the Constitution, as it allowed arbitrary and unequal treatment of similar offenses. Indian courts still apply the test of reasonable classification under Article 14 that this judgment helped establish.

 f the Constitution, as it allowed arbitrary and unequal treatment of similar offenses. Indian courts still apply the test of reasonable classification under Article 14 that this judgment helped establish.

A dissenting opinion is read by lawyers. It does not draw a map. How, then, did this same judge come to draw the boundaries that every Indian now lives inside? Then came Potti Sreeramulu, whose fast for a separate Telugu state ended in his death on 15 December 1952. The unrest that followed forced Jawaharlal Nehru's government to concede what two earlier bodies, the Dhar Commission of 1948 and the Nehru-Patel-Sitaramayya committee of 1949, had both refused, i.e., a reorganisation of India along linguistic lines. In December 1953, a commission was formed under Fazl Ali, by then Governor of Odisha, with the historian-diplomat K.M. Panikkar and the veteran liberal parliamentarian H.N. Kunzru as members. For almost two years they toured the country, took evidence region by region and read memoranda from parties, princes and peasants. They weighed every demand against four tests - national unity and security, linguistic and cultural homogeneity, financial and administrative viability, and the welfare of the people in each proposed state. The Commission submitted its report on 30 September 1955. The report said that it was guided by the principle that "the unity of India must be regarded as the paramount consideration," and refused to accept one language, one state as an absolute rule. Not every line Fazl Ali drew survived contact with politics though. He wanted to keep Maharashtra and Gujarat together as a single bilingual Bombay state, a plan that satisfied neither Marathi nor Gujarati speakers and did not survive the decade. The state was split into Maharashtra and Gujarat in 1960. The commission had recommended sixteen states and three union territories. Parliament's States Reorganisation Act of November 1956 settled instead for fourteen states and six territories. But the template was kept as it was. Punjab and Haryana followed it in 1966. Chhattisgarh, Uttarakhand and Jharkhand followed it in 2000. Telangana followed it in 2014. Every one of these reorganisations has worked within the same administrative and legal vocabulary that Fazl Ali's commission wrote, that a community's claim to its own language and government must be weighed against, never simply surrendered to, the unity and coherence of the nation. Fazl Ali spent his last years as Governor of Assam, working to bring the Naga hills into the administrative mainstream. He opened a college at Mokokchung, Nagaland that still bears his name. Later, Fazl Ali’s son, Syed Murtaza Fazl Ali, became Chief Justice of the Jammu and Kashmir High Court and, in 1975, a judge of the very Supreme Court his father had helped inaugurate. Sir Syed Fazl Ali was awarded the Padma Vibhushan in 1956. He died in office on 22 August 1959. Sir Syed Fazl Ali led no mass movement. But every time an Indian under arrest demands to know the grounds, every time a citizen calls a law arbitrary before a court, and every time someone crosses from one state into another without a thought for how that border came to sit exactly there, they are repeating an argument first made by a Varanasi born Bihari Muslim judge. #history #lingusticstates