In a historic tribute to Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, the Government has announced sesquicentennial celebration to honour Patel’s unyielding legacy in unifying India
Union Home Minister Amit Shah has announced that to honour Sardar Patel’s ‘monumental contributions’, to commemorate, his ‘enduring legacy as the visionary behind the establishment of one of the world’s most robust democracies and his pivotal role in unifying India from Kashmir to Lakshwadeep’ which ‘remains indelible’, the government, under the leadership of Prime Minister Modi, will celebrate his sesquicentennial from 2024 to 2026.
After the nationwide movement to erect the Statue of Unity, this is another watershed occasion, when the legacy of Sardar Patel would be commemorated and cherished. This honour was long due and is richly deserved. The Sardar’s centenary in 1975, was a given a short-shrift. It was deliberate. The Indira-led Congress, busy enforcing an unethical and draconian ‘Emergency’, had little time to commemorate Sardar Patel.
A commemoration would have certainly raised hard questions. Moreover, could Sardar’s democratic legacy be commemorated, with the entire Opposition, minus the crooning communists, behind bars? One of Patel’s foremost biographers, Rajmohan Gandhi, writing in 1991, spoke of how acknowledgements in the case of Nehru were ‘fulsome’ and in the case of Gandhi ‘dutiful’, but in the case of Patel, were ‘niggardly.’ Speaking of the Nehru centenary celebrations in 1989, Gandhi writes, that it ‘found expression on a thousand billboards, in commemorative TV serials, in festivals and in numerous other platforms.’ While Patel’s centenary on October 31, 1975, four months after Emergency was clamped, ‘was by contrast, wholly neglected by official India and the rest of the Establishment.’
In a long interview with Harry Hodson, British economist and editor, Patel’s shadow and trouble-shooter-in-chief, VP Menon, recalled a day when the usually tolerant and absorbing Patel chose to talk back to Nehru. ‘You think you made the Congress?’, he snapped, ‘We are all co-builders in it. You think I want your position? If that was the case, I would not have resigned my Presidency and asked Gandhiji that you should take over. I told him that I would stand down.’ ‘There was rare emotion in the Sardar’s voice,’ writes Narayani Basu in her biography of Menon citing that particularly acerbic encounter. The post Sardar Patel Congress was made to believe that it was Nehru alone who made it and therefore only he and his political progeny were worthy of commemoration and remembrance. VP was saddened to ‘see that under the veil of idealism and greatness Nehru wrapped himself in, there existed a vindictive and petty man.’
For someone who saw Patel so closely for many intense years, VP told Hodson, how Sardar ‘died as a very, very bitter and sad man’, and ‘Panditji should never have treated him the way he did.’ That propensity of negating Patel and his contribution to our national march percolated through Nehru’s dynasty and the Congress that he shepherded post-Patel. In his biographical opus, LK Advani has rightly described the Congress’s dégringolade, after Patel, arguing that ‘after Sardar Patel passed away, there was no one left in the Congress Party to counterbalance Nehru’s negative views on various important issues.’ As an acolyte of Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee and belonging to his intellectual and political lineage, the occasion of Sardar Patel’s sesquicentennial commemoration also brings to my mind the special bond that they shared in free India’s first cabinet.
Patel’s biographer Rajmohan Gandhi argues that ‘in the politically significant selection of Ambedkar and Mookerjee, Patel’s was undoubtedly the decisive role.’ While Sardar had his eyes on Babasaheb Ambedkar from the ‘summer of 1946’, Dr Mookerjee, who then represented the Hindu Mahasabha, had earned Sardar’s plaudits by calling for and advocating the partition of Bengal in March 1947 and ‘by refusing to join an abortive bid for a united and independent sovereign Bengal that Sarat Bose’ and the then Muslim League premier of Bengal, mastermind of the bloody 1946 ‘Direct Action’,
H S Suhrawardy, had floated. It was a clever ploy by Suhrawardy to try and wean away the whole of Bengal from India and to toss it eventually into his master Jinnah’s Pakistan cauldron.
Both, Dr Mookerjee’s bold advocacy and Sardar Patel’s support to his demand, saved Bengal and ensured that a portion of it remained an integral part of India. It was a moment, like a few more to follow in the coming years, in which both Sardar Patel and Dr Mookerjee worked closely.
In his voluminous memoirs, ‘Living an Era’, veteran Congressman DP Mishra, recalls that, when Suhrawardy realised his nefarious plan of snatching away Bengal was falling through, ‘he took to making veiled threats about Calcutta being destroyed as a result of communal warfare’ and told Mountbatten that he ‘feared serious riots and damage’ in Calcutta and ‘wanted six-months joint control’ of the city.
Mishra writes that when Mountbatten sought Patel’s reaction to the proposal, Patel replied, ‘not even for six hours.’ These are all worth remembering, commemorating and revisiting.
The nationwide Statue of Unity movement from 2013 to 2104, the humongous mission of erecting and unveiling the Statue of Unity, and the commemoration of ‘Rashtriya Ekta Diwas’, have all been milestones in the last decade. A long and deliberately neglected legacy is being mainstreamed.
(The author is chairman of Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee Research Foundation and National Executive Committee member of the BJP; views are personal)
