Battle For The Sardar’s Legacy
The unseemly battle between the two major political parties in the country over the legacy of one of India’s greatest sons, Independence movement leader and the country’s first Home Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Sardar Vallabhai Patel, hides more than it reveals.
The BJP’s Prime Ministerial candidate and Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi laid the foundation stone for the Statue of Unity, touted to be the tallest such structure in the world or “more than twice the size of the Statue of Liberty” as the publicity campaign around it reminds us, on the banks of the Narmada River on the Sardar’s birth anniversary on Thursday. A couple of days before that, Modi had in the presence of the Prime Minister at a function in Ahmedabad to inaugurate a museum on Sardar Patel speculated that the state of the nation, as it were, would have been very different if Patel and not Jawaharlal Nehru had been India’s first Prime Minister.
All in all, the BJP and Modi have been amplifying like never before their long held argument that the Congress with its unhealthy obsession with the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty to the exclusion of everybody else had successfully ignored, even damned with faint praise, an icon of India’s freedom struggle.
The Congress, on the other hand, used the occasion of the Sardar’s birth anniversary to issue an advertisement in major newspapers that quoted Patel as saying: “We must review the extent of the action taken, the success of failure achieved… for ensuring final and complete annihilation of ‘those’ subversive forces.” (Emphasis in original.) The message sought to be conveyed as to who the ‘those’ highlighted in the advertisement, given the Congress’ campaign to propagate Sardar Patel’s discomfort with the RSS and Hindu Mahasabha in the aftermath of the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi which led to the RSS being banned in 1948 by him as Home Minister, is obvious. That the advertisement came on the heels of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh claiming Patel as a Congressman at the Ahmedabad function in a well-directed barb at Modi who was sharing the dais with him, only confirmed that the battle for appropriating Patel’s legacy had been well and truly joined.
In essence, the Congress’ efforts have been to highlight its history and traditions wherein both a Nehru and a Patel despite their differences could work together for the party and country whilst marking the clear blue water between the RSS and those inspired by its ideology and the “broad church”, in a manner of speaking, that is (or at least used to be) the Grand Old Party.
The central theme of the Sardar’s legacy, however, is not contested. He unified the nearly 600 princely states and petty principalities that the British Raj had left unabsorbed in the Indian Union after 1947, was known to be a blunt, man of action who was blooded into mass politics in the Champaran Satyagraha under Gandhi himself and had an abiding, self-effacing persona that saw him gracefully make way for the younger Nehru to be first among equals at the time of Independence, in large part because that is what the Mahatma wanted. Patel was also unquestionably the party strongman on whom Nehru leaned heavily.
The crucial difference in their approach to the issue of shaping the nature of India’s polity, which is really at the heart of the ongoing war over his political legacy, was that whilst both were clear that India must be a secular country governed by rule of law, Patel reflected the popular perception that the creation of Pakistan was tantamount to an entire community having substantially if not wholly chosen to secede from India while Nehru believed that his view that the Muslim League elite had misguided the masses was also the popular view. Everything that followed, from the banning of the RSS to the lifting of the ban by Patel himself, could be argued to have stemmed from that duality of perception.
