Sardar Vallabhabhai Patel India's Iron Man by Balraj Krishna

Author:Balraj Krishna [Krishna, Balraj]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rupa Publications
Published: 2014-10-31T21:00:00+00:00

21

Integration of States

Patel’s decision on unification of India went back to December 1939 when he had declared with a seeming premonition: “The red and yellow colours on India’s map have to be merged into one. Unless that is done, we cannot have swaraj.”1 Patel undertook that task on the transference of power. Mountbatten had confidence in his wisdom and ability to do that most amicably and successfully.

Patel had, as Home Member in the Interim Government, come to know of the Political Department’s designs to Balkanise the Indian States. He was then a helpless witness. The Princes were under the exclusive charge of the Viceroy as Crown Representative, but were directly responsible to the Secretary of the Political Department, who, in turn, could directly report to the Secretary of State in London. The British were to terminate Paramountcy simultaneously with the transference of power to India, so that they could make the Princes independent, and thus enable them to negotiate, individually or jointly, with the new Government in British India on equal terms. This was an attempt to implement Churchill’s “Imperial strategy”, of which Wavell records in his Journal on March 29, 1945: “He seems to favour partition into Pakistan, Hindustan, Princestan, etc.”2 This was the tip of the iceberg. What was being manoeuvred underneath hardly anyone could see or know. Patel was no exception.

Such manoeuvring followed the two pronouncements of the Cabinet Mission: the Memorandum of May 12th, and the Plan of May 16th. The former stated: “When a new fully self-governing or independent Government or Governments come into being in British India… HMG will cease to exercise the powers of Paramountcy… the rights of the States which flow from their relationship to the Crown will no longer exist and that all the rights surrendered by the States to the Paramount Power will return to the States. Political arrangements between the States, on the one side, and the British Crown and British India, on the other, will thus be brought to an end. The void will have to be filled either by the States entering into a federal relationship with the successor Government or Governments in British India, or, failing this, entering into particular political arrangements with it or them.”3 As Patel commented later, “Nobody could have been so innocent or ignorant as to presume that overnight small rulers could be converted into ‘Their Majesties!’ That position would have been full of dangerous possibilities and potentialities.”4 In its statement of May 16th, the Mission virtually put a seal on the States’ sovereign status by declaring, “Paramountcy can neither be retained by the British Crown nor transferred to the new Government.”5

The Cabinet Mission made another dangerous move in the suggestion that for the seats allotted to the Princes in the Constituent Assembly, the Chamber of Princes should nominate a Negotiating Committee for parleys with its counterpart from British India. Two dangers lurked in that. Since “practically every matter which concerns the States has been committed to the care of the States

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