Singh.

Within days the government backed down. The ban was lifted on 12 July, and Sachar went to the Akal Takht in person to apologise. His own party criticised him for it, and by January 1956 he was gone, replaced by the tougher Partap Singh Kairon.

In 1956 Delhi tried a compromise, the Regional Formula: one Punjab, with Punjabi and Hindi zones and committees for each. The Akalis accepted it. Then it was attacked from the other side.

In 1957 the Arya Samaj and the Jana Sangh launched an agitation to protect Hindi, and about 6,000 people were arrested. Akali accounts and later histories record cigarette packets thrown into the sarovar and torn pages of the Guru Granth Sahib scattered in the streets. Kairon used the uproar as a reason to delay the formula.

The sharpest fight was over a single column on a census form: mother tongue. In 1951, and again in 1961, the Arya Samaj urged Punjabi Hindus to write Hindi. Families who spoke Punjabi at home, in the market and at weddings put down Hindi on paper. The Akalis said a campaign had falsified the count. Its supporters said people had simply written down the language they chose.

Not every Hindu leader agreed. In 1960, at Jalandhar, the RSS chief M.S. Golwalkar was reported as saying that Punjabi was the mother tongue of every Punjabi, and Jana Sangh leaders could not get him to take it back. Nehru, in a 1961 note of his talks with Fateh Singh, called the Arya Samajists who had opposed Punjabi ‘very foolish and ignorant’, while still refusing the Suba.

In May 1960 the Akalis called for a march on Delhi. On the night of 24 May Master Tara Singh was arrested, and the morcha passed to the preacher who had been seized in the 1955 raid.

Fateh Singh, born in 1911 at Badiala near Bathinda, had no formal schooling and began learning to read Punjabi at 15. In the Ganganagar desert he helped build schools and colleges for village children.

For seven months the jathas went out. The government said about 30,000 people were jailed; the Akali Dal’s count for the whole movement is 57,129. On 18 December 1960 Fateh Singh began a fast unto death. He ended it on 9 January 1961, the 22nd day, after Nehru said Punjab was ‘broadly speaking a Punjabi Suba’ with Punjabi as its dominant language.

Then the old Master tried. On 15 August 1961 Tara Singh began his own fast unto death at the Golden Temple. On 1 October, the 48th day, after a letter from Nehru promising an inquiry into Sikh grievances, he took food. He had sworn an oath before the fast, and many Sikhs felt he had broken it.

The Panj Pyare, the Five Beloved who speak for the Panth, tried him. In late November 1961 they found him guilty and set his penance: extra prayers for a month, and five days of cleaning the shoes of the sangat and washing dishes in the langar. Punjab’s most famous Sikh politician did it.

The inquiry Nehru promised, under S.R. Das, reported in 1962. It found no discrimination against Sikhs, and called the Suba demand a camouflage for a Sikh state. By January 1965 Fateh Singh’s side had beaten Tara Singh’s in the gurdwara elections, 90 seats to 45. One lasting gain came out of these years: Punjabi University opened at Patiala in 1962.

On 16 August 1965, from the Akal Takht, Fateh Singh announced a fast from 10 September, and said he would burn himself alive if the Punjabi Suba was refused. Within weeks India and Pakistan were at war, and the tank battles were being fought in Punjab’s own fields at Asal Uttar and Khem Karan. On 9 September he postponed the fast.

On 23 September, the day after the ceasefire, the government set up a Cabinet committee and a parliamentary committee to look at the demand afresh.

The man chosen to chair the parliamentary committee was the Speaker of the Lok Sabha: Hukam Singh, who sixteen years earlier would not sign the Constitution. His committee received about 2,200 memoranda for a Punjabi-speaking state and 903 against. It handed in its report on 15 March 1966 and backed the demand.

The other side came out on the streets. In March 1966 the Jana Sangh led strikes and protests against the division. In Panipat, accounts of the agitation record, three Congress workers died when rioters set fire to the shop they were trapped in; one was an old associate of Bhagat Singh. The violence was called off on 18 March. The Jana Sangh’s Atal Bihari Vajpayee also dissented from the decision.

On 23 April 1966, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s government conceded the Punjabi Suba.

Punjab woke up smaller on 1 November 1966. Its Hindi-speaking south, from Hisar to Gurgaon, became the new state of Haryana; Kangra, Shimla and other hill areas went to Himachal Pradesh.

The boundary commission under Justice J.C. Shah used the 1961 census, the census of the mother-tongue war. Two of its members wanted Kharar tehsil, with Chandigarh in it, to go to Haryana. The third, Subimal Dutt, wrote that Kharar and Chandigarh could not be called Hindi-speaking. Delhi chose a third way: Chandigarh, built as Punjab’s capital on the land of Punjabi villages, became a union territory and the capital of both states.

And the rivers? Sections 78 to 80 of the Punjab Reorganisation Act kept the sharing of the Bhakra and Beas waters, and the boards that ran the dams and headworks, in the Centre’s hands. Punjab had its language state. It did not have its capital or control of its own rivers.

Haryana’s leaders told a different story about the same day. Their region, they said, had been Punjab’s neglected back yard ever since the British attached it to Punjab in 1858, as punishment for its part in the revolt of 1857. Prof Sher Singh and Chaudhary Devi Lal had raised the demand for Haryana in the Punjab Assembly as early as 1954. For Haryana, 1 November 1966 was a birthday, not a loss.

In December 1966 Fateh Singh began another fast, this time for Chandigarh and the Punjabi-speaking areas left out, with self-immolation fixed for 27 December. That day Hukam Singh told a huge congregation at the Golden Temple that Indira Gandhi had agreed to arbitrate and that Chandigarh belonged to Punjab. The fast ended. On 8 January 1967 Indira Gandhi said no assurance had been given on Chandigarh.

Master Tara Singh died in Chandigarh on 22 November 1967, aged 82. In August 1969 Darshan Singh Pheruman announced his fast. Punjab was then ruled by the Akali Dal itself, in a coalition with the Jana Sangh under Chief Minister Gurnam Singh, and it was under that government that he was arrested in Amritsar on 12 August. He died on 27 October.

Within three months Fateh Singh was fasting again, from 26 January 1970. On 29 January the Centre announced its award: Chandigarh would go to Punjab within five years, Haryana would get money to build a new capital, and Punjab would hand Haryana part of Fazilka tehsil, with Abohar and its cotton fields. Fateh Singh ended his fast the next day.

Neither half happened. The swap stalled over Abohar and Fazilka, and Chandigarh stayed a union territory. Fateh Singh retired in 1972 and died that October.

The Anandpur Sahib Resolution was born out of a defeat. In the March 1972 election the Akalis won just 24 of 117 seats, and Giani Zail Singh’s Congress took Punjab. On 11 December 1972 the party set up a 12-member committee, among them Surjit Singh Barnala and Gurcharan Singh Tohra, to restate what it stood for. According to the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism, the Sikh scholar Sirdar Kapur Singh advised it.

On 16 and 17 October 1973 the working committee met at Anandpur Sahib, where Guru Gobind Singh created the Khalsa, and adopted the document unanimously. The Tribune called a conference to promote it at Malerkotla that November a flop.

Its preamble calls the Sikhs a historically recognised political nation since 1699. Its stated aim is the ‘pre-eminence of the Khalsa’, through ‘a geographical entity and a constitutional set-up of its own’. In practice it asked for an autonomous region in the north, taking in Chandigarh and the Punjabi-speaking areas left out in 1966, in which the Centre kept only foreign relations, defence, currency and general communications. Other versions list railways and the post too.

It was also a social programme: an end to caste discrimination, a ban on liquor and drugs, minimum wages, pensions for the old, and access to Nankana Sahib and the other gurdwaras left in Pakistan.

On 25 June 1975 Indira Gandhi declared the Emergency. Opposition leaders across India were jailed, newspapers were censored, and much of the country went quiet.

Punjab did not. Parkash Singh Badal later told The Tribune that the Akalis were assured they could ‘rule’ Punjab if they stayed silent, and that they refused. In July 1975 the Akali Dal launched a morcha from the Akal Takht to ‘save democracy’. Every day a jatha gathered at the Darbar Sahib, received siropas, said an ardas and marched off to court arrest. With the party president Mohan Singh Tur jailed, Harchand Singh Longowal ran it.

The morcha lasted the whole 21 months, and the historian J.S. Grewal puts the number of Akalis arrested at nearly 40,000. In the middle of it, on 24 March 1976, the Centre issued an order dividing Punjab’s river water with Haryana. Remember that order.

In 1977, after the Emergency, the Akalis came back to power under Badal. At Ludhiana on 28 and 29 October 1978 the 18th All-India Akali Conference, chaired by Jagdev Singh Talwandi, endorsed the resolution in twelve parts. The first, moved by Tohra and endorsed by Badal, asked for real federalism for every state, pointing to the Emergency as proof of what an all-powerful Centre could do. The second listed Punjab’s claims: Chandigarh, the Punjabi-speaking areas, control of the headworks, and a revision of the river waters award.

By the early 1980s three versions were in circulation, and each politician quoted the one that suited him. Talwandi’s rival faction put out a sharper one in 1981; in 1982 Longowal authenticated another.

Indira Gandhi’s government called the resolution secessionist. In July 1984 its White Paper on the Punjab agitation put it at the centre of the case against the Akalis. Critics pointed to its words about a Sikh nation and ‘a constitutional set-up of its own’, and asked what else they could mean.

Even some who doubted the government agreed. On 26 July 1984 an editorial by Girilal Jain, then editor of The Times of India, accepted the Prime Minister’s view that the resolution was ‘secessionist both in its inspiration and language’, while attacking the White Paper for hiding the story of the failed talks.

The Akalis read it the other way, as a charter for a federal India. The 1978 version asked for autonomy for every state, not only Punjab, and the Centre kept defence and foreign affairs. In 1985 R.S. Narula, a retired Chief Justice of the Punjab and Haryana High Court, answered the charge of secession point by point.

The Sikhs have no designs to get away from India in any manner.Harchand Singh Longowal, Akali Dal president

Historians add a third reading. Robin Jeffrey argues the autonomy and nationhood language was probably a bargaining chip to revive a beaten party. The 1985 Rajiv–Longowal accord recorded the Akalis’ position that the resolution was within the Constitution and sent its Centre–state part to the Sarkaria Commission, set up in 1983 to study exactly those questions for all of India.

Punjab means five waters, and since 1947 it has kept three: the Sutlej, the Beas and the Ravi. A 1955 agreement split their spare water, 15.85 million acre-feet a year: undivided Punjab 7.2, Rajasthan 8, Jammu and Kashmir 0.65. The 1960 Indus Waters Treaty gave India full use of these rivers.

After 1966 Haryana wanted its share. When the two states could not agree, the Centre used Section 78 of the Reorganisation Act. Its order of 24 March 1976, during the Emergency, gave Haryana 3.5 million acre-feet out of Punjab’s 7.2. To carry it, a canal would run about 214 km from the Sutlej to the Yamuna: the Sutlej–Yamuna Link, or SYL. Haryana started digging its stretch that October.

Here the Akalis’ own record gets awkward. Badal’s Akali government issued notices to acquire land for the canal on 20 February 1978 and accepted Rs 1 crore from Haryana towards it. Only in July 1979 did it go to the Supreme Court against the 1976 order. Haryana finished its own stretch by June 1980.

In February 1980 Indira Gandhi, back in power, dismissed the Akali government. On 31 December 1981, with the water recounted at 17.17 million acre-feet, the chief ministers of Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan, Darbara Singh, Bhajan Lal and Shiv Charan Mathur, signed an agreement brokered by Indira Gandhi: Punjab 4.22, Haryana 3.5, Rajasthan 8.6, Delhi 0.2, Jammu and Kashmir 0.65. Both states withdrew their cases. Punjab was to finish its stretch by the end of 1983.

On 8 April 1982, at Kapoori village in Patiala district, near the Haryana border, Indira Gandhi ceremonially broke ground for Punjab’s stretch of the canal.

The Akalis began a morcha at Kapoori under Longowal. Punjab’s farmers saw their water flowing away; Haryana’s farmers saw water they had been promised for six years. On 4 August 1982 the Akali Dal folded the Kapoori protest into a far bigger campaign for all the Anandpur Sahib demands, the Dharam Yudh Morcha, with Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale beside them.

Everything that followed, the morcha, Blue Star and November 1984, is told in our long read Punjab 1984. The 1985 Rajiv–Longowal accord promised Chandigarh to Punjab again, and a tribunal for the water. In 2004 Punjab’s Assembly tore up its water agreements; in 2016 the Supreme Court struck that law down. In August 2026 the Attorney General told the court that the two states were moving closer to a deal. The canal is still not finished.

This is a story of promises: one made by the Ravi in 1929, one in a speech in 1946, one by a Speaker at the Golden Temple in 1966, one in an award in 1970. None was kept in full.

It is also a story with no clean side. Governments jailed tens of thousands for asking for what other languages got. Arya Samaj leaders asked neighbours to disown the tongue they spoke at home, and in 1966 rioters set fire to a shop with three men inside. Akali leaders broke their own vows, and an Akali government took Haryana’s money for the canal it later fought. And there were people who did right on every side: a Hindu-born Master who cleaned the sangat’s shoes when the Panth told him to, a Congress chief minister who apologised at the Akal Takht and lost his job for it, an RSS chief who said Punjabi belonged to every Punjabi, and Darshan Singh Pheruman, who kept his vow to the end.

Chandigarh is still a union territory and the SYL is still dry in Punjab. The questions this story asks, about language, faith, rivers and how much power Delhi should hold, are not history yet.