Appearance
6.25 — Making One Country: The Princely States and Kashmir
On 15 August 1947 the British transferred power over British India. They did not transfer power over the roughly 560 princely states, which covered around two-fifths of the subcontinent's area and about a quarter of its population.
British paramountcy over those states simply lapsed. Legally, each ruler was free to accede to India, accede to Pakistan, or remain independent.
If even a modest fraction had chosen independence, India would have been a patchwork. Hyderabad alone was the size of France with a population of about 16 million, and it sat in the middle of the peninsula.
Almost all of them acceded before independence day. This chapter is about how, and about the three that did not.
The method
Vallabhbhai Patel, as Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for States, and V. P. Menon, a civil servant who had risen from a clerk's position, ran the operation from July 1947.
The Instrument of Accession was the legal device, and its terms were deliberately narrow: a ruler ceded only three subjects — defence, foreign affairs and communications — and retained internal autonomy.
That narrowness was the whole trick. A ruler was being asked to give up things he could not exercise anyway — no princely state could conduct a foreign policy or defend itself — while keeping what looked like his position.
The inducements were substantial. The privy purse: a tax-free annual payment, calculated from the state's former revenue, guaranteed by the Constitution. Retention of titles, palaces and personal property. Precedence and privileges. And several rulers were appointed as Rajpramukh — the ceremonial head of the new merged unit — or later as governors and ambassadors.
The pressure was equally real. Patel's method combined the offer with an explicit warning that a ruler who held out would face his own population, that the departure of British troops removed his protection, and that the Congress organisation could raise agitation inside any state that resisted. He set a deadline of 15 August and made clear that terms would be worse afterwards.
Menon's role was the practical one — travelling constantly, drafting, and persuading individually. His two books on the transfer of power are a primary source written by a participant, and they are self-serving in the ordinary way and factually detailed.
Then the second stage, which is less remembered and more consequential. Having acceded, the states were merged: small states were amalgamated into unions, and by 1949 most had signed merger agreements surrendering internal autonomy entirely. The princely order effectively ceased to be a political fact within two years. The privy purses were abolished by constitutional amendment in 1971 under Indira Gandhi.
The three that resisted
Junagadh
A small state on the Kathiawar coast in Gujarat, with a Muslim ruler and an overwhelmingly Hindu population, not contiguous with Pakistan.
The Nawab acceded to Pakistan in August 1947. India objected on the grounds that the state was not contiguous with Pakistan and that its population was Hindu, and imposed an economic blockade. A provisional government was formed by Junagadh's own people. The Nawab fled to Pakistan, the Dewan invited India to take over, and a plebiscite in February 1948 recorded an overwhelming vote for India.
Note the principle India argued for here — population preference over the ruler's decision — because it is the reverse of the principle India argued in Kashmir. Both sides in the Kashmir dispute have used each other's Junagadh arguments ever since.
Hyderabad
The largest and richest princely state, ruled by the Nizam, with a Muslim ruling elite and a population around 85 percent Hindu.
The Nizam sought independence. A Standstill Agreement was signed in November 1947 to preserve the status quo for a year.
Two things then made the situation untenable. The Razakars, a private militia under Kasim Razvi attached to the Ittehad-ul-Muslimeen, grew to a large force and conducted widespread violence against villagers, particularly Hindus and communists. And the Telangana peasant rebellion — a communist-led armed movement against the state's landlord system — was in progress across large parts of the state and was being suppressed brutally.
In September 1948 India conducted "Operation Polo", described officially as a police action. Hyderabad's forces collapsed in five days and the Nizam surrendered.
What followed is the part that was suppressed for decades. Communal violence against Muslims in Hyderabad state after the takeover was severe. The Government of India commissioned an inquiry led by Pandit Sunderlal, which reported in 1949 and estimated deaths in the range of 27,000 to 40,000, with some other estimates running higher. The report was not published at the time and was released only decades later. This book states it because a chapter about national integration that omits it is incomplete.
Kashmir
The hardest case, and the one that never closed.
The situation in 1947. Jammu and Kashmir was a large state with a Hindu ruler, Maharaja Hari Singh, and a Muslim-majority population, bordering both India and Pakistan. Its most popular political leader, Sheikh Abdullah of the National Conference, was a Muslim who was politically close to Nehru and opposed to the Muslim League, and who had led a movement against the Maharaja's rule.
Hari Singh wanted independence and signed a Standstill Agreement with Pakistan while negotiating with both.
October 1947. Tribal militia from Pakistan's North-West Frontier, with support and organisation from Pakistani officials and army officers — a fact now acknowledged in Pakistani accounts — invaded Kashmir. They advanced toward Srinagar, and their advance was slowed by looting at Baramulla, where a massacre including at a Christian mission is documented.
On 26 October the Maharaja signed the Instrument of Accession to India. Indian troops were airlifted into Srinagar the following day and stopped the advance.
Three disputes about that moment persist. The exact date and sequence of the signature — whether accession preceded or followed the airlift — has been argued, and the documentary record supports accession on 26 October with the airlift on 27 October. Whether accession under invasion is valid — India says the ruler had the legal right, Pakistan says he had lost legitimacy. And the letter accompanying the acceptance, in which Mountbatten wrote that the question of accession should be settled by reference to the people once law and order were restored. India regards that as a policy statement, not a legal condition; Pakistan regards it as a binding commitment.
The war ran until the end of 1948.
On 1 January 1948 India referred the matter to the United Nations Security Council under Chapter VI, complaining of Pakistani aggression. This is the decision most criticised in India. The Council did not treat it as a simple case of aggression; it passed resolutions calling for a plebiscite — conditional on Pakistan first withdrawing all its forces and tribesmen, then India reducing its forces to the minimum, and only then a plebiscite.
The first condition was never met. Pakistan did not withdraw. So the plebiscite never happened, and each side blames the other for the failure of a condition that was genuinely sequenced.
A ceasefire took effect on 1 January 1949, leaving the Line of Control: India holding the Kashmir Valley, Jammu and Ladakh — roughly two-thirds of the territory — and Pakistan holding what it calls Azad Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan.
And China holds Aksai Chin, taken in 1962 (Chapter 6.24), plus the Shaksgam valley ceded to China by Pakistan in 1963.
Article 370
Kashmir's accession was accompanied by a special constitutional arrangement. Article 370 gave the state its own constitution, its own flag, and limited the Union Parliament's legislative power over it to the three acceded subjects plus whatever the state concurred in. Article 35A, added in 1954, allowed the state to define permanent residents and restrict property rights and government employment to them.
Its status was described in the Constitution itself as temporary. In practice it was eroded steadily by presidential orders over the following decades, so that by the 1980s a large part of the Union's legislative power applied anyway.
It was abrogated on 5 August 2019 by presidential order and parliamentary resolution, and the state was split into two Union Territories. The Supreme Court upheld the abrogation in December 2023. The arguments about its legality, its wisdom and its consequences are current politics, and this book records the sequence rather than adjudicating it.
Sheikh Abdullah, and what happened next
Abdullah became Prime Minister of the state in 1948 with Nehru's backing and implemented land reform that was among the most thorough in India — transferring land from large landlords to cultivators without compensation, which is why Kashmir has a relatively equal rural landholding structure to this day.
He was dismissed and arrested in 1953 on suspicion of moving toward independence, and spent much of the following two decades in detention. He and Nehru had been close personal friends.
That arrest is the point at which Kashmiri politics turned. The pattern that followed — dismissed governments, rigged elections, particularly the state election of 1987 — is widely identified by scholars as the direct cause of the armed insurgency that began in 1989.
The other integration: linguistic states
One more piece of national construction belongs here.
The Constitution's original state boundaries were the colonial provinces, which mixed languages arbitrarily.
Potti Sriramulu died in December 1952 after a 56-day fast demanding a Telugu-speaking state. Riots followed, and Andhra State was created in 1953.
The States Reorganisation Act of 1956 redrew the map on linguistic lines, and further divisions followed — Maharashtra and Gujarat in 1960, Punjab and Haryana in 1966.
Nehru had opposed this, fearing it would encourage fragmentation. The outcome suggests he was wrong: giving language groups their own states removed the grievance rather than feeding it, and India's linguistic diversity has not produced secession, while the countries that suppressed linguistic identity — Pakistan with Bengali, most obviously — did face it. Chapter 13.3 treats this as a general finding about federal design.
Where this shows up in your life
The map of India is Patel's work, and the Statue of Unity, the tallest statue in the world, was built in Gujarat in 2018 in his memory — which is itself a political statement about which founder is being emphasised.
Kashmir is the reason India and Pakistan have fought three of their four wars, maintain nuclear arsenals aimed at each other, and have one of the most militarised borders on Earth. Chapter 6.26 covers the wars.
And the counterfactual is worth holding. The integration was completed in about two years, mostly by negotiation, with two brief military operations and one unresolved case. Compared with the alternative — a subcontinent of hundreds of statelets, or a series of secession wars — it is one of the most successful pieces of state-building in the twentieth century, and it is routinely underrated because it worked.
What the next page covers
India fought China in 1962 and Pakistan in 1947, 1965, 1971 and 1999. Chapter 6.26 covers those wars — what each was about, how each was fought, what each settled and what it did not, the creation of Bangladesh, the nuclear tests of 1974 and 1998, and Kargil. It is also where the question of what India's military position actually is gets answered with numbers rather than slogans.