OPEN LETTER TO HARYANA CM’S CHIEF PRINCIPAL SECRETARY RAJESH KHULLAR, WHO WROTE IN THE TRIBUNE ON 26 OCTOBER THAT HIS PARENTS’ 1961 CENSUS ENTRY OF HINDI AS THEIR MOTHER TONGUE WAS “A LIE, TOLD WITH LOVE”
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The unfinished business of the 1966 reorganisation of Punjab, chiefly the status of Chandigarh and a fair reckoning of the Punjabi-speaking areas of the Ambala division, should be settled through dialogue between the two states as they mark sixty years of separate statehood, KBS Sidhu, a former Special Chief Secretary of Punjab, has said.
KBS Sidhu made the call in an open letter to Shri Rajesh Khullar, Chief Principal Secretary to the Chief Minister of Haryana. He was responding to Shri Khullar’s column in The Tribune of 26 October 2026, “The line that made me Haryanvi,” published in a series on the diamond jubilee of the Punjab Reorganisation.
In his column, Shri Khullar recalled that during the 1961 census, his parents, Punjabi-speaking migrants from West Punjab, recorded Hindi as their mother tongue in support of a state that did not yet exist. He also wrote that Punjab had paid for feeding and defending the nation with its soil, its water and a dark decade, and that Haryana should offer Punjab a hand rather than a comparison chart.
KBS Sidhu, who is also the Convener of the Shiromani Punjab Forum, an independent, non-partisan think-tank, welcomed the candour and generosity of the column. He noted that the 1966 boundary was drawn largely on the basis of census returns on language, and that, as Shri Khullar’s own family history shows, these returns did not always reflect the language actually spoken at home.
“A mother tongue does not cease with the efflux of time, nor with a change of cadre,” KBS Sidhu said. “Punjabiyat is not a matter of domicile. It is shared by Punjabis in Ambala and Amritsar, in Brampton and in Lahore. That shared inheritance is the best foundation for resolving what 1966 left unresolved.”
The letter recalls that Chandigarh, built on the land of Punjab’s villages to replace lost Lahore, was kept as a Union Territory “for the time being” in 1966, an arrangement now sixty years old. The award of 1970 and the Rajiv–Longowal Accord of 1985 both promised the transfer of Chandigarh to Punjab, but neither was implemented.
“A debt acknowledged is not a debt discharged,” KBS Sidhu said. “Officers who have served both states with distinction, as Shri Khullar has, are well placed to help both governments approach these questions in a spirit of fairness rather than rivalry.”
KBS Sidhu emphasised that Punjab and Haryana share a history, a culture and, in large measure, a language. He said their sixtieth anniversary on 1 November was an occasion for reconciliation and partnership.
