A Word’s Eye View: Josy Joseph Traces The 21 Days That Stitched India Together

At first glance in the bookshop, I wondered if I should pick up the book. After all, the story had been told in quite detail earlier. The most important of those books was “The Integration of Indian States,” by V P Menon. He was Vallabhbhai Patel’s factotum and Secretary of the States Department. His book detailed the challenges the Dominion of India (as it was at the time of Independence) faced in integrating 562 princely states.

These princely states controlled almost two-fifths of India’s area and a quarter of her population. Without their accession to India, the nation couldn’t have survived. V P Menon played a pivotal role in the integration of these states. (On a separate note, since the current government is in the habit of conferring Bharat Ratna posthumously, I can never understand why V P Menon has not been so honoured).

Coming back to the book, I glanced at the author’s name – Josy Joseph. I know him as a senior journalist, a serious researcher, and a writer. His earlier two books were groundbreaking. “A Feast of Vultures: The Hidden Business of Democracy in India” examined corporate-political cronyism. “The Silent Coup: A History of India’s Deep State” exposed how the deep state operates entirely outside parliamentary oversight. (Pick them up and read them, if you haven’t).

If Josy Joseph was writing the book, I had to read it. And the author doesn’t disappoint. V P Menon was central to the saga and had extensive personal interactions with figures like Mountbatten, Nehru and Patel. His book therefore gives a top-level view. Joseph, relying on archival records, follows what can only be described as an investigative journalist’s approach.

He provides us with rich details about the intrigues of the princes like the Nawab of Bhopal, the Maharaja of Indore, the Nizam of Hyderabad, the Jamsaheb of Navanagar, the ruler of Junagadh, the Maharaja of Baroda and officials like Sir C P Ramaswami Iyer, the formidable Dewan of the princely state of Travancore and Sir Conrad Corfield, the pro-royalist head of the British Political Department.

While some of this has been written about earlier, Joseph also highlights the little-known roles of patriotic officers like R V M D Iyengar, a civil servant operating as a deep-cover mole inside the Nizam of Hyderabad's inner cabinet. Iyengar fed intelligence to the States Department in New Delhi on the Nizam’s clandestine attempts to secure European armaments. According to Joseph, Iyengar’s role was so secret that even his descendants did not know about it.

Joseph begins his book by describing an assassination attempt on the life of C P Ramaswami Iyer. Iyer survived the machete attack, but it broke his determination to keep Travancore and other defiant princely states out of the Indian Union. This opened the floodgates, and all the dominoes fell, except, as we well know, for Hyderabad, Junagadh and Kashmir. Nawab of Bhopal signed the instrument of accession on August 14, 1947, but, by prior arrangement, asked Mountbatten not to disclose the fact of his signing till August 25, in case he changed his mind. Of course, that never happened.

Was the Congress behind the attack on Iyer? We will never know, and Joseph doesn’t say. But knowing what a hard-headed realist Sardar Patel was, you can’t help but wonder.

One highlight of Joseph’s book is that he also focuses on how far-flung areas like the North East were integrated and how this has left scars that continue to torment India to this day. V P Menon glossed over some of these, but to be fair, I think he focused more on the challenges posed by the bigger princely states.

Joseph also spends a lot of time discussing the problems of Kathiawar estates and thanas. This was an ungodly mess in terms of administration and jurisdiction. The region spanned over 60,000 square kilometres and had an 800-kilometre coastline. Almost 222 of the 562 princely states were in this region alone, some no bigger than a few villages, with annual revenue of a few hundred rupees. The map of Kathiawar was divided into about 860 different jurisdictions, with territories often scattered and interlaced. This fragmentation led to significant administrative and economic difficulties.

In 1943, the British tried to address this problem through the Attachment Scheme, under which these smaller entities were “attached” to larger princely states like Baroda, Navanagar, and Junagadh. Not surprisingly, the bigger states welcomed the scheme because it extended their power, but the smaller estates and thanas bitterly resented it.

Joseph details the yeoman work done by the States Ministry officials like Kumar Shri Baneshinji, M L Buch and freedom fighters like U N Dhebar (who went on to become the first chief minister of Saurashtra) in sorting out this mess.

The author also makes some sensational revelations. According to the book, to tackle the unsettled condition prevailing in the country at the time of Partition, General Cariappa (later Field Marshal) and one of the two most revered chiefs of the Indian Army (the other being Field Marshal Sam Manekshaw) actively considered a military coup! Lord Ismay, Mountbatten’s Chief of Staff, thankfully, talked him out of it.

Given the huge geographic expanse, and the simultaneous developments all round, the book moves back and forth chronologically. It takes a bit of getting used to, but as a reader you realise that it is inevitable.

Every time I read about this era, the mind boggles at all that was achieved in so little time. Remember that it was on July 25, 1947, that Mountbatten announced August 15, 1947, as the date for the end of British rule over India. In these three weeks (the 21 days from the title of the book), Nehru, Patel, Menon, and scores of others stitched together a nation that has not only survived but also thrived for almost eight decades. As Indians, we should be eternally grateful that such giants were in the right place at the right time.

But here is an almost logical follow-up question. Do you think today’s political leaders (of whichever hue) or the officials are capable of tackling such complex challenges? And if not, who is to blame? Them for their shortcomings or us for putting them in power?

Book: Birth of a Nation: The Twenty-One Days That Made India

Author: Josy Joseph

Publisher: Westland Books

Pages: 799

Price: 264