How 560 Kingdoms Became India: Patel, Menon, Junagadh, Kashmir and the Fall of Hyderabad

New Delhi, August 1947. In a room at Government House, the Viceroy’s palace, a young maharaja has just signed away the most important powers of his kingdom. The Viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, steps out for a few minutes.

Hanwant Singh, Maharaja of Jodhpur, pulls out a revolver and points it at the civil servant across the table. “I refuse to accept your dictation,” he says.

The civil servant is V.P. Menon, secretary of India’s new States Department. He tells the Maharaja that killing him will not undo the signature. “Don’t indulge in juvenile theatricals,” he says. When Mountbatten comes back, he turns it into a joke. The men leave together, and the episode, Menon wrote, became a standing joke between him and the Maharaja.

That is Menon’s own account, from his 1956 book The Story of the Integration of the Indian States. Nobody else in the room wrote it down. But it catches the mood of those weeks. British rule was ending. For generations the British had governed two-fifths of the subcontinent not directly, but through hundreds of kings, nawabs and chiefs. When the British left, their treaties with those rulers would lapse. In law, each could go its own way.

Almost none did. In about two years, Vallabhbhai Patel and V.P. Menon, helped at first by Mountbatten, brought some 560 states into India, by persuasion, pressure, money and, in a few places, force. This is that story. It has a Nawab who flew away with some of his dogs, and a Maharaja who told his aide to shoot him in his sleep. It has the Punjab states that became PEPSU, a war in Kashmir, and killings in Hyderabad that India kept quiet about for decades.

Nobody agrees on exactly how many states there were. It depends who counted. The Butler Committee and the Simon Commission of the 1920s counted 562. The government’s White Paper on Indian States of 1950 used the same figure. Menon, counting what was left in India after Partition, used 554. Mountbatten, speaking off the cuff, said “something like 565”. Hence the round “560-odd”.

Together they covered about 45 per cent of pre-Partition India, the White Paper says. Hyderabad and Kashmir were each about the size of the United Kingdom. At the other end, some holdings in Kathiawar ran to only a few acres. A few states, such as Mysore, Baroda, Travancore and Cochin, were well run, Menon wrote. Many were run, in his words, in a way that was “personal and primitive”.

The British called their hold over the princes paramountcy. Britain ran the states’ defence and foreign affairs. The rulers kept their palaces, courts and taxes. The plan of 3 June 1947 announced that paramountcy would end on 15 August. Some princes saw a chance. The Nawab of Bhopal, Hamidullah Khan, a friend of Mountbatten, tried to rally the rulers into a bloc of their own. Travancore and Hyderabad said they would join neither India nor Pakistan. Hyderabad even looked into leasing or buying Goa from the Portuguese, to get a port.

Other rulers moved the other way. On 28 April 1947 Baroda, Bikaner, Cochin, Gwalior, Jaipur, Jodhpur, Patiala and Rewa took their seats in the Constituent Assembly, breaking a princely boycott. Patiala, the biggest of the Punjab states, was among the first through the door.

Vallabhbhai Patel was 71 in the summer of 1947. He was a Gujarati lawyer who had made his name leading peasants in Bardoli against the British. Now he was Deputy Prime Minister and Home Minister. In July he also took charge of a new States Department, set up to deal with the princes.

His secretary there was an unusual civil servant. Vapal Pangunni Menon was born in 1893 at Ottapalam in Malabar. He worked as a railway stoker, a coal miner and a clerk in a Bangalore tobacco company. Then he joined the government’s secretariat. He rose to be constitutional adviser to the last Viceroys and had a large hand in the plan to divide India. He took charge of the States Department on 5 July 1947.

His first idea was a statement to calm the princes. Menon drafted it on 4 July, he says, with some passages inspired by Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural address. Patel issued it the next day. It asked the rulers to join India on just three subjects, defence, foreign affairs and communications, and promised no domination.

It is therefore better for us to make laws sitting together as friends than to make treaties as aliens.Vallabhbhai Patel’s statement to the princes, 5 July 1947, drafted by V.P. Menon

Menon wrote the drafts and did most of the bargaining. Patel was the power behind him. And Delhi held the railways, posts, coal and fuel that most states could not live without.

On 25 July 1947 Mountbatten addressed the Chamber of Princes in Delhi, for the first and last time as Crown Representative. He spoke without notes. Menon, who was there, called it “the apogee of persuasion”.

Join a dominion on defence, foreign affairs and communications, Mountbatten told the rulers. No state could defend itself alone, none had ever run its own foreign policy, and railways and telegraphs could not stop at a border. Those three subjects would cost them nothing, he said, and leave them “all the practical independence” they could use. Legally they could choose either dominion. But geography could not be dodged: of the 565 or so states, the vast majority were “irretrievably linked geographically” with India. And if they wanted to come in, he said, “you must come before 15 August.”

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.Lord Mountbatten to the Chamber of Princes, 25 July 1947, as recorded by V.P. Menon

Two documents went round the hall. The Instrument of Accession handed India those three subjects and nothing else. This version was for the 140 biggest states. It cost them nothing, and it said the ruler was not bound by any future constitution. Smaller states signed other forms. The Standstill Agreement kept existing arrangements, from customs to posts, running while details were settled. Delhi made one rule plain: no accession, no standstill agreement.

For six days and nights a committee of rulers and ministers argued the wording at Bikaner House. The drafts were final on 31 July. Jinnah, Menon says, told Mountbatten the whole policy was utterly wrong, and promised that states joining Pakistan would keep their independence. By 15 August almost every state inside India’s borders had signed.

Almost every. In June, Sir C.P. Ramaswami Iyer, the dewan or chief minister of Travancore, had announced that the state would be independent. Travancore had rich deposits of monazite, a source of thorium for nuclear power. The historian Ramachandra Guha writes that British ministers hoped to get special access to it. On the evening of 25 July a 25-year-old socialist, K.C.S. Mani, attacked him with a curved blade outside the music academy in Trivandrum. A medical bulletin counted seven wounds. Mani said he was avenging Punnapra-Vayalar, the 1946 crackdown on workers in which, the historian A. Sreedhara Menon estimated, about 1,000 people died. Ramaswami Iyer survived. On 30 July the Maharaja telegraphed Mountbatten that he accepted the Instrument.

The Nawab of Bhopal stayed away from the 25 July meeting. The princes, he said, were being “invited like the Oysters to attend the tea party with the Walrus and the Carpenter”. In the end he signed, on condition that his signature be kept secret for ten days after independence. “Now that I have conceded defeat,” he wrote to Patel, he hoped to be as staunch a friend as he had been an opponent. Patel replied that he did not see it as “either a victory for us or defeat for you”.

The Maharaja of Indore would not even answer his invitation. Then one morning, Menon says, his signed Instrument and Standstill Agreement arrived in an ordinary postal envelope.

Jodhpur was the dangerous one, a big Hindu-majority state on the new Pakistan border. Menon heard that Jinnah handed Hanwant Singh a blank sheet of paper and his own fountain pen, telling him to write his own terms. Then the Maharajkumar of Jaisalmer, there with him, said he would join only if he never had to side with Muslims against Hindus. The meeting fell apart. Jodhpur’s nobles were against Pakistan. Menon brought Hanwant Singh to Mountbatten. A Hindu ruler taking a Hindu state to Pakistan, Mountbatten told him, would go against the whole basis of Partition. It would bring serious trouble between Hindus and Muslims inside his state. He signed. Then came the revolver. Five years later, Hanwant Singh died in a plane crash.

Junagadh sat on the coast of Kathiawar, in today’s Gujarat. In 1941 it had 6,70,719 people, more than 80 per cent of them Hindu, and it held the temple of Somnath. It had no land border with Pakistan. Karachi was about 480 km (300 miles) away by sea. Its ruler, Nawab Mahabat Khanji, was, in Menon’s phrase, “an eccentric of rare vintage” who kept hundreds of dogs and once, Menon was told, staged a wedding for two of them and declared a state holiday.

In May 1947 Sir Shah Nawaz Bhutto, a Muslim League politician from Karachi, became the Nawab’s dewan, or chief minister. On 15 August Junagadh announced that it had joined Pakistan. Pakistan accepted on 13 September. Two small territories, Mangrol and Babariawad, tried to break away to India, and the Nawab sent in his troops.

India answered with a blockade and a rival government. On 25 September, at a meeting in Bombay, Samaldas Gandhi proclaimed an Arzi Hukumat, a provisional government of Junagadh, whose volunteers began taking villages. India cut coal, fuel, posts and flights, and moved troops to the border.

By late October the Nawab had had enough. He flew to Karachi with most of his family, some of his dogs, and the state’s cash and shares, Menon says. One of his begums had gone back for her child. The plane left without her. On 27 October Bhutto wrote to Jinnah that revenue had gone “to the bottom” and that Kathiawar’s Muslims had “lost all enthusiasm for Pakistan”. On 8 November he left for Karachi too. The next day India took over the administration.

On 13 November Patel spoke at Bahauddin College and asked the crowd, as a flourish, which country they wanted. Over ten thousand hands went up for India. He then visited the ruined Somnath temple, and its rebuilding was decided on the spot.

On 20 February 1948 India held a referendum. Out of 2,01,457 registered voters, 1,90,870 voted; 91 chose Pakistan. Correspondents of the Sunday Times and Daily Telegraph found little fault with it, Menon says. Pakistan called the vote a discourtesy and has never accepted it. Its official maps still show Junagadh as Pakistani.

Jammu and Kashmir was the mirror image of Junagadh: a Hindu Maharaja, Hari Singh, ruling a Muslim-majority state that bordered both new countries. He signed nothing with India in August, offered standstill agreements to both, and waited.

In October the state came apart. Early that month rebels rose against him in Poonch. Pakistan, India said, squeezed the state’s supplies. On 22 October armed Pashtun tribesmen from Pakistan crossed the border near Muzaffarabad. Muslim soldiers of the state forces deserted. Brigadier Rajinder Singh held the raiders near Uri for two days with about 150 men and died there. By 24 October the raiders had cut Srinagar’s power. Instead of racing on, many stopped to loot and kill at Baramulla.

On 25 October Menon flew to Srinagar. He found the city silent and the Maharaja “completely unnerved”, and told him to leave for Jammu. At first light on the 26th Menon flew back to Delhi. Mountbatten said Indian troops could go only to Indian land. The state must join first. And because most of its people were Muslim, they should be asked later. Nehru and the ministers agreed.

Menon flew to Jammu that day. He found the Maharaja asleep after driving all night. Woken, Hari Singh signed the Instrument of Accession, Menon writes. Then he told Menon about the orders he had left with his aide. If Menon did not come back from Delhi, everything was lost. The aide was to shoot him in his sleep. On 27 October Mountbatten accepted the accession, saying the question should be settled “by a reference to the people” once the invaders were gone. That morning, over a hundred aircraft began flying Indian troops to Srinagar.

Even the date is argued over. The Instrument is dated 26 October. The historian Srinath Raghavan thinks it was almost certainly signed on the 27th; the journalist Prem Shankar Jha argues for the 25th. Pakistan called the accession a product of “fraud and violence”. It pointed to the killing of Muslims in Jammu that autumn. Scholars put that toll anywhere from 20,000 to 100,000 dead. Raiders and rebels killed many Hindus and Sikhs at Rajouri and Mirpur.

The war that followed ended in a UN ceasefire at one minute to midnight on 1 January 1949, with Kashmir divided. The plebiscite India had promised was never held; India said Pakistan never withdrew its forces first.

Accession was only the first step. A state that had handed over three subjects was still a kingdom. The next step, merger, was harder, and it began in Orissa, where small states were sliding into chaos and an adivasi revolt.

On 13 December 1947 Patel and Menon reached Cuttack. The next morning Patel faced twelve small rulers. He had not come as the old British power, he told them, but “as a member of a family trying to solve a family problem”. Their states had no money and no men, he said; they should hand over all power. The young Raja of Ranpur asked if he could stand for the provincial assembly. Yes, said Patel: instead of diving in a narrow well, he could swim in an ocean. To the bigger rulers he was blunter. Their states, he said, were like ulcers on the body of the province, to be cured or removed.

The rulers asked to be paid more. Patel refused. If the privy purses were to last forever, he said, they must not be so high as to become “a target of attack”. By that evening the agreements were signed, to take effect on 1 January 1948.

Then the pace quickened. In early 1948, 222 states of Kathiawar became one union, Saurashtra. Madhya Bharat was formed out of Gwalior, Indore and 18 smaller states on 28 May 1948. Rajasthan was finished in stages by 15 May 1949, and Travancore and Cochin joined in 1949. Each union had a Rajpramukh, one of its rulers, as a figurehead governor. In May 1948 the Rajpramukhs signed new instruments that gave Delhi far more power.

Menon kept the score. Hyderabad and Mysore were left whole. 216 states merged into provinces. Five became provinces run from Delhi, and 21 Punjab hill states became Himachal Pradesh. 310 became six unions. Where there had been 554 states, there were now 14 units.

East Punjab had six princely states. Patiala, Nabha and Jind were the Phulkian states, descended from a common ancestor, Phul. Faridkot sprang from the same stock. Kapurthala’s rulers were Ahluwalias; Malerkotla’s nawabs were Sherwani Afghans. All four Sikh states had come under British protection by the Treaty of Amritsar of 1809. Patiala alone was bigger, richer and more populous than the rest put together.

1947 had torn them apart as it tore Punjab. The Partition killings reached into the princely states too. The historian Ian Copland has studied the part the Sikh princes and their forces played in the East Punjab massacres of that year. Refugees poured in from the west, raising the share of Sikhs, above all in Patiala, Menon notes. In early 1948 Faridkot’s Raja was accused of mistreating political prisoners and Muslims waiting to leave. Delhi took over his state, after a meeting of leading rulers agreed.

The Akali leader Giani Kartar Singh wanted the states merged into East Punjab. The nationalist Sikh Jathedar Udham Singh Nagoke wanted a separate union of all of them, Patiala included. Menon put four options to Patel, who was recovering from a heart attack in Dehra Dun. East Punjab, swamped by refugees, could take no more, they decided. So the states would become a union of their own.

The key was Patiala’s Maharaja, Yadavindra Singh. He wanted the union called “the Patiala Union” and the Rajpramukh’s post to be hereditary. He got neither. But he became Rajpramukh for life, with Kapurthala’s Maharaja as his deputy. His privy purse was later fixed at Rs 17 lakh. On 5 May 1948 the rulers of eight states signed the covenant, the two small states of Kalsia and Nalagarh included. Master Tara Singh and Giani Kartar Singh applauded, Menon says.

Patel inaugurated the Patiala and East Punjab States Union, PEPSU, at Patiala on 15 July 1948. Talks to form a ministry broke down that night, after the Akali Dal refused to join on Menon’s terms. A caretaker government took over under Gian Singh Rarewala, and a ministry of seven was formed early in 1949. PEPSU had about 34 lakh people and, as Menon noted, it was the only Sikh-majority unit in India. On 1 November 1956 it was merged into Punjab, the start of a new argument told in our story of the Punjabi Suba movement.

The violence and migration that reshaped the Punjab states in 1947 is the subject of our long read <a href="/news/partition-of-punjab-1947-full-story">Partition of Punjab, 1947: The Line Drawn in Five Weeks</a>.

Hyderabad was the biggest prize of all: a landlocked state the size of Britain in the middle of the Deccan, with its own army. About 87 per cent of its people were Hindu. Its ruler since 1911, the Nizam Mir Osman Ali Khan, was a Muslim.

After the 3 June plan the Nizam issued a firman, a royal order: on 15 August he would resume the status of an independent sovereign. He had hoped to stay in the Commonwealth, and protested at being “abandoned” by his old British ally. After weeks of haggling over words and even commas, he signed a one-year Standstill Agreement with India on 29 November 1947. Each side soon accused the other of breaking it; Hyderabad complained of a blockade.

Real power was slipping to Qasim Razvi, who had become head of the Ittehad-ul-Muslimeen in December 1946 and built its Razakar militia. India’s information, Menon says, was that there were 200,000 Razakars with small arms, beside 42,000 regular and irregular state troops. Razvi’s speeches grew wilder.

The day is not far off when the waves of the Bay of Bengal will be washing the feet of our Sovereign.Qasim Razvi, April 1948, as reported by the Associated Press of India and quoted by V.P. Menon

The Razakars raided villages and border areas, attacked trains and levied their own taxes. J.V. Joshi, a Hindu member of the Nizam’s council, resigned. A reign of terror ruled Parbhani and Nanded, he wrote. At Loha he had seen killings, rapes and burnt houses with his own eyes. About four lakh people, most of them Hindus, are reported to have fled the state. Muslims who spoke against the Razakars were not safe either. Shoebullah Khan, 28, edited the Urdu paper Imroz and argued for joining India. Late one night in August 1948, after work at the paper, four men attacked him. He died hours later in hospital. The prosecution blamed Razvi, but the High Court later freed the accused.

Inside the state, a communist-led peasant revolt in Telangana had been fighting the Nizam’s landlords since 1946. Talks collapsed in June 1948. In August Hyderabad took its case to the UN Security Council. On 11 September Jinnah died in Karachi.

At 4 a.m. on 13 September 1948 Indian troops crossed into Hyderabad. India called it a “police action”. The army’s name for it was Operation Polo. The main thrust came from Sholapur in the west under Major-General J.N. Chaudhuri, with a second from Vijayawada in the east, and Tempest aircraft overhead.

It was very nearly a different war. On the first day Indian troops caught a former British commando who worked for the Hyderabad army. He was driving a jeep full of explosives towards the Naldurg bridge. His papers said the attack was expected on the 15th, Menon writes. Two days later, the bridges would have been blown and the rains would have bogged the army down.

Instead, resistance collapsed. Indian losses were slight. Menon put the dead on the other side at “a little over 800”. The figures usually quoted now are 807 Hyderabad soldiers and 1,373 Razakars killed. At 5 p.m. on 17 September the Nizam announced a ceasefire. On the 18th Chaudhuri drove into Hyderabad city, took the surrender of the state army’s commander, Major-General El Edroos, and became Military Governor. Razvi was arrested on 19 September. He stayed in jail until 1957, and was freed on condition that he leave for Pakistan. He died in Karachi in 1970.

On 23 September the Nizam withdrew his complaint at the UN. In a radio broadcast he blamed Razvi’s group for seizing power and terrorising the state. India kept him on as head of state. From 26 January 1950 he was Rajpramukh of Hyderabad, until the state was broken up in 1956. Across India, Menon wrote, there was not a single communal incident during the operation.

Inside Hyderabad, it was another story.

On 17 September Nehru turned down the Red Cross’s offer of relief and said the merger had been achieved without bloodshed. By November, reports from Padmaja Naidu, the daughter of Sarojini Naidu, told him of something else. “The information is contrary to what I had believed,” Nehru wrote.

He asked Pandit Sunderlal to go and see. With Qazi Abdul Ghaffar and Maulana Abdulla Misri, he toured nine of the state’s 16 districts from 29 November to 21 December 1948. They held meetings with Hindus and Muslims, in public and in private.

Their report estimated that at least 27,000 to 40,000 Muslims died during and after the police action. It counted only those killed in cold blood. The worst districts were Osmanabad, Gulbarga, Bidar and Nanded. In Latur, the report said, killing went on for more than 20 days; of about 10,000 Muslims, barely 3,000 were left. It recorded rape and abduction, forced conversions, desecrated mosques and the looting of homes and shops. It named local Hindu mobs, armed men from a Hindu communal organisation who came in from Sholapur and other towns, and some Congress workers. It also found Indian soldiers had taken part.

Encouraged, persuaded and in a few cases even compelled the Hindu mob to loot Muslim shops and houses.The Sunderlal report on the conduct of some Indian soldiers, as quoted by The Quint

The report’s confidential notes also described the Razakars’ crimes before the operation. Officials at the time called the killing a popular reaction to them. Chaudhuri, the Military Governor, estimated that about 2,000 Muslims may have been killed. Patel wrote to the mission in January 1949. A goodwill mission had never been the government’s business, he said, and the report lacked “balance and proportion”. In 1949 an amnesty was quietly given to Hindus involved in “retaliatory action”.

The report was never published. Its existence came to light in 1988; scholars and the journalist-lawyer A.G. Noorani wrote about it, and from 2013 it was available to read at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library. Some writers put the toll far higher. In 1950, using leaked accounts, the scholar Wilfred Cantwell Smith wrote of 50,000 to 200,000 dead.

The princes were not simply told to go. They were paid. Each ruler who merged his state got a privy purse: a tax-free sum every year for himself and his family. He kept his palaces, private property and titles, and his heir would succeed him.

Menon worked out a formula in Orissa: a state with a revenue of Rs 15 lakh a year would give its ruler Rs 1,30,000. The old Political Department’s formula would have given him Rs 5 lakh. Eleven big states got special deals for the ruler’s lifetime. Gwalior got Rs 25 lakh, Baroda Rs 26.5 lakh, Mysore Rs 26 lakh and Patiala Rs 17 lakh. The Nizam kept the Rs 50 lakh in Hyderabad money he had always drawn, about Rs 43 lakh in Indian rupees. At the other end, the ruler of Katodia in Saurashtra got Rs 192 a year.

The total, according to the White Paper laid before Parliament, came to Rs 580 lakh, about Rs 5.8 crore a year. In return, Menon pointed out, the states handed over Rs 77 crore in cash and investments. They gave up about 19,000 km (12,000 miles) of railway, and the customs posts inside India came down. The privy purses were written into the Constitution, in Article 291.

The promise lasted about twenty years. Indira Gandhi’s government said the purses had no place in an equal society. In September 1970 a bill to end them passed the Lok Sabha. In the Rajya Sabha it fell one vote short of the two-thirds it needed. The next day, 6 September, the President simply stopped recognising the rulers. On 15 December 1970 the Supreme Court struck that order down, in a case brought by Madhav Rao Scindia and others. Mrs Gandhi then won a big majority in the 1971 election. The 26th Amendment became law in late December 1971. It ended the rulers’ recognition, titles and purses for good.

Patel had warned the Orissa rulers in 1947 not to let their purses become “a target of attack”. In the end that is what they became.

How the Constitution that guaranteed the privy purses was written, from 1946 to 1950, is told in <a href="/news/constitution-of-india-1950-full-story">our story of the Constitution of India</a>.

Was it patient statecraft, or threats in silk gloves? The honest answer is both, and it depended on the state. Most rulers signed because they saw no future alone, because their own subjects wanted India, or because Mountbatten and Menon talked them round. A few were pushed hard. In Junagadh, Hyderabad and Kashmir, the matter ended with soldiers.

Patel did not live to see the new map settle. He died on 15 December 1950. In 2018 India unveiled his 182-metre Statue of Unity in Gujarat, the tallest statue in the world. Menon, who wrote the story down, died in Bangalore in 1965. His book calls it a foundation. For the first time, he wrote, India had become “an integrated whole”. A welfare state still had to be built on top.

In Telangana, 17 September is still marked three ways at once. The Centre and the BJP call it Liberation Day. The BRS calls it National Integration Day. The state government calls it People’s Governance Day. In Junagadh, Somnath was rebuilt. In Kashmir, the line drawn on 1 January 1949 is still a front line.

In 1947 the map of India looked like a broken mirror, hundreds of pieces of every size. By 1950 it was one country. Few Indians alive today remember living under a king. That, more than any statue, is what Patel and Menon left behind.