The Sardar, The Pandit and the Loh Purush

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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 15^th 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 139^th 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 30^th anniversary of Indira Gandhi’s assassination; will the new government mark it?  I don’t remember Sardar Patel’s 100^th 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.

Above 262 Seats, There is No Morality (31 May 2009)

If you wrapped your head in a piece of cloth to ward off the baking heat, and you closed your eyes and shut your ears to the news as it broke, you could feel yourself spinning around in a time machine last week.

There they were, the cavalcades of satraps and tributaries, bearing incense and myrrh and marigolds and shopping lists, descending on the Congress’s “war room” and 7 Race Course Road – how appropriate an address for horse-trading! – to wheedle and whinge and while away the long hours while the royals decided who would be seated in their durbar. Was this any different from the Prince of Wales’s visit just over a century ago when India’s princelings flocked to Delhi to pay tribute to their future emperor? How deliciously feudal we are, how supremely inured to the trappings of royalty or dynasty. Whether it is the house of Bolangir, or the scion of Gwalior, or the royal house of Srinagar’s Gupkar Road – papa and son Abdullah and son-in-law Sachin Pilot, himself from the Gurjjars’ post-Emergency ruling clan, all huggle-muggle in a “Kodak moment” – today’s Congress Party, which bills itself as the world’s largest democratic party, is a long, long way from getting there. You don’t need to stand for any election to make it to a top party post. And you know the long roll-call of famous progeny who will grace the Treasury benches. There are quite a few in the Opposition ranks, too, but don’t for a moment assume that this means we have a young Lok Sabha. Although there are 79 MPs under the age of 40, the average age of this Lower House is 53.03 years – this is older than the 14th Lok Sabha and much older than our very first parliament in 1952 where the average age was 46.5 years.

But what about the Aam Admi, the bemused hero of Laxman’s cartoons, the speck in the ocean of 417 million Indians who actually voted this time? First of all, the media, who (again) got it wrong in their opinion and exit polls and exhibited their immaturity and illiteracy, actually have not managed to analyse why voters behaved the way they did. At a very broad level, the average voter in large swathes of our nation still reacts in a visceral manner to what she hears. That message may be wrapped in a wad of currency, or address basic fears about a livelihood, food to eat, clean water, or decent roads. Why, most of the newly-minted MPs would have been hard put to even spell the names of their constituencies before this election. Ajay Maken boasted that he had visited his New Delhi constituency – where he lives – 200 times since 2007. Most of us ordinary citizens visit our constituencies, where we live, at least twice every day.

Second, the Common Man is tired of blatant and primitive appeals to caste and religion. That is why the Rashtriya Janata Dal, the Bahujan Samaj Party, and yes, even the Bharatiya Janata Party have been administered a very big punch in the solar plexus. Haryana, Rajasthan, Bihar, Orissa, Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh and Delhi prove that just trying to run a half-good government that is not nakedly corrupt can reap big rewards.

And finally, contrary to early euphoria about the return of the national parties and the decimation of regional fiefdoms, the numbers tell a different story. The combined vote share of the Congress and the BJP actually fell from the 2004 election, and the vote share of the regional parties stayed nearly the same at about 30 percent. Yes, the BSP, the RJD, and others of their ilk have been forced to offer “unconditional outside support” (see satrap above) but for the UPA, it is like going to sleep every night with your head resting on a basket of cobras.

A hung parliament it was not, but creating a new government took quite a while. It is fascinating, even for us politics-obsessed Indians, to watch the process. After all, Manmohan Singh’s cabinet has 78 ministers, ministers of state with independent charge, and junior ministers of state, which means every third member of the UPA in the Lok Sabha is a minister. Not very long odds. The portfolios were also largely unsurprising. None of the top posts went to newcomers. There were a few stabs at imagination: Kamal Nath got road transport and highways, Veerappa Moily got law, and the irrepressible Farooq Abdullah got new and renewable energy. But did it set off a frisson up the nation’s spine? You tell me.

And down south, while Andhra Pradesh sulked at not getting more ministerial posts despite giving the Congress its single largest chunk of 33 MPs from any one state, dynasty-building was going in apace in neighbouring Tamil Nadu. One day after his older son Azhagiri was named a minister in Delhi, Tamil Nadu chief minister Muthuvel Karunanidhi named his second son his deputy and heir apparent. You’ve got to expect some drama in a state that has politicians with names like Stalin, Napoleon and Tagore.

Way off in the Sunderbans, Cyclone Aila caused death, destruction and destitution. People had no water or food for days. But it was point-scoring time again, and Mamata Banerjee and Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee wanted to be sure we knew it was a national calamity.

In 1996, as a few Indian climbers lay dying on the upper reaches of Everest, they were ignored by a group of Japanese summiteers. There was a huge uproar about why the stricken men had not been offered oxygen and a lifeline. In India’s politics, getting to exercise power is getting to the top of the world, and it takes everything you have. “Above 8,000 metres there is no morality,” one Everest climber said. So brutal, and yet so true.
(This piece appeared in Khaleej Times on June 3, 2009)