#memory
#history
Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel.
31 October is the birth anniversary of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel (1875-1950), the Iron Man of India.
A successful barrister like his brother Vithalbhai Patel, Vallabhbhai Patel joined Gandhiji in the Bardoli Satyagraha and became a prominent leader of the Congress. He was elected Congress President in 1931.
After independence, Patel had every claim to be the first Prime Minister of free India. But Gandhiji opted for the more popular, more articulate, more secular, Jawaharlal Nehru. Without a murmer, Patel agreed to be the Deputy Prime Minister in charge of Home.
25 years later a perceptive C Rajagoplachari wrote:
“Undoubtedly it would have been better if Nehru had been asked to be Foreign Minister and Patel made the Prime Minister”.
History will remember Patel as the creator of the new Republic of India. The British had given the rulers of the native states, the option to join eiether India or Pakistan or be independent.
Patel, with the aid of the able Secretary of States, VP Menon, managed to get the consent of the majority of rulers to accede to the Indian Union.
He was able to liberate Hyderabad State – where the Nizam had baulked to join the Indian Union – without much force.
The horrors of the partition, and the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi under his charge as Home Minister, shocked him and undoubtedly hastened his death.
It is an irony of history, that the communal and divisive forces led by the RSS, an organisation Patel had banned and opposed with all his might in his lifetime, are now trying to appropriate his legacy.
Congress, still tied to the dynastic moorings, appear unprepared or unwilling to reclaim the precious legacy of the Sardar.
The biography by Rajmohan Gandhi, grandson of Mahatma Gandhi and Rajaji, is a must read for everyone who is interested in the history of India during the tumultuous years of the independence struggle and the formation of a nascent Republic.
– Joy Kallivayalil.
