Sardar Patel and V. P. Menon Turned 554 Princely States Into 14 Administrative Units, and Offered the Rulers a Tax-Free Privy Purse to Sign

The number of princely states in 1947 depends on who counted. The White Paper the Ministry of States issued in 1950 says the Butler Committee and the Simon Commission applied the word “State” to 562 units. Lord Mountbatten told the rulers on 25 July 1947 that there were “something like 565”, and V. P. Menon’s tally of the states his ministry merged comes to 554. On 15 August 1947 the legal tie between all of them and the British Crown lapsed.

This piece follows the mechanics, state by state, using Menon’s 1956 book and that White Paper. The man and the monument built in his name are covered in our article on the Statue of Unity.

Why the count is 562, 565 or 554

The 562 comes with a breakdown. The White Paper reports the Butler Committee’s grouping: 108 states whose rulers sat in the Chamber of Princes in their own right, 127 more represented by twelve elected members of the Chamber, and 327 estates, jagirs (land grants held on a ruler’s terms) and similar holdings. Those add to 562.

Size varied wildly. According to the same paper, 202 states each covered less than 10 square miles, while 15 were larger than 10,000. After the partition of British India, the states geographically contiguous to India covered 687,949 square miles, about 48 per cent of the new Dominion’s area, with roughly 89 million people.

Menon’s closing chapters count 554 states integrated. The figures differ by source, so each one below carries its source.

What lapsed on 15 August 1947

Section 7(1)(b) of the Indian Independence Act 1947 says “the suzerainty of His Majesty over the Indian States lapses, and with it, all treaties and agreements in force”. Paramountcy was the Crown’s overriding authority over the states. The Cabinet Mission’s memorandum of 16 May 1946 had already said it could not be handed to a successor government, in Menon’s account.

A proviso in the same section kept customs, transit, communications and posts and telegraphs arrangements running until either side ended them or new agreements replaced them. Beyond that, each ruler was free to join India, join Pakistan, or try to stay apart.

Six weeks, 5 July to 15 August

The States Department was set up on 5 July 1947 under Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, with Menon as its secretary. Patel issued a statement on 5 July, drafted by Menon, asking the rulers for accession on only three subjects: defence, external affairs and communications. He wrote that it was “better for us to make laws sitting together as friends than to make treaties as aliens”.

The legal tool was the Instrument of Accession. The White Paper says accession on the three subjects carried no financial liability for the state. The full instrument went to the 140 or so rulers who exercised full powers, Menon writes, and separate forms were drawn up for estates, talukas and intermediate states. The Standstill Agreement kept existing arrangements on matters of common concern in force while new ones were made, and the government made it conditional on accession. Menon adds that rulers who would not sign the instrument were refused a Standstill Agreement.

Mountbatten’s address to the Chamber of Princes on 25 July 1947 supplied the deadline. “If you are prepared to come, you must come before 15 August,” Menon records him saying, and he added that rulers could not run away from the Dominion Government “which is your neighbour”. By 15 August, the White Paper says, every state within India’s geographical limits had acceded except Hyderabad, Kashmir and Junagadh.

Travancore, Bhopal and Jodhpur

Menon gives three cases as the hard ones before the deadline. Sir C. P. Ramaswami Aiyar of Travancore announced soon after the 3 June plan that the state would assert its independence when power was transferred. Then Sir C. P. was wounded in a personal attack, and the Maharajah telegraphed Mountbatten accepting the Instrument of Accession and the Standstill Agreement. Menon gives no date for the attack.

The Nawab of Bhopal had led, with the Maharajah of Indore, the rulers who most strongly opposed accession. He signed on condition that his signature stay secret for ten days after the transfer of power. His letter to Patel said, “Now that I have conceded defeat”, and Patel’s reply, in Menon’s text, was that it was right and propriety that had triumphed in the end.

In Jodhpur, Maharajah Hanwant Singh met Jinnah. Menon writes that he was told Jinnah gave the maharajah a signed blank sheet of paper and said he could fill in all his conditions. The Maharajkumar of Jaisalmer then told Hanwant Singh he would not side with Muslims against Hindus if communal trouble came, which surprised him. Back in Jodhpur, Mountbatten and Menon pressed him, Menon conceded some of his demands in a letter, and he signed. Menon also records that the maharajah drew a revolver at one point, and that his own reply was “Don’t indulge in juvenile theatricals.”

Junagadh, Hyderabad and Kashmir

Junagadh was the one case that ended at a ballot box. Its Nawab, Sir Mahabatkhan Rasulkhanji, ruled 670,719 people on 3,337 square miles, and the 1941 census made more than 80 per cent of them Hindu, Menon writes. His government announced accession to Pakistan on 15 August 1947.

On 17 September the Indian Cabinet decided to post troops around the state without occupying it. The Nawab left for Karachi towards the end of October, and the Junagadh administration was handed to the Government of India on 9 November 1947. The plebiscite followed on 20 February 1948, under Indian administration. Of 201,457 registered voters, 190,870 voted, and 91 voted for Pakistan. Separate polls the same day in Mangrol, Manavadar, Babariawad, Bantwa and Sardargarh gave 39 votes for Pakistan out of 31,434 cast.

Hyderabad, with nearly 16 million people, more than 82,000 square miles and a revenue of Rs 26 crore, signed a Standstill Agreement on 29 November 1947 but never an Instrument of Accession. Indian troops entered on 13 September 1948, the state’s army surrendered on the evening of 17 September, and on 23 November 1949 the Nizam issued a firman accepting the Constitution of India as Hyderabad’s, per Menon. Jammu and Kashmir had not acceded by 15 August either, and how it joined is told in our account of the first Kashmir war.

From 554 states to fourteen units

Menon’s tally, in his chapter on administrative consolidation, runs as follows. Of 554 states, Hyderabad and Mysore were left territorially untouched. 216 were merged into provinces. Five were taken over individually as Chief Commissioners’ provinces, and 21 Punjab Hill States made up Himachal Pradesh. 310 were consolidated into six unions, of which Vindhya Pradesh was later converted into a Chief Commissioner’s province. “In the place of 554 States,” Menon writes, “fourteen administrative units had emerged.” The White Paper groups them differently: 216 merged into provinces, 61 centrally administered and 275 in unions.

The sequence began in the east. The Orissa and Chhattisgarh rulers had formed an Eastern States Union of their own, which the Government of India refused to recognise and dissolved. Rulers signed merger agreements at Cuttack and Nagpur on 14 and 15 December 1947. In a statement dated 16 December, Patel put the stakes at some 56,000 square miles, about 8 million people and a gross revenue of about Rs 2 crore.

Kathiawar, the peninsula of Gujarat, held 222 states and estates, the White Paper says. They became a union that Patel inaugurated on 15 February 1948, renamed the United State of Saurashtra in November 1948. Junagadh joined it in January 1949.

In the north-west, the Matsya Union of Alwar, Bharatpur, Dholpur and Karauli was inaugurated on 18 March 1948. A first Rajasthan union of nine states followed on 25 March 1948, grew to include Udaipur on 18 April 1948, and became Greater Rajasthan with Jaipur, Jodhpur, Bikaner and Jaisalmer on 30 March 1949. Menon puts the finished Rajasthan union at about 128,000 square miles and nearly 15.3 million people, the biggest of the unions. Rajputana, the land of the Rajput kingdoms, had 19 salute states (rulers entitled to a gun salute) and 3 non-salute ones, Menon writes.

Madhya Bharat was inaugurated by Jawaharlal Nehru on 28 May 1948, at nearly 47,000 square miles and over 7 million people. The Patiala and East Punjab States Union, PEPSU, joined eight states under a covenant signed on 5 May 1948 and was inaugurated on 15 July 1948. Each union had a former ruler as its head, called a Rajpramukh: the Maharaja of Gwalior in Madhya Bharat, the Maharaja of Patiala in PEPSU and the Maharaja of Jaipur in Rajasthan, each for life.

Persuasion, pressure and the Kashmir argument

Whether this was consent or coercion depends on whose account one reads, and both are on the record. The White Paper and Menon describe signed instruments and covenants. Menon’s own pages also record troops posted around Junagadh, an army marching into Hyderabad and a Nawab who “conceded defeat”. John Zubrzycki’s 2023 book Dethroned, in its publisher’s description, says the states were “coaxed, coerced, outmaneuvered or bludgeoned into joining India” and that what Patel and Menon called a “bloodless revolution” was anything but.

Kashmir is the contested ground between Patel and Nehru. Srinath Raghavan argued in ThePrint in 2018, drawing on declassified documents, that both leaders were closely involved in Junagadh, Hyderabad and Kashmir. In his reading Patel at first opposed taking Kashmir to the United Nations, was open until late 1947 to Kashmir going to Pakistan if Pakistan helped bring Hyderabad to India, and by mid-1948 agreed with Nehru that dividing the state along the military lines was the realistic settlement. The opposing claim, reported by The Quint, is that Prime Minister Narendra Modi told the Lok Sabha on 7 February 2018 that all of Kashmir would have been India’s had Patel been the first prime minister. The Quint’s fact-check says the commentators it consulted held that Patel was not eager for Kashmir to accede to India.

Pavan Kumar, writing in Strategic Analysis in 2023, describes the public argument as running between blaming Nehru for Article 370 and presenting Patel as its real architect, and tests both against the documents.

The privy purse and the day it ended

The rulers who signed mergers were given a privy purse, a fixed annual payment. Menon calls some such return elementary justice for states surrendered for all time. The sums were set by formula from a state’s revenue in 1945 to 1946. In the Eastern States formula, a ruler received 15 per cent of the first Rs 1 lakh (100,000 rupees) of revenue and 10 per cent of the next Rs 4 lakh, with a lower rate above that and a ceiling of Rs 10 lakh. The Deccan States formula paid 15 per cent on the first Rs 5 lakh, 10 per cent on the next Rs 5 lakh and a lower rate above Rs 10 lakh, with a minimum of Rs 50,000.

Kathiawar’s rulers asked for 20 per cent of gross revenue. Menon says the States Ministry refused and used the Deccan formula with a cap of Rs 10 lakh. The purses were free of all taxes and were to continue to the rulers’ successors, and the covenants guaranteed them. In his statement of 16 December 1947, Patel said of the Orissa and Chhattisgarh rulers, “These Princes have by their act of abnegation purchased in perpetuity their right to claim the devotion of their people.”

In October 1949 the Minister for States told the Constituent Assembly that annual commitments came to about Rs 4.5 crore. A footnote in the White Paper puts the figure at about Rs 5.8 crore once later agreements, including those with Hyderabad and Mysore, were counted. Article 291 of the Constitution charged the purses to the Consolidated Fund of India.

Parliament ended them with the Constitution (Twenty-sixth Amendment) Act, dated 28 December 1971. It omitted Articles 291 and 362 and inserted Article 363A, whose first clause ends recognition of the former rulers and whose second says “privy purse is abolished and all rights, liabilities and obligations in respect of privy purse are extinguished”. The Statement of Objects and Reasons, signed by Indira Gandhi on 31 July 1971, said rulership with privy purses and special privileges unconnected to any current function did not fit an egalitarian social order. The amendment came a little over 24 years after Patel’s statement of 5 July 1947.