Indian History Quiz: Integration of the Princely States

The correct answer is B, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel. The States Department was set up in early July 1947, weeks before independence, and Patel took charge of it as Deputy Prime Minister and Home Minister, with V. P. Menon as its Secretary. In little more than a year the department secured the accession of around 565 states and then merged most of them into provinces or unions of states. Option A is wrong: Nehru as Prime Minister handled foreign affairs and dealt personally with Kashmir, but the department was not his. Option C is wrong: C. Rajagopalachari became Governor-General in 1948 and later Chief Minister of Madras, and had no charge of the states question. Option D is wrong: Maulana Azad was Education Minister in the first cabinet. The work earned Patel the titles Iron Man of India and Bismarck of India, and his birth anniversary on 31 October is observed as National Unity Day.

The correct answer is A, defence, external affairs and communications. The Instrument of Accession was kept deliberately narrow so that a ruler could sign it without feeling that he had surrendered his state, and all other powers stayed with him for the time being. Option B is wrong: taxation and police remained with the states at the stage of accession, and were brought under common administration only through the later merger agreements. Option C names the matters covered not by the Instrument but by the Standstill Agreement, which continued existing arrangements on customs, currency, posts and railways until new ones were settled. Option D lists subjects that were never part of the document; they were and remain largely provincial or state subjects. The point to remember is the two-step process: a narrow accession in 1947, and the real integration into provinces, unions of states and centrally administered areas in 1948 and 1949.

The correct answer is B, V. P. Menon. As Secretary of the States Department he drafted the Instrument of Accession and the Standstill Agreement, travelled from court to court to collect signatures, and wrote the standard first-hand account of the episode, The Story of the Integration of the Indian States. Option A, H. M. Patel, was a senior civil servant who worked on the partition arrangements and later became a finance minister, but not on the states. Option C, K. M. Munshi, was a member of the Constituent Assembly and of its Drafting Committee, and was the agent-general in Hyderabad during the crisis, a related but different role. Option D, B. N. Rau, was the Constitutional Adviser to the Constituent Assembly, who prepared the first draft of the Constitution. Pairing Patel as the political head with Menon as the official head is the form in which this question is usually set.

The correct answer is B, Operation Polo. The Nizam of Hyderabad, Mir Osman Ali Khan, had signed a Standstill Agreement in November 1947 and then delayed accession while the Razakar militia under Kasim Razvi attacked villagers. The Government of India launched the police action from 13 to 18 September 1948, after which the Nizam acceded and became Rajpramukh of the state. Option A, Operation Vijay, was the action of December 1961 that ended Portuguese rule in Goa, Daman and Diu, and the name was used again in 1999 for the Kargil operations. Option C, Operation Meghdoot, was the 1984 operation on the Siachen glacier. Option D, Operation Cactus, was the Indian intervention in the Maldives in 1988. Examiners very often offer Operation Polo and Operation Vijay together, so fix the pairing of Polo with Hyderabad in 1948 and Vijay with Goa in 1961.

The correct answer is B, 26 October 1947. The Maharaja had hoped to stay out of both dominions and had signed a standstill arrangement, but when tribal raiders supported from across the border entered the valley and advanced towards Srinagar in late October 1947 he asked India for military help. India made accession the condition, the Instrument was signed on 26 October, and troops were airlifted to Srinagar the next day. Option A is wrong because no accession was signed on the day of independence; that is the date on which paramountcy lapsed. Option C, 26 January 1948, is close to the date the Constitution came into force two years later and has nothing to do with Kashmir. Option D, 17 September 1948, falls inside the Hyderabad police action, and is remembered in Telangana in connection with that event, not with Kashmir. The accession was later reflected in Article 370.

The correct answer is C. The Act let paramountcy lapse with effect from 15 August 1947, so in strict law every princely state became free either to accede to India, to accede to Pakistan, or to attempt to remain outside both. That is why the States Department had to obtain a signed Instrument of Accession from each ruler rather than simply inherit authority over them. Option A is the commonest wrong answer, and it is wrong precisely because no transfer took place; India's authority over a state came from the ruler's own accession. Option B is wrong for the same reason, and the Act drew a boundary between the two dominions without dividing paramountcy. Option D is wrong because the Act set no such period; the Chamber of Princes created in 1921 simply ceased to matter. The lapse is the fact on which statement-based questions in this chapter usually turn.

The correct answer is A, a plebiscite held in February 1948. The Nawab of Junagadh, Mahabat Khan III, announced accession to Pakistan in September 1947 although his small state in Kathiawar was surrounded by Indian territory and had a largely Hindu population. Popular resistance followed, the Nawab left for Karachi, and after the administration was taken over a plebiscite was held in February 1948 in which the vote for India was overwhelming. Option B describes Hyderabad, where Operation Polo ran from 13 to 18 September 1948. Option C is wrong because the Radcliffe Boundary Commission drew the line between India and Pakistan in Punjab and Bengal and had no role in the princely states. Option D is wrong: the referendum of the 1950s that students sometimes recall is the vote in the Chandernagore settlement, and 1956 is the year of the States Reorganisation Act, not of any vote in Junagadh.

The correct answer is B, the Patiala and East Punjab States Union. It was formed in 1948 by grouping Patiala with Kapurthala, Jind, Nabha, Faridkot, Malerkotla, Nalagarh and Kalsia, with the Maharaja of Patiala as Rajpramukh, and it became a Part B state under the Constitution of 1950. PEPSU was merged into Punjab in 1956 when the States Reorganisation Act ended the four-part classification. Options A, C and D are plausible-looking expansions built from the same words, and that is exactly how the question is set; each of them misstates either the first element, which is the state of Patiala, or the second, which is East Punjab. Remember PEPSU alongside the other unions of states created in the same years, Saurashtra from the Kathiawar states, Rajasthan from the Rajputana states, Madhya Bharat from the central Indian states and Travancore-Cochin in the south.

The correct answer is B, Part B states. These were the former princely units and unions of states, among them Hyderabad, Mysore, Rajasthan, Saurashtra, Madhya Bharat, Travancore-Cochin, PEPSU and Jammu and Kashmir, and each was headed by a Rajpramukh rather than by a Governor. Option A, Part A states, were the former governors' provinces of British India, such as Bombay, Madras, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, each with a Governor and an elected legislature. Option C, Part C states, were the former chief commissioners' provinces and some smaller princely areas, including Delhi, Himachal Pradesh, Vindhya Pradesh, Ajmer, Coorg, Manipur and Tripura, administered by a Chief Commissioner or Lieutenant Governor. Option D, Part D, held only the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. The whole scheme was abolished by the States Reorganisation Act, 1956, which replaced it with states and union territories.

The correct answer is B, the 36th Constitutional Amendment Act, 1975. It made Sikkim the twenty-second state of the Union after a referendum in which its people voted to end the rule of the Chogyal and to join India. Option A, the 35th Amendment of 1974, is the near miss the examiner relies on: it gave Sikkim the intermediate status of an associate state of the Union, a status that existed only for that one year. Option C, the 42nd Amendment of 1976, is the sweeping amendment of the Emergency years that added the words socialist, secular and integrity to the Preamble and created the Fundamental Duties. Option D, the 44th Amendment of 1978, reversed many of those changes and replaced internal disturbance with armed rebellion as a ground for a national emergency. Sikkim had been an Indian protectorate since 1950.

The correct answer is D, none of the above. The princely states were not a small fringe of the map. Standard accounts place their share at roughly two-fifths of the land area of the subcontinent, and some put it close to a half, with around a quarter of the population; about 565 states of every size, from Hyderabad and Kashmir down to estates of a few villages, lay between and around the British provinces. Option A, one-third, is the figure students most often guess and it understates the true extent. Option B, one-fourth, is nearer to the share of population than of area, which is where the confusion comes from. Option C, one-tenth, is far too small and would describe only a handful of the larger states. Because every fraction offered falls short of the accepted range, the paper marks the fourth option as correct. The lesson is to carry one bearing in memory: more than a third, nearer two-fifths.