A Montage on Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel's role in unification of India

India has come a long way since its independence 69 years ago. Back then, a hard-fought independence came with besetting problems—partition, communal riots and a refugee crisis. By 15 August 1947, the process of integration of princely states was almost complete but the holdouts—Hyderabad, Kashmir and Junagadh—were the toughest nuts to crack. Add to that the resource constraints, fledgling institutions if at all, and a colonial machinery ill-equipped to deal with changed realities, and the Jawaharlal Nehru government had too much on its hands.
Vallabhbhai Patel, India’s first deputy prime minister and the minister of home affairs, would not just handle these problems with dexterity but would go on to truly become—in the words of Shashi Tharoor—“the man who saved India”. By integrating more than 560 princely states, Patel and his secretary of the ministry of states V.P. Menon imparted geographic coherence to India and prevented its Balkanization, a fate which many predicted would befall the newborn state sooner than later.

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