Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel by Balraj Krishna

Author:Balraj Krishna [Krishna, Balraj]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: null
ISBN: 9789353024819
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers India
Published: 2018-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

7

DEMOLISHER OF PRINCELY ORDER

Patel vs. Wellesley

Patel’s unification and consolidation of over 560 princely states, in a country of continental size and diverse people, was epoch-making—of greater importance than Bismarck’s role in Germany. In India, his creation can be comparable, though in contrast, with Lord Wellesley’s princely order that laid the foundations of Britain’s Indian Empire. That order, nevertheless, met with its peaceful demise at the hands of Patel. The replacement was most democratic, taking care of the interests of both, the princes and their subjects. Wellesley’s policy was aggressive imperialism that reduced the once proud princes to mere puppets and sycophants. Patel didn’t do that. His integration was a bloodless revolution, in the achievement of which the princes were his equal partners. He was generous to them to a fault, allowing them to live, as before, in their royal palaces and to enjoy handsome privy purses to live happily in the style they were used to. He even offered them opportunities to serve their country in dignified positions.

Wellesley, governor-general of India (1798-1805), built the empire on the basis of two Indias—British India and princely India, each independent of the other, but the latter served as a bulwark against the former. During his seven years in India, Wellesley concluded as many as 100 treaties with Indian princes, making them subservient to British rule under his policy of subsidiary alliances—an umbrella of “defensive alliance and mutual guarantee”.

India was passing through chaotic times. Princes faced danger from their neighbours, small and big. Wellesley offered them guarantee of protection by stationing British troops within a state, for which payment was made “either in cash or by alienating a portion of his territory to British control”. By such arrangement, the prince was “secure against his Indian enemies, but also irrevocably attached to his British friends. The Princely fly was firmly enmeshed in the British political web, and any hope of escape was idle”.1

The princes responded to Wellesley’s offer in their own interest. To them, his offer of alliances was a beacon of hope, guaranteeing them a continuation of their rule, integrity of their territories and the prospect of their leading a carefree, luxurious life, in many cases licentious, in the seclusion of their palaces. For all this, the princes mortgaged their freedom, and were reduced to powerless stooges—impotent potentates.

In 1947, the departing British left the princes forlorn— indeed orphaned—by terminating paramountcy prior to the transfer of power. They feared being swept off by the new winds of a revolutionary change in the wake of the transfer of power. Earlier, the princes had faced threats from their jagirdars and neighbouring princes; now they faced them from their restive subjects, who were determined to wipe off their autocratic rule—an anachronism in the new climate—in their overwhelming desire to join the mainstream of national life pulsating with the soaring aspirations of a free people. At such a critical moment, Patel came to the princes’ rescue by offering them a new honourable life in a democratic India as equal members of a free nation.

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