THE REPUBLICNehru was the prime minister, resulted in solid Congress majorities at the
centre and in all states with the exception of a 1957 Communist victory in
Kerala, where Chief Minister E.M.S.Namboodiripad launched a land
reform programme and a reform of the educational system; he was soon
removed with the instrument of President’s Rule. In those years elections to
the state assemblies and to the central Lok Sabha were held simultaneously.
This demanded a particular blend of local and national issues in the
election campaigns; the candidates for the assembly seats who were
naturally closer to the people often carried the Lok Sabha candidate along
on their bandwagon.
The ubiquitous Congress easily supported the federal structure of India.
There were only some dissenting voices in the South, where the people who
were not satisfied with the old administrative boundaries drawn by the
British wanted to have them redrawn along linguistic lines. The first unit to
be affected was the giant Madras Presidency, which encompassed speakers
of all the four Dravidian languages. The Telugu-speaking Andhras were the
first to campaign for a state of their own. Their linguistic movement was of
long standing and an Andhra University had been established already
under British rule. Gandhi had recognised their claim when he redrafted
the Congress constitution in 1920, which also made provision for new
Provincial Congress Committees such as the Andhra PCC, the Tamil Nadu
PCC and the Karnataka PCC. But the experience of partition and the
spectre of ‘Plan Balkan’ had made Nehru very nervous about such
subdivisions and he had at first resisted all attempts to redraw boundaries.
He had to yield to the Andhras when, after a long fast, one of their leaders
died in 1953. A States Reorganisation Commission was then appointed
and subsequently more linguistic states were established according to its
recommendations. One of the most problematic constructions of this kind
was the new state of Kerala, which was composed of all Malayalam-
speaking districts, some of which had belonged to the princely states of
Travancore and Cochin and some to the Madras Presidency.
A much thornier problem than that of the division of the old Madras
Presidency was the carving up of the Bombay Presidency, although this
seemed to be easier at first sight because there were only two clearcut units
left: Gujarat and Maharashtra. The difficulty was that Bombay City was
geographically part of Maharashtra but that its industry and trade were in
the hands of Gujaratis. For this reason Gandhi had made provision for a
special Bombay City PCC in addition to the Gujarat and Maharashtra PCCs.
This could have served as a precedent for establishing a city state, like
Hamburg in Germany, but Nehru did not think of such a solution and
stoutly resisted the division of the Bombay Presidency until a militant
regional party, Samyukta Maharashtra Samiti (United Maharashtra Society),
threatened to dislodge the Congress there. Finally, the division was made in
1960 and Bombay became the capital of Maharashtra. The regional party