The Story of the Integration of the Indian States by V.P. Menon

The country trod the path of economic progress only when Nehru’s policies were thrown out with contempt in the liberalization era. V P Menon tells the story of that heroic effort that has not received the grateful attention of India because the state machinery was bent upon conferring on Nehru the laughable epithet of the architect of modern India. With patience, tact, compromise and a little bit of coercion when all else failed, the states were eventually pulled under the wings of the Indian republic.

They tamed the quarrelsome princes and convinced them of the need first to accede to India and then to merge their states with others or British Indian provinces. But Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel and Vappala Pangunny Menon, his adviser and secretary to the States ministry achieved the impossible in such a short time. Nobody could have imagined that all these principalities would be merged into a single union within two years – a blink of an eye as far as national timescales are concerned. The bigger provinces were under direct British rule, but the native princely states, which were 554 in number, were scattered over the entire area. When India became independent, the country was a kaleidoscope of small and large states of various hues and shades. Menon was given the title of Rao Bahadur, appointed a CIE in the 1941 Birthday Honours and a CSI in the 1946 Birthday Honours. When the husband died, Menon married his widow. The couple had actually arranged his marriage and helped raise his two sons - Pangunni Anantan Menon and Pangunni Shankaran Menon. In Patrick French's book, India - a portrait, it is mentioned that VP Menon moved in with his Keralite friends after his wife left him and returned to south India.

In 1946, he was appointed Political Reforms Commissioner to the British Viceroy.

By working assiduously, Menon rose through the ranks to become the highest serving Indian officer in British India. The son of a school headmaster in Kerala, Menon worked as a railway stoker, coal miner and Bangalore tobacco company clerk before gaining a junior post in the Indian Civil Service. Menon, was an Indian civil servant who played a vital role during the partition of India and the integration of independent India, from the period 1945-1950.

Rao Bahadur Vappala Pangunni Menon CSI, CIE (30 September 1893 - 31 December 1965), also known as V.

The Story of the Integration of the Indian States by V.P. Menon