The Congress leaders were in no mood to further divide the country into linguistic lines. This created great disappointment among the Kannada speakers, Malayalam speakers, and the Marathi speakers, and the Telugu speakers, because they had all looked forward to having their own state. The Telugu speakers, however, showed the strongest protests. Their leader Potti Sriramulu went on a hunger fast demanding the formation of Andhra state to protect the interests of Telugu speakers. As the fast went on, it attracted much Hartals and bandhs began to be observed. Meanwhile, Potti Sriramulu died. This incidence intensified the situation. The protests took intense form. This forced the Central Government to give in to the demand and the new state of Andhra Pradesh came into existence on 1 October 1953.

After the formation of Andhra Pradesh, other linguistic communities also demanded their own separate states. Hence, a State Reorganisation Commission was set up, which submitted its report in 1956. It recommended the redrawing of the district and provincial boundaries to form compact provinces of Assamese, Bengali, Oriya, Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, and Telugu speakers respectively. The large Hindi-speaking region of north India was broken up into several states. Then in 1960, the bilingual state of Bombay was divided into separate states for Marathi and Gujarati speakers. In the year 1960, the state of Punjab was also divided into Punjab and Haryana, Punjab for the Punjabi speakers, and Haryana for the rest who spoke Haryanvi or Hindi.