V. P. Menon

Vapal Pangunni Menon was born on 30 September 1893 at Ottapalam in Malabar, now Kerala. He never finished high school or college, yet rose through the Imperial Secretariat Service to become the highest-ranking Indian officer in British India. He served as Constitutional Adviser to the last three Viceroys and as Political Reforms Commissioner from 1942 (Wikipedia).

He was involved in the 1947 plan for partition. One admiring account, on the British Empire website, says he put to Mountbatten at Simla in May 1947 a plan for two dominions, that Mountbatten adopted it after Nehru rejected the earlier London plan, and that party leaders approved it on 3 June. That account is an advocacy piece, and its credit to him should be read as its author's view.

The States

On 5 July 1947 he became Secretary of the States Department under Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel. He drafted the Instrument of Accession, and by the transfer of power all but three of the 565 states, Junagadh, Hyderabad and Kashmir, had signed it. He went to Srinagar and Jammu in October 1947 to secure Kashmir's accession papers (Wikipedia, British Empire website). GKToday describes his three-stage approach, in which small states were merged into provinces, contiguous states were grouped into unions under a Rajpramukh, and sensitive states were placed under the Centre.

The Patiala and East Punjab States Union, PEPSU, was one of those unions. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism says it was formed from eight states, Patiala, Jind, Nabha, Kapurthala, Faridkot, Kalsia, Malerkotla and Nalagarh, and was formally inaugurated on 15 July 1948 by Patel, with the Maharaja of Patiala, Yadavindra Singh, as Rajpramukh. It does not name Menon. His own book on the integration has a chapter on PEPSU (Vedams listing of its contents). PEPSU lasted until 1 November 1956, when it was merged into Punjab; in 1952 and 1953 an Akali-led United Front ministry under Gian Singh Rarewala governed it.

Key moments

• 1942: Reforms Commissioner to the Viceroy.
• May to June 1947: his plan for the transfer of power, as the British Empire website tells it.
• 5 July 1947: Secretary of the States Department.
• 15 July 1948: Patel inaugurates PEPSU.
• May to July 1951: Acting Governor of Orissa.
• 31 December 1965: dies in Bangalore.

After leaving office he wrote The Story of the Integration of the Indian States (1956) and The Transfer of Power in India (1957), and joined the Swatantra Party without contesting an election. He died at Bangalore on 31 December 1965, aged 72.

What he is remembered for. He is remembered as the official behind the legal machinery of 1947, and for what that machinery did to the Punjab's princely states, which became PEPSU and then, in 1956, part of a larger Punjab.