The second volume of Justice S N Aggarwal's study of Sardar Patel's unification work turns to the questions that Volume 1 left open: the northeast, the privy purse, and the Hyderabad operation in full detail. These were not clean administrative matters — they were fought over at every level, and Patel's concern that the princely states would be denied constitutional protections (a concern Indira Gandhi vindicated by abolishing the privy purse in the early 1970s) runs through the narrative as a warning about what was at stake.
Aggarwal draws on official documents, quoting many verbatim, to build arguments with the precision his legal background demands. The book traces how Patel managed the northeastern states — where the diversity of political arrangements made the task far more complex than the accessions in the rest of the country — and why the Hyderabad episode, often reduced to a military police action, was considerably more fraught in its politics.
For researchers and students seeking primary-document grounding, or for anyone who wants to understand what chakravartin means applied to a democratic statesman, this volume completes the picture.
India's independence from the British on August 15, 1947, was preceded by its partition on religious lines having a murky history of dangerous antics and shenanigans of the likes of Muslim League, Jinnah and others; supported, either by accident or design, by Congress and its leadership. That Nehru failed miserably to control the situation, in which there was bloodshed, communal hatred, brutalization of women and loss of India's territory, is a well-known story. The question is what would have been the status of India's political borders had, say, Nehru been in charge of 'unifying' India - that is bringing together more than 500 princely states within the Indian union? We could well have been left to wishful thinking - "Had Sardar been the in-charge of the department handling unification of princely states within the Indian union". This book, a well-researched document, takes the reader step-by-step on how Sardar went after the task; and how diligently he completed them. Of course, the story of Hyderabad and Junagarh is slightly more well-known. But do you know how Chhattisgarh and Orissa (now Odisha), or even Lunavada (in Gujarat), Deccan States and so many others were included in the Indian union? Do we today ever realise that these states were 'not part of independent India'? That is why we say it is not only a book for history enthusiasts but all students, who ought to know the real political map of our country when it became independent.
