In December 1947, under the leadership of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, the process of merging the princely states of Odisha began. On December 14 and 15, the rulers of Seraikella and Kharsawan had also signed the "Instrument of Accession" to merge with the province of Odisha. As per the decision, the Odisha administration was scheduled to formally take over the governance of Kharsawan on January 1, 1948.
Since Kharsawan and Seraikella were located in the mineral-rich and industrially prosperous Singhbhum region, the leaders of the neighboring Bihar province did not want it to go to Odisha under any circumstances. To prevent this, the Bihar government devised a secret plan to create an anti-Odisha mindset there, using the local tribal leader "Jaipal Singh Munda" as a tool. The tribal populace was misled and told that if they merged with Odisha, Odias would rule over them and snatch away their traditional rights over water, forest, and land. Due to this misleading and provocative propaganda, resentment grew among the indigenous inhabitants against the Odisha government as well as the Odia people.
On January 1, 1948, officials from the Odisha administration were scheduled to arrive to take charge of Kharsawan's governance. At this time, opposing the merger with Odisha and demanding a separate 'Jharkhand' state, around 30,000 to 50,000 tribals gathered at a large weekly marketplace (Hatpada) ground in Kharsawan. The people held their traditional bows and arrows. By then, the Bihar Military Police had already been deployed there to control the situation. In a manner mirroring the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, the police surrounded the narrow exit routes of the ground from all sides. Without taking any preliminary measures like dialogue or lathi-charge to control the crowd, the administration directly opened fire on the innocent public using automatic rifles.
Following that horrific massacre, the Bihar administration took extremely inhuman steps to cover up its crime. A military curfew was immediately imposed across the region so that no leader, journalist, or relief organization from Odisha could enter Kharsawan to gather the facts. Hundreds of bodies were packed into trucks overnight without being handed over to their families. The corpses were forcibly dumped into a deep well on the ground and buried with soil, while the remaining bodies were discarded in distant forests as food for wild animals. People groaning in pain from bullet wounds were not allowed to be taken to the hospital. Even the bloodstains on the ground were completely erased by pouring water and digging up the soil. Later, when the news of the massacre leaked through some sources, the Bihar government showed the death toll as a mere 35 in its official report. However, according to eyewitnesses, more than a thousand people had died in the firing.
After this massacre, the Bihar administration unleashed extreme atrocities on the local Odias to keep the Seraikella and Kharsawan regions under its control. However, history books usually do not give space to these truths in the name of national integration. To eradicate the Odia language from Seraikella and Kharsawan, the Bihari authorities overnight removed Odia from all government schools and administrative offices, replaced it forcibly with Hindi, and publicly burned Odia books. Odia teachers or government employees who spoke in favor of the merger with Odisha were dismissed from their jobs, and local Odia leaders were framed in false treason cases and sent to Hazaribagh Jail. To turn Odias into a minority in their own land, thousands of non-Odia people were brought from the interior regions of Bihar and provided with land and housing there, which completely altered the social demographics of the region. Local Odias were labeled as outsiders. Bihari goons and police used to visit Odia villages and threaten the residents. Many Odia homes were looted, and the modesty of several Odia women was violated. Amidst all these atrocities, attempts were made to suppress the voice of the Odias living in the Seraikella-Kharsawan region. The then Maharaja of Seraikella, Aditya Pratap Singh Deo, decided to fight a legal battle against this administrative injustice by Bihar.
Just a few days before the Constitution of India came into force and the Supreme Court was established, a case was filed in the then Federal Court of India on January 15, 1950, against the unjust merger of Seraikella and Kharsawan. The Supreme Court of India was established on January 28, 1950. The Supreme Court became functional exactly two days after India became a republic, and its first meeting was held in the "Chamber of Princes" at the Parliament House. After the establishment of the Supreme Court, as per Article 374(2) of the Constitution, the case regarding the unjust merger of Seraikella and Kharsawan was transferred to the Supreme Court and registered as 'Original Suit No. 1 of 1950'. The legal name of this case was State of Seraikella vs. Union of India & Others (1950), and it went down in the history of the Supreme Court as Original Suit No. 1 of 1950. Before the first Chief Justice of India, Justice Harilal Jekisundas Kania, and a special bench, the Maharaja argued that while the merger with Odisha had been finalized as per the 'Instrument of Accession' in December 1947, the Central Government had breached the contract by forcibly merging it with Bihar.
Although the Constitutional Bench of the Supreme Court heard the case at length, it ruled against Odisha, citing the limitations of Article 363 of the Constitution. The court stated that the Supreme Court did not have the legal jurisdiction to interfere in any political treaty made between a princely state and the Government of India prior to independence, and that it was entirely an administrative decision of the Central Government. Some historians allege that due to the bias and pressure of the then President, who was of Bihari origin, the two regions of Odisha went to Bihar.
Even though Odisha lost the legal battle against the political clout of the Central Government at the time and lost these two prosperous regions forever, this struggle for Odia identity remains immortalized as 'Case Number 1' on the very first page of the history book of India's highest judiciary. The blood of innocent tribals and Odias spilled on the soil of Kharsawan, along with the Supreme Court's first legal battle, reminds us how many hundreds of innocent souls sacrificed their lives and how many tears of border-dwelling Odias are hidden behind the modern map of Odisha.
However, there is an eternal law of history that one eventually falls into the pit they dig for others. The political and diplomatic conspiracy that the then Bihar administration and its associates had plotted to snatch Seraikella and Kharsawan from Odisha and suppress Odia pride eventually boomeranged on them.
The tribal leader Jaipal Singh Munda, whom the Bihar government had used as a tool to incite the tribals against Odisha, later became the biggest headache for Bihar itself. The Bihar government had thought that after wresting this region from Odisha, they could rule over it peacefully. But after the Kharsawan massacre, the local tribals realized that the Bihar administration was not their own. As a result, the "Separate Jharkhand State Movement" launched under the leadership of Jaipal Singh Munda was directed not against Odisha, but directly against the Bihar government. The very weapon that the Bihar administration used to wound Odisha became the foundation for splitting Bihar into two.
Since independence, because the administration in the state of Bihar engaged in such vile actions, its administrative system deteriorated to a very low level. Officials became corrupt and tyrannical, and for decades, Bihar became a stronghold of goons, criminals, oppressive police, and corrupt bureaucrats.
In 1947-48, the Bihar government used deceit and trickery to prevent Seraikella and Kharsawan from merging into the province of Odisha because these areas were part of Singhbhum, which was extremely rich in mineral resources, natural beauty, and industry. Bihar's greed was centered on the wealth of that region. But the wheels of history turned in such a way that the very mineral wealth for which Bihar had oppressed the Odias slipped out of its hands. The movement born in that region intensified, and finally, in the year 2000, Bihar was forced to split into two. A separate state named "Jharkhand" was carved out comprising the richest and most prosperous region of Bihar, and Seraikella-Kharsawan became a part of that new state. Following this division, Bihar became economically crippled.
In 1948, by abusing administrative power, the then ruling class of Bihar thought they had triumphed by defeating an Odia king (Aditya Pratap Singh Deo) and Odisha's claim in the Supreme Court. However, the ruling Congress party of that time eventually lost all its political ground in the Singhbhum region. The local public and tribals rejected them forever. The massive pit of conspiracy that the Bihar government had dug to weaken the province of Odisha, wipe out the Odia language, and usurp the territory of Seraikella-Kharsawan eventually fueled the fire of the Jharkhand movement. That fire ultimately split Bihar in two.
It is true that Odisha shed tears over the loss of its land, but by the laws of nature, those who committed the injustice fell into the political pit of their own making and lost the stolen territory of Odisha forever. That is why it is said that whoever commits injustice—be it an individual, a race, or the collective population of a nation—must ultimately face divine retribution.
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