Founder President

V P Menon – Freedom deliverer to Modern India

Vapala Pangunni Menon (V P Menon), the founder president of Kerala Club,  was the Constitutional Adviser to the last three Viceroys during British rule in India. Hewas the only Indian in Mountbatten’s inner team. It was Menon’s plan for the partition of India into twoDominions which was eventually adopted. Menon realised the need to get thePrincely States to accede to India before the date of independence. Menon and Sardar Patel later achieved the full integration of the IndianStates. Menon’s two books, namely, ‘Transfer of Power in India’ and ‘TheIntegration of Indian States’ are masterpieces of history. However, in another of his works entitled ‘An Outline ofIndian Constitutional History’, he gives hismost forthright views on some of the leading actors in the birth of the Indian State.

Menon was also exceptional in that he came from a very humble background and yet reached theheights of the Indian Government Service. He was born as the son of an agriculturist on September 30, 1894. As a schoolboy, he ran away from home to spare his family the cost of his education. He worked in a gold mine in Mysore and then as an English teacher.In 1914, he joined the Government Service as an Assistant in the Home Department. He was draftedinto the Reforms Department and there, by sheer brilliance and hard work became the Reforms Commissioner. Menon thus became the highest serving Indian officerin the Indian Government Service.He had an encyclopaedic knowledge ofeverything to do with the Indian Constitution. He attended the Indian Round Table Conferences in London.

It is a miracle performed by Sardar Patel and V P Menon that within two years following independence, 564 Indian States comprising two-fifths of the country were fully integrated with the rest of India to make it a great nation.

Lord Mountbatten commented on the contributions of V P Menon thus: “I wonder how many Indians, particularly of the rising generation, have any idea of the debt which they owe V P Menon. What made him such a great man? First, his character, which enabled him to rise from a thirty-rupee clerk to the highest civil service appointment in Government. Secondly, his high intellectual qualities; a first-class brain with great powers of logical deduction and analysis; and blessed with the rare ability to gauge the future accurately – the seeing eye, as I call it. Thirdly, outstanding physical attainments; a wonderful constitution which enabled him to perform fantastic hours of work without strain, coupled with a happy disposition and a marvellous sense of humour.”

Menon never got recognised for his achievements in drafting the plan which made independence possible and also later for his manoeuvres in achieving peaceful integration of Indian princely States. Though he was not a freedom fighter, he was the person through whom the destiny delivered freedom to democratic India.