Close to Jinnah and a bitter opponent of the Mahatma and his Congress, Nawab Hamidullah Khan was a polo-playing close friend of Viceroy Mountbatten. He looked at the British Indian Independence Act 1947 as a great betrayal, a lapse in British justice. He asked his friend Mountbatten: ‘Are we to write out a blank cheque and leave it to the leaders of the Congress Party to fill in the amount?’ He also saw the danger of India, without the princely states, being overrun by the communists. Mountbatten reminded the Nawab that leaders like Sardar Patel were ‘as frightened of communism’ as the Nawab himself and needed the help of the princes. He also said that no ruler could ‘run away from the dominion closest to him’. With most princes falling in line by the end of July 1947, he asked for a small sop to his pride in an extension of the timeline to 15 August. Sardar Patel refused, and Mountbatten offered a halfway solution. Bhopal could sign the instrument of accession on 14 August; Mountbatten would keep it safe under lock and key and hand it over to Sardar Patel on 15 August.
Also read: How Maharaja Hari Singh’s indecision led to Pakistan’s economic blockade of Kashmir
Jodhpur
Jodhpur, bordering Pakistan, was ruled by the flamboyant Raj Rajeshwar Maharajadhiraj Shri Hanwant Singh Rathore, still in his early twenties. Already married twice, the Maharaja, popularly known as Hanwant Singh, was having an affair with Zubeida, a Bohra Muslim film actress from Mumbai. He was strongly anti-Congress. Persuaded perhaps by the Nawab of Bhopal, he met Jinnah at his residence at 10, Aurangzeb Road (now Dr A.P.J. Abdul Kalam Road) on 6 August 1947.
In the meeting, Jinnah offered him a signed blank sheet of paper, asking him to enter whatever conditions he wished for joining Pakistan!
When Jinnah asked the Maharajkumar of Jaisalmer, Giridhar Singh, who had accompanied Hanwant Singh, whether he would also prefer to join Pakistan like Jodhpur, he raised his doubts regarding Jinnah’s neutrality on issues of communal differences between Hindus of Jaisalmer and Muslims of Pakistan. Zafarullah, political advisor to Jinnah, ruled out communal differences leading to violence and rioting in Pakistan and, since Jinnah was travelling to Karachi the next day, pressed Hanwant Singh to sign the Instrument of Accession. As soon as Hanwant Singh asked for more time to consult his more than fifty sardars or feudal heads and his mother, the dowager Maharani Sri Badan Kunwar Saheba, Jinnah brusquely pulled away the blank paper with his signature from Hanwant Singh.
Hanwant Singh met Lord Mountbatten and Sardar Patel in Delhi on 9 and 10 August. Sardar Patel asked him to take into consideration the possible revolt of the people in case he decided to join Pakistan. He also agreed to connect Jodhpur with the port of Kutch in case it joined India. Hanwant Singh visited the Viceroy’s house the next day to sign the Instrument of Accession. Along with Mountbatten, V.P. Menon was also present at the ceremony. Hanwant Singh had a pen-pistol that he had made to order. When Mountbatten was absent for a while, there are alternative accounts of how Hanwant Singh opened the cap of the pen, took out the pistol and threatened to shoot V.P. Menon. According to one account, after signing the Instrument of Accession with his pen-pistol, the Maharaja told Menon that he could even kill him with the same pen.
Just as Menon got scared, Mountbatten entered and dismissed the whole episode as a joke. Hanwant Singh gave the pen-pistol to Mountbatten, who took it to London and gifted it to the Magic Circle Gift Museum in London, where it is still on display.
After Travancore, Bhopal and Jodhpur, what remained was the integration of the two major princely states of Jammu and Kashmir and Hyderabad, and the small but significant princely state of Junagadh. Their integration is what is taken up in the next section.
The three thorns in the flesh
The integration of the three princely states of Jammu and Kashmir, Hyderabad and Junagadh had remained pending on 15 August 1947. In Muslim-majority Jammu and Kashmir in the north, the Dogra king Maharaja Hari Singh, a Hindu, ruled over his three provinces of Kashmir, Jammu and the Frontier Districts. Jammu and Kashmir had the largest territory among the princely states and a long land border with not only India and Pakistan, but also with Afghanistan, China and Tibet. In the Pamir mountains, the narrow Wakhan Corridor separated the state’s Gilgit-Baltistan from Tajikistan in the former Soviet Union.
In Hindu-majority Hyderabad in the south, the seventh Nizam, Mir Osman Ali, was a Muslim. Both Jammu and Kashmir and Hyderabad were large princely states whose rulers were entitled to twenty-one-gun salutes, but with an important difference: Hyderabad in the south-east, unlike Jammu and Kashmir, was not contiguous to Pakistan. Neither did
it have access to the Bay of Bengal.
The princely state of Junagadh in the west, ruled by Nawab Mahabat Khan, was small relative to Jammu and Kashmir and Hyderabad. The Nawab was entitled to thirteen hereditary and fifteen personal and local gun salutes. While surrounded to the north, east and south by Indian provinces or princely states, unlike Hyderabad, it had access to the Arabian Sea, particularly through the port of Veraval.
All the three ‘excellencies’ had their own hallmark signs of a mix of grandeur, flamboyance, eccentricities and decadence. Maharaja Pratap Singh of Jammu and Kashmir had sent his young nephew Hari Singh, the prince regent, on a tour of Europe. In 1921, only 26 and already married twice, Hari Singh was caught in flagrante delicto in a Paris hotel with a jockey’s wife. He was blackmailed for money and dragged through the courts. The case, with his identity concealed as ‘Mr. A’, was splashed across the newspapers of Europe and America.
Nizam Osman Ali’s portrait was featured on the cover of the Time magazine on 12 February 1937. Inside, the cover story, entitled ‘Hyderabad: Silver Jubilee Durbar,’ described him as the richest man in the world! But he was also known for his miserliness. Once, Osman Ali offered a cigarette to Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru, the Nizam’s legal advisor, and when Sapru accepted it, he politely took it back, clipped it into two with a clipper he had in his pocket and offered one half to Sapru! He had unusual interests, including photography. ‘After his death a cache of bizarre photographs were found that had been taken with a hidden camera inside his guest bathroom. They provide a candid record of his famous
visitors performing their toilet.’
Junagadh’s Nawab Mahabat Khan had a passion for dogs. He owned 800 dogs, each with its own room, a telephone, and a servant. He got his favourite bitch Roshana married to a handsome golden retriever named Bobby in a state ceremony attended by 50,000 guests. In the context of the annexation of princely states to India and Pakistan, Junagadh, a small relative to both Jammu and Kashmir and Hyderabad, has been described by some as the ‘joker in the pack’. So, let us first turn to the accession of Junagadh to India.
This excerpt from Ashok Lahiri’s India in Search of Glory has been published with permission from Penguin Random House India.