#DadasahebPhalke

“A farmer’s son who taught himself law kept every feeling under iron control for fifty years, and then spent the last three years of his life stitching 560 fragments into one country — the largest peaceful political consolidation in modern history, with three hard exceptions this chapter will not hide.”

“The map of India is not natural and was not inevitable. In about eighteen months after August 1947, Patel — with his civil servant V. P. Menon — persuaded, pressured and out-manoeuvred some 560 princely states into one union, an integration achieved mostly with paper and only partly with force, and at real, honestly countable cost.”