The two men were born fourteen years and fourteen days apart. They died
fourteen years apart, one just three years after independence. Vallabhbhai Patel and Jawaharlal Nehru were
both London-educated lawyers. They both
worked very closely with Mahatma Gandhi in the long fight for
independence. Both went to prison
several times. Both were involved in the
thankless partition of the subcontinent in 1947. They were forced to work closely together
after independence and had to sometimes publicly proclaim their regard and
respect for each other. Patel was the
popular choice of the Congress party to lead it into independence, but Gandhi
anointed Nehru, whom he regarded as a son, and wanted Patel, whom he regarded as
a brother younger by only six years, to do the heavy lifting in moulding flesh
and bones into Nehru’s idea of India.
Patel was always willing to give up his place if asked, and this was one
of his great virtues. But he could stand
very firm when it came to the interests of the nation he wanted to see emerge from
British-ruled India and a patchwork quilt of princely states. In just three incredible weeks Patel, at the
head of the vital States Department and very ably assisted by the master-bureaucrat
V.P. Menon, engineered the accession of 554 states to the Indian Union just
ahead of the August 15th deadline.
As India and Pakistan took birth in an orgy of communal savagery, Patel
worked day and night to persuade millions of refugees that they had, even if
ravaged and penniless, a future in their new homes.
This Friday we will all celebrate Rashtriya Ekta Diwas, national unity
day, to mark Sardar Patel’s 139th birthday. The Central Board of Secondary Education,
which has jurisdiction over 15,799 schools in India and 23 other countries, has
declared that each student will have to take a 71-word pledge that includes the
solemn resolve “to make my own contribution to ensure internal security of my
country”. So will hundreds of thousands
of government employees nationwide. The
University Grants Commission has asked colleges across the nation to administer
the pledge. Young women and men will be
asked to run a ‘unity lap’ around the nearest playground; unity quizzes will be
held; and questions will be asked about Patel’s life and work.
It is somewhat ironical that National Unity Day also happens to be the 30th
anniversary of Indira Gandhi’s assassination; will the new government mark it? I don’t remember Sardar Patel’s 100th
birth anniversary in 1975 being celebrated with any joy: on that day India was
frozen in the grip of Indira’s Emergency.
So yes, it is high time we paid true tribute to Sardar Vallabhbhai
Patel, the hero of the Kheda and Bardoli satyagrahas, who was honoured with our
highest honour, the Bharat Ratna, only in 1991, the same year Rajiv Gandhi got
his after his assassination. Both Nehru
(in 1955) and Indira (1971) awarded themselves the title while they were alive
and in office. A set of Sardar Patel
commemorative coins was issued only in 1996.
The Bharatiya Janata Party’s Atal Behari Vajpayee, in his six years as
prime minister, did not attempt even a minor deification of Patel
It is probably not coincidental that Narendra Modi, who is called Loh Purush, wants to be remembered as
the man who built the tallest statue in the world. The 182-metre Statue of Unity will be built
over the next four years on a small island near the Sardar Sarovar dam in
Gujarat. Patel the original Iron Man
will be twice the height of the Statue of Liberty in New York and five times
the height of Christ the Redeemer in Rio di Janeiro. It will cost the taxpayer Rs 2,979 crore ($480
million).
But what intrigued me was why Modi has been resolute for so many years
about elevating Patel to the pantheon of the BJP’s heroes. Reading several accounts (interestingly Patel
never wrote his autobiography) I realised that although a lifelong Congressman,
he was a Hindu nationalist to the core, and here he was in the company of other
Congress grandees like Rajendra Prasad, Sampurnanand, Madan Mohan Malaviya, Lala
Lajpat Rai and Purushottam Das Tandon.
Soon after independence Patel vowed to rebuild the Somnath Temple in the
then just-acceded Junagadh state; after Patel’s death, President Rajendra
Prasad went to the site to consecrate the foundation, badly irking Nehru.
In early January 1948, just weeks before Gandhi was assassinated by
Nathuram Godse, Patel made a speech in Lucknow that bared his sympathies, and
his antipathy for Nehru’s idealised notions of secularism. “In the Congress, those who are in power feel
that by the virtue of authority they will be able to crush the RSS [Rashtriya
Swayamsevak Sangh] … They are patriots who love their country. Only their trend
of thought is diverted.” Patel saw the
RSS as an ally in the task of rehabilitating the huge flood of Hindu and Sikh
refugees. He was also unambiguous about
the large Muslim population that had chosen to stay back in India after
Partition. “… mere declaration of loyalty to [the] Indian Union will not help
them at this critical juncture. They must give proof of their declaration,” he
said.
Many have said India would have been very different if Patel had been
its first prime minister: no Kashmir problem, no war with China, everything
ship-shape. Does the rediscovery of
Patel mean Nehru is dispensable? For me,
both were crucial in the first few years after independence when we did not
have a constitution, when an unelected government had to bring 345 million
people together. Nehru was a visionary,
a thinker and planner; Patel was a doer, a negotiator, a chief operating
officer. When LIFE photographer Margaret
Bourke-White asked Nehru about his differences with Patel, he answered: “The
important point is – do the differences outweigh the agreements?”
History is someone’s story, and the story changes with each sutradhar or narrator. We are seeing a
new hagiography being constructed. The
Sardar deserves every bit of our respect and admiration. But we need not redact the ‘old’ history for
that. Enough histories have been
writtten that show Patel as an extraordinary politician, strategist and
nationalist. We just have to read them.
