When Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel got signatures of princely states at Cuttack railway station

NEW DELHI: India’s first deputy prime minister and home minister Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, called the ‘Iron Man of India’, is remembered perhaps most for the manner in which he united the country by integrating 562 princely states soon after Independence.
The country celebrates Sardar Patel’s 144th birth anniversary as ‘National Unity Day’ today. It is also a day when nullification of Article 370 and Article 35A of the Constitution changing the status of Jammu and Kashmir and creation of Ladakh as a separate Union Territory (UT) come into effect.
Here is an interesting anecdote about the manner in which Sardar Patel set off integrating the princely states one by one.Sardar Patel had himself described the process of merger. The audio recording of his speech was played at the function near Statue of Unity at in Kevadia in Gujarat where Prime Minister Narendra Modi dedicated nullification of Article 370 to the ‘Iron Man of India’.
Speaking in the State Advisory Board meeting at Nagpur on November 4, 1948, he said, “I want to put forth before you how I thought of uniting the princely states and merging them with India.”
After he accepted the post of home minister in the Indian government, he was not aware that the job of [merging] the princely states was going to come before him. “Or, [I also did not know] the shape this merger would take, what should be done about the princely states and how to make use of them. I was thinking about these aspects,” he said.
The occasion came about four months after Independence. “You saw when time came, I went to Orissa [Odisha] in December last year [1947]. I called all the kings of Orissa's princely states. For several hours, I spoke with them. I tried to impress upon them to merge their princely states with India. But they were hesitant, he said.
Sardar Patel further said the kings were not sure whether they should merge their princely states with India or not. “Finally, I told them if you want to sign the treaty of accession, you should do it after due consideration. I told them that I was not pressuring them. If you want time, take it. I told them that I would accept their signatures only after they considered it as their responsibility,” he said.
However, despite these negotiations, the kings did not sign the treaty. Sardar Patel left the place and went to the railway station.
At the railway station, the kings conveyed a message to Sardar Patel who was waiting in the train. They asked him to wait for one hour. “While I waited in the train, my secretary [VP Menon] stayed back and talked to them. They finally signed the treaty and sent it to me in the train,” he said.
“Of course, I told them one thing - that they should settle the issue as early as possible. Because they were not the only ones with whom I had to deal with but there were several small and big princely states. And if work is not accomplished early, there were forces which would spoil the matter,” he finally said.
And this is how the accession of princely states started and one after the other started falling in line. Junagadh and Hyderabad princely states, with whom Sardar Patel dealt with, resisted merger. However, finally they too acceded and integrated into India.