ABSTRACT
For the central government, a communal group was an interest group formed on a religious basis and oriented towards securing preferential treatment for its members simply because they were its members. The two communities of type in Punjab were Sikhs and Hindus. Sikhs formed just over one third of Punjab’s total population after partition of the province in 1947 and before second division of the province in November 1966. In the post-partition years certain political leaders of the Sikh community feared that the Sikhs, free from the menace of threatened extermination, would readily re-absorb into the fold of Hinduism. The Akali agitation culminated in what was known as the ‘regional formula’, whereby, for the transaction of government business with regard to certain specified matters, the state was to be divided into two regions, one Hindi-speaking and the other Punjabi-speaking, and for each region there was to be a regional committee consisting of members of the Assembly belonging to the region.
