The Nehru Committee Report of 1928, Section 86 of the Nehru Report read: "The redistribution of provinces should take place on a linguistic basis on the demand of the majority of the population of the area concerned, subject to financial and administrative considerations".

On June 17, 1948, Chairman Rajendra Prasad set up a 3-member commission, called The Linguistic Provinces Commission with a specific brief to examine and report on the formation of new provinces of Andhra, Kerala, Karnataka and Maharashtra. Its report, submitted on December 10, 1948, listed out reasons against the idea of linguistic reorganisation in the given context. It dealt with each of the four proposed States - Andhra, Karnataka, Kerala and Maharashtra - and concluded against such an idea.

Historian Gyanendra Pandey records 500,000 non-Muslim (Hindus and Sikhs) refugees flowing into the Punjab and Delhi in 1947-48. Pandey also records that several thousand Muslims were forced out of their homes in Delhi and nearby places by violent mobs to seek asylum in camps set up around the Red Fort and the Purana Quila. Refugee camps were set up but they had hardly any sanitation and water supply.

The Indian National Congress, at its Nagpur session (1920), recorded that the national identity will have to be necessarily achieved through linguistic identity and resolved to set up the Provincial Congress Committees on a linguistic basis.

East Pakistan (which became Bangladesh in December 1971) was constituted by putting together the eastern part of divided Bengal, Sylhet district of Assam, the district of Khulna in the region and also the Chittagong Hill tracts. Such districts of Bengal as Murshidabad, Maida and Nadia which had a substantially large Muslim population were left to remain in India. The exercise was one without a method.