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| 1953, Dec. 2 |
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| The government signed a five-year trade agreement with the USSR. | 1 |
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| 1954 |
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| Nehru denounced U.S. policies in Parliament early in the year. Later that year he concluded a trade agreement with China and got France to transfer its four settlements to India (concluded in 1956). | 2 |
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| 1955 |
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| The first Backwards Classes Commission, under the direction of Kaka Kalelkar, submitted a report to the government about special privileges to be extended to Untouchables and others by the state. Although sharply divided among themselves, the commissioners ultimately recommended that special “reservations of places” in education and government employment be awarded not simply on the basis of group membership, but by calculating individual economic need. This decision maintained the constitution's original emphasis on the relationship between state and individual, and it was sharply resisted by those advocating the extension of reservations to entire groups (identified by caste name and listed on the “schedules” of castes and tribes inherited from the British and maintained by the independent government). | 3 |
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| June 7–22 |
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| During a visit of Nehru to Moscow, the USSR and India concluded an agreement for Soviet economic and technical assistance to India. In November the visit was reciprocated by Marshal Nikolay Bulganin and Nikita Khrushchev. | 4 |
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| July 25 |
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| The government ordered the closure of the Portuguese legation in New Delhi because of Portugal's unwillingness to negotiate on Goa's integration into the Indian republic. On Aug. 15 Indian demonstrators marched on Goa and Damao. Portuguese police killed 21 and wounded over 100. India broke relations with Portugal on Aug. 19. | 5 |
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| Oct |
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| A States Reorganization Commission submitted its report recommending that many British-imposed administrative boundaries be redrawn to recognize certain regional, cultural, and linguistic configurations. Although this change was justified on the basis of administrative efficiency (the use of a single language in a given state), the emergence the following year of 14 states and 6 centrally administered territories legitimized community identities based on linguistic (and therefore regional, cultural, and often ethnic) affinities. The commission explicitly rejected the demands for redrawn boundaries in the Punjab, however, arguing that although these demands claimed to accommodate Punjabi, they really aimed to satisfy Sikh (therefore religious, not linguistic) identity claims. | 6 |
| The remainder of the decade illustrated that the redrawing of some boundaries did not defuse the demands of communities that resisted the pull of national identity. In addition to the Sikhs, another major regional challenge emerged in South India concerning Tamil identity. This movement combined language (Tamil), kinship, and religious claims (Tamil was represented as the goddess Tamilttay) to resist what Tamils felt was a colonizing effort to force Hindi and Gangetic Plains identity on the South. | 7 |
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