(On the Princely States and the Art of Holding a Country Together)New Delhi — Late 1948
Unity is often mistaken for agreement.
In truth, unity is the decision to stop resisting.
India's map had been redrawn on paper, but on the ground it was still stitched together with hesitation. The princely states were spoken of as "integrated," yet integration was not a moment—it was a condition that had to be maintained daily.
The danger was not rebellion.
It was memory.
The princes had signed because history had cornered them. Some believed in India. Others believed in survival. A few believed they were merely waiting out a weak central government that would one day bargain again.
If we treated them as defeated men, they would behave like humiliated ones.
If we treated them as equals, we would fracture authority.
The path between those errors was narrow.
And it required restraint more than strength.
The first decision was what not to touch.
Titles were not abolished immediately. Ceremonial allowances were maintained. Public humiliation was avoided—not out of kindness, but calculation. Pride attacked openly becomes resistance. Pride left alone decays quietly.
We did not rush to rewrite customs.
We rewrote revenue flows.
The moment fiscal authority moved to the center, real power followed without confrontation. A ruler who cannot raise money governs only by memory.
And memory fades faster than anger.
Patel favored decisiveness.
I favored absorption.
So we divided the task.
Patel handled refusal.I handled aftermath.
Where resistance lingered, the response was administrative—not political. A state delayed integration? A transport permit stalled. A grant paused. A procedural requirement enforced.
Nothing dramatic.
Nothing deniable.
The message was never spoken aloud—but it was understood.
India would not punish defiance loudly.
It would outlast it.
The greatest mistake would have been to replace one elite with another.
So we did something unfashionable.
We co-opted competence.
Former princely administrators who knew irrigation systems, land records, and judicial customs were retained—not rewarded, not celebrated, simply retained.
Loyalty was not demanded.
Performance was.
This confused everyone.
Those who expected purges felt betrayed.
Those who expected privilege felt diminished.
Both reactions were useful.
Uncertainty discourages conspiracy.
Culturally, we moved slower than activists wanted.
Flags changed. Laws changed. But rituals were allowed to dissolve naturally. We did not instruct people how to remember their past.
We let the present become louder than nostalgia.
Children attending central schools learned a different geography than their parents had lived.
That was enough.
Privately, I worried most about language.
Not the politics of it—the emotion.
States that felt culturally erased would one day reassert themselves, not as separatists, but as victims. That story is harder to counter than rebellion.
So federalism was not merely tolerated.
It was emphasized.
States were encouraged to govern visibly—within a framework that made secession impractical.
Autonomy was given just enough space to breathe.
Not enough to run.
There were moments of doubt.
Reports of quiet defiance. Rumors of coordination. Grievances dressed as grievances but rooted in loss of relevance.
Each time, the answer was the same.
Patience.
Time is the most underestimated weapon of stable states.
One evening, reviewing accession documents again—not as treaties, but as psychology—I wrote a sentence I never spoke aloud:
"A nation survives not when everyone agrees to belong—but when leaving stops feeling possible."
That was the true measure of integration.
Not loyalty.
Irreversibility.
By the end of 1948, the princely states no longer occupied my daily attention.
That was success.
They had become administrative units instead of historical questions.
No ceremonies marked the transition.
No speeches commemorated it.
Unity, achieved properly, does not announce itself.
It simply stops being discussed.
This was the first rule.
Hold the country together without humiliating those who once stood apart.
The next rule would be harder.
Because it required disciplining not pride—
but power itself.