India After Gandhi (10 page)

On their part, the princes disliked and even feared Nehru. Fortunately the Congress had assigned the problem of the states to the pragmatic administrator Vallabhbhai Patel. Through the spring of 1947 Patel threw a series of lunch parties, where he urged his princely guests to help the Congress in framing a new constitution for India. This they
could do by sending delegates to the Constituent Assembly, whose deliberations had begun in Delhi in December 1946. At the same time Patel wrote to the more influential
dewans
(chief ministers), urging them to ask their rulers to come to terms with the party which would now rule India.
¹³

One of the first princes to come over to Patel’s side was the Maharaja of Bikaner. His
dewan
was K. M. Pannikar, awidely respected historian who, more clearly than otherpeople, could see that the ‘Vasco da Gama epoch of Asian history’
¹⁴
was swiftly coming to an end. The forces of nationalism were irresistible; if one did not compromise with them, one would be swept away. Accordingly, in the first week of April 1947 Bikaner issued a public appeal to his fellow princes to join the Constituent Assembly. Their entry into the Assembly, he said, would ‘make quite clear to everyone that the Indian Princes are not only workingfor the good of their States and for their mother country but are above all patriotic and worthy sons of India’.
¹⁵

The first chiefdom to join the Constituent Assembly, back in February, had in fact been the state of Baroda. After Bikaner’s appeal a dozen more states joined, many of them from Rajasthan. Pannikar and Bikaner had ‘led the Rajput princes in a fresh act of traditional obeisance to Delhi, where in place of Mogul or British, a Pandit now rules. They have made acompact with Congress – probably, from their point of view, rightly.’
¹⁶

Several states in Rajasthan,Bikaner included, would share aborder withPakistan; this, and ancient memories of battles withMuslim kings, predisposed them to an early compromise with Congress. But other states in the hinterland were less sure how far Delhi’s writ would run after the British left. Might not the situation revert tothat of the eighteenth century, when the peninsula wasdivided up among dozens of more-or-less sovereign states?

On 27 June a newStates Department was set up by the government of India. This replaced the old Political Department, whose pro-princes, anti-Congress tenor had caused so much mischief.
¹⁷
Patel wouldbethe minister in charge. As hissecretary he chose V. P. Menon, asmall, alert and ferociously intelligent Malayali from Malabar. Unusually for a man in his position, Menon had come from the ranks.Far from being a member of the elite Indian Civil Service – as other secretaries to government were – he had joined the government of India asaclerk and steadily worked hisway up. He had been reforms commissioner
and constitutional adviser to successive viceroys, and had played a key role in drafting the Indian Independence Bill.

His peers in the ICS derisively called him ‘babu Menon’, in reference to his lowly origins. In fact, as British Raj gave way to Congress Raj, there could have been no better man to supervise this most tricky aspect of the transition. Menon’s first act was to urge the British government not to support fanciful claims to independence. ‘Even an inkling that H.M.G. would accord independent recognition’, he told London, ‘would make infinitely difficult all attempts to bring the States and the new Dominions together on all vital matters of common concern.’
¹⁸

Menon was also ideally placed to mediate between his old boss, Mountbatten, and his new boss, Vallabhbhai Patel. Between them they worked on a draft Instrument of Accession whereby the states would agree to transfer control of defence, foreign affairs and communications to the Congress government. On 5 July Patel issued a statement appealing to the princes to accede to the Indian Union on these three subjects and join the Constituent Assembly. As he put it, the ‘alternative to co-operation in the general interest’ was ‘anarchy and chaos’. Patel appealed to the princes’ patriotism, asking for their assistance in raising ‘this sacred land to its proper place among the nations of the world’.
¹⁹

On 9 July Patel and Nehru both met the viceroy, and asked him ‘what he was going to do to help India in connection with her most pressing problem – relations with the [princely] States’. Mountbatten agreed to make this matter ‘his primary consideration’. Later that same day Gandhi came to meet Mountbatten. As the viceroy recorded, the Mahatma ‘asked me to do everything in my power to ensure that the British did not leave a legacy of Balkanisation and disruption on the 15th August by encouraging the States to declare their independence . . . ’
²⁰

Mountbatten was being urged by the Congress trinity to bat for them against the states. This he did most effectively, notably in a speech to the Chamber of Princes delivered on 25 July, for which the viceroy had decked out in all his finery, rows of military medals pinned upon his chest. He was, recalled an adoring assistant, ‘in full uniform, with an array of orders and decorations calculated to astonish even these practitioners in Princely pomp’.
²¹

Mountbatten began by telling the princes that the Indian Independence Act had released ‘the States from all their obligations to the Crown’. They were now technically independent, or, put another way, rudderless, on their own. The old links were broken, but ‘if nothing can
be put in its place, only chaos can result’ – a chaos that ‘will hit the States first’. He advised them to forge relations with the new nation closest to them. As he brutally put it, ‘you cannot run away from the Dominion Government which is your neighbour any more than you can run away from the subjects for whose welfare you are responsible’.

The Instrument of Accession the princes were being asked to sign would cede away defence – but in any case, said Mountbatten, the states would, by themselves, ‘be cut off from any source of supplies of up-to-date arms or weapons’. It would cede away external affairs, but the princes could ‘hardly want to go to the expense of having ambassadors or ministers or consuls in all these foreign countries’. And it would also cede away communications, but this was ‘really a means of maintaining the life-blood of the whole sub-continent’. The Congress offer, said the viceroy, left the rulers ‘with great internal authority’ while divesting them of matters they could not deal with on their own.
²²

Mountbatten’s talk to the Chamber of Princes was a
tour de force.
In my opinion it ranks as the most significant of all his acts in India. It finally persuaded the princes that the British would no longer protect or patronize them, and that independence for them was a mirage.

Mountbatten had prefaced his speech with personal letters to the more important princes. Afterwards he continued to press them to sign the Instrument of Accession. If they did so before 15 August, said the viceroy, he might be able to get them decent terms with the Congress. But if they did not listen, then they might face an ‘explosive situation’ after Independence, when the full might of nationalist wrath would turn against them.
²³

By 15 August virtually all the states had signed the Instrument of Accession. Meanwhile the British had departed, never to return. Now the Congress went back on the undertaking that if the princes signed up on the three specified subjects, ‘in other matters we would scrupulously respect their autonomous existence’.
²⁴
The
praja mandals
grew active once more. In Mysore a movement was launched for ‘full democratic government’ in the state. Three thousand people courted arrest.
²⁵
In some states in Kathiawar and Orissa, protesters took possession of government offices, courts and prisons.
²⁶

Vallabhbhai Patel and the Congress Party cleverly used the threat of popular protest to make the princes fall in line. They had already
acceded;
now they were being asked to
integrate
, that is to dissolve their states as independent entities and merge with the Union of India. In exchange
they would be allowed to retain their titles and offered an annual allowance in perpetuity. If they desisted from complying, they faced the threat of uncontrolled (and possibly uncontrollable) agitation by subjects whose suppressed emotions had been released by the advent of Independence.
²⁷

Through the latter part of 1947 V. P. Menon toured India, cajoling the princes one by one. His progress, wrote the
New York Times
correspondent in New Delhi,

could be measured from the ensuing series of modest newspaper items, each series running about like this:

First, a small headline, ‘Mr V. P. Menon Visits Stateof Chhota Hazri’;

Then, in the Governor-General’s daily Court Circular, a brief notice, ‘H. H. the Maharajah of Chhota Hazri has arrived’;

And soon, a banner headline, ‘CHHOTA HAZRI MERGED’.
²⁸

As this account makes clear, the groundwork was done by Patel and V. P. Menon; but the finishing touch was applied by Mountbatten, a final interview with whom was sometimes a necessary concession to princely vanity. The governor general also visited the more important chiefdoms, where he saluted their ‘most wise and Statesmanlike decision’ to link up with India.
²⁹

Mountbatten dealt with the symbolism of the princes’ integration with India; V. P. Menon with the substance. In his book, Menon describes in some detail the tortuous negotiations with the rulers. The process of give and take involved much massaging of egos: one ruler claimed descent from Lord Rama, another from Sri Krishna, while a third said his lineage was immortal, as it had been blessed by the Sikh Gurus.

In exchange for their land each ruler was offered a ‘privy purse’, its size determined by the revenue earned by the state. The bigger, more strategically placed states had to be given better deals, but relevant too were such factors as the antiquity of the ruling dynasty, the religious halo which might surround it, and their martial traditions. Apart from an annual purse, the rulers were allowed to retain their palaces and other personal properties and, as significantly, their titles. The Maharaja of Chhota Hazri would still be the Maharaja of Chhota Hazri, and he could pass on the title to his son as well.
³⁰

To reassure the princes, Patel sought to include a constitutional
guarantee with regard to the privy purses. But, as V. P. Menon pointed out, the pay-off had been trifling compared to the gains. In addition to securing the political consolidation of India, the integration of the states was, in economic terms, a veritable steal. By Menon’s calculation, while the government would pay out some Rs150 million to the princes, in ten years’ time the revenue from their states would amount to at least ten times as much.
³¹

Acquiring the territory of the States was followed by the scarcely less difficult job of administrative integration. In most states, the land revenue and judicial systems were archaic, and there was no popular representation of any kind. The Ministry of States transferred officials trained in British India to put the new systems in place. It also oversaw the swearing-in of interim ministries prior to the holding of full-fledged elections.

Patel and Menon took more than one leaf out of the British book. They played ‘divide-and-rule’, bringing some princes on side early, unsettling the rest. They played on the childlike vanities of the maharajas, allowing them to retain their titles and sometimes giving them new ones. (Thus several maharajas were appointed governors of provinces.) But, like the British in the eighteenth century, they kept their eye firmly on the main chance: material advantage. For, as Patel told the officials of the states ministry, ‘we do not want their women and their jewellery – we want their land’.
³²

In a mere two years, over 500 autonomous and sometimes ancient chiefdoms had been dissolved into fourteen new administrative units of India. This, by any reckoning, was a stupendous achievement. It had been brought about by wisdom, foresight, hard work and not a little intrigue.

When Vallabhbhai Patel had first discussed the states problem with Mountbatten, he had asked him to bring in ‘a full basket of apples’ by the date of Independence. Would he be satisfied with a bag of 560 instead of the full 565, wondered the viceroy. The Congress strongman nodded his assent.
³³
As it turned out, only three states gave trouble before 15 August, and three more afterthat date.

Travancore was the first state to question the right of the Congress
to succeed the British as the paramount power. The state was strategically placed, at the extreme southern tip of the subcontinent. It had the most highly educated populace in India, a thriving maritime trade, and newly discovered reserves of monazite, from which is extracted thorium, used in the production of atomic energy and atomic bombs. The
dewan
of Travancore was Sir C. P. Ramaswamy Aiyar, a brilliant and ambitious lawyer who had been in his post for sixteen years. It was commonly believed that he was the real ruler of the state, whose maharaja and maharani were like putty in his hands.