Bismarck of India: How Patel corralled the princely states

Often forgotten in the narratives of how India achieved independence is the question of the princely states.

- John Zubrzycki

Ruling over two-fifths of pre-Partition India, the princes were given the choice of acceding to India or Pakistan or becoming independent, once the treaties and instruments that bound them to the British Crown lapsed on the transfer of power.

The man rightly credited with saving India from Balkanisation, had enough states exercised their legal rights, is Vallabhbhai Patel who took up the critical post of states minister in June 1947.

Today, Patel is often called the Bismarck of India for repeating the German chancellor's feat of cajoling a group of scattered and disparate princedoms into giving up their sovereignty and creating a cohesive nation state.

Britain's most loyal allies, the 562 princely states, were virtually untouchable — only those rulers who committed the most heinous of crimes were censured, or, in the rarest of cases, removed. Some states were not much bigger than a couple of cricket pitches. At the other extreme were behemoths such as Hyderabad, a state larger in area than most countries in Europe, and whose income and expenditure rivalled that of Belgium.

Regardless of their stature, Patel considered their rulers as little more than “worthless ... sycophants”, who their slave-like subjects had “a right to dethrone”. He was adamant that if India was to be a territorially and politically viable nation, the states had to be part of it. Any deviation from this goal would risk plunging “a dagger into the very heart of India”.

Writing a few months after Independence, a Western journalist described Patel as “a Hindu Cromwell courteously decapitating hundreds of little King Charleses”, in the process turning the princes into pensioners and giving their subjects political unity and a voice they had never known before.