Nov 11, 2025 1 Nov is Rajya Nirman Diwas in India.

 1 Nov is Rajya Nirman Diwas in India. A large number of states were formed on 1st November, though not in the same year.

It all started with The States Reorganisation Act which was passed on 14 September 1956 and came into effect on 1 November 1956. Since the 1920s leaders of the Indian National Congress believed that the proper way to ensure that governance was done in locations close to the people. Following upon this belief it was imagined that the proper way to identify a people was through their language. Of course, Muslims were excluded from such conceptions of a people. It was imagined that Muslims formed a separate group which was identified with a separate language called Urdu. In some parts of India, such as the hinterland of Malegaon, it was even reported that the language of Muslims was 'Musalmani'. Following upon such beliefs the State Reorganisations Commission created boundaries for smaller provincial divisions in India based on its own conception of language. Thus, all of Maharashtra was imagined to be speaking 'Marathi', the language which was essentially spoken only in the Pune-Solapur-Satara region. All of Karnataka was said to speak 'Kannada' a language which was not spoken in large parts of the region which were clubbed together to form a new state. Even greater mess was created with the formation of massive states like Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Andhra Pradesh in which the same language was spoken throughout but there were significant cultural variations of other kind. Imagining uniformity of culture created quite a mess in India. Some of the boundaries which were created did not match the reality on the ground thus creating a mess between the newly formed states. Some of the conflicts which resulted continue to this day as in the boundary dispute between Maharashtra and Karnataka. Many of the cultural areas were simply forced live with the state ignoring their distinct identity. This happened in the case of the speakers of languages such as Ahirani in Maharashtra who were subsumed by the language spoken in a small portion of western Maharashtra. In some cases language got confused with religion, as happened in Punjab where the communal Sikh leaders of the Akali Dal insisted that Punjabi was the language of the Sikhs while the communal Hindu leaders associated with groupings such as the Arya Samaj insisted that Hindi was the language of the Hindus. Pic. shows a meeting at Teen Murti House, the residential palace of Jawaharlal Nehru to discuss the reorganisation of states. This meeting was on October 14, 1955. It shows, Morarji Desai (left), Jagjivan Ram (second from left) and prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru (second from right).