Dethroned #4: Tale of Some States

Since I’ve already covered Junagadh, Hyderabad and Kashmir in other blogs, I won’t repeat the tales of those princely states in this series. In this one, I’ll cover a few of the other states though.

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Travancore. A well-run princely state. With access to the main trades of the Indian Ocean. Resource rich – teak, sandalwood, tea, spices, rubber, mica. 47% literacy (three times higher than British India). Progressive in many ways. Plus, it had the world’s second largest monazite reserves. What’s that? A rare earth whose by-product was thorium, a nuclear fuel. Very important in a world that had just entered the atomic age.

 

Thus, it was a good candidate for independence post-Britain, writes John Zubrzycki in Dethroned. Unsurprisingly, its dewan, CP Ramaswami Aiyar, announced to do just that. Nehru threatened an economic blockade and promised Travancore would collapse within 3 months. In response, Travancore banned the Congress from the state.

 

On the monazite reserves, Nehru had been proactive. He had already passed a directive that all minerals needed to produce nuclear power would belong to the Indian union. Aiyar was in a dilemma – while monazite would help him gain Western support to make Travancore independent (they could then buy the mineral for themselves), it also risked crossing the Rubicon with India/Nehru. Aiyar backed off on the monazite topic.

 

Then Patel and VP Menon stepped in. They pointed out communism was taking seed in his state. If Travancore went independent, they would get zero support from Delhi should an uprising happen. And also threatened (warned?) that his life would be in danger if he continued to pursue independence. Mountbatten urged Aiyar to do the “patriotic” thing. Aiyar refused to budge. Upon his return to Trivandrum, he was stabbed with wounds to the head. Realizing how far India was willing to go (and Mountbatten would look the other way), he urged the maharaja to join India. Ten days later, the maharaja had signed the Letter of Accession to India.

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Indore. Its ruler, Yashwant Rao Holkar, taxed the patience of all sides the most of all. He had a tortured personal life and tended to live abroad for long periods. Hardly the candidate for a ruler. The British too considered him a “most unsatisfactory ruler” and pressurized him to sign the Instrument of Accession.

 

But he stalled in every possible way, including pretending not to be in the palace when the British representatives came calling. In frustration, Mountbatten even suggested to the Congress to let Indore stay independent. It will surely fail under such an incompetent ruler, Mountbatten said, and India could cite it as an “example of what happens to States that try and stand on their own”.

 

Patel didn’t have the patience. He threatened to “starve you out”. Holkar responded by telling Nehru that with such threats, he was going to consider Pakistan’s offer to join them instead. Soon though, Holkar caved in, and a signed Instrument of Accession (to India) was delivered to Menon’s office.

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Gwalior. Its ruler, George Jiwajirao Scindia, begged Menon to let the state be independent based on its size and its sound finances. He pleaded for a vote by the people of the state – surely, in a democracy, people should get to choose. He was that confident that he would win any such referendum.

 

Menon asked Scindia and his wife, Vijayaraje, come to Delhi. Neither of the Scindia’s wanted to join India, but Menon wore them down and Vijayaraje’s “progressive outlook” worked to his advantage. Vijayaraje, who would go on to become a prominent politician of India, had grave concerns how a well governed state like Gwalior would fare under “Congress nominees” but she, as she said later, “lapsed into good manners and smiled bravely”.

 

The two kingdoms were to be merged (along with others) into Madhya Bharat. Jiwajirao was promised the role of rajpramukh for life; and Yashwant the role of uprajpramukh for life. Their privy purses amount were also far larger than that of most of the other princes who signed up.

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Rajputana. Its mostly Rajput rulers were fairly popular with their subjects. And fiercely independence-leaning. All discussions to unify them into a single state led to argument on who would be rajpramukh, which would be the capital.

“It would take a dozen mini-mergers before the Rajasthan that appears on today’s maps came into existence.”

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Patel is often called the “Bismark of India” for cajoling a “group of scattered and disparate princedoms into giving up their sovereignty and creating a cohesive nation state”. What is forgotten, as one Internet meme reminds us, Germany took 9 years to unit 39 states; Italy took 23 years states to unite 9 states while Patel and Menon, the “diminutive Malayali”, took 18 months to unite 560 states. And the way it was done led Kruschchev, the Soviet premier, to wonder:

“How did you manage to liquidate the princely states without liquidating the princes?”