The country pays tribute to the Iron Man on his 151st birth anniversary. He unified India and defended secularism, despite his differences with Nehru
At Kevadia in Gujarat, Rashtriya Ekta Diwas on Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel’s 151st birth anniversary, beside the 182-metre Statue of Unity would be celebrated with much fanfare. Patel is invoked more often than he is read, and he deserves to be read whole: not as a statue, and not as a weapon.
In July 1947, Patel took charge of the States Department, with VP Menon as his secretary. With British paramountcy ending, some 560 princely states were nominally free to choose their future. Patel’s offer was accession on just three subjects: defence, external affairs and communications, backed by privy purses and firm pressure. When Junagadh’s Nawab opted for Pakistan, a February 1948 plebiscite returned 190,870 votes, only 91 of them for Pakistan. Hyderabad’s holdout ended with Operation Polo, from 13 to 17 September 1948.
He gave the republic its administrative spine: on 21 April 1947, he called the services the “Steel Frame of India”; that date is now Civil Services Day. His secular credentials deserve better than slogans from either camp. The evidence for them is strong. He banned the RSS on 4 February 1948. In July, he wrote that its activities “constituted a clear threat to the existence of Government and the State”.
In May 1949, he moved a motion in the Constituent Assembly to end separate electorates, hoping for “a true secular democratic State, where everybody has equal chance”. Yet the record is also ambivalent, as Christophe Jaffrelot has argued. Patel urged RSS men to join the Congress. His government lifted the ban in July 1949 once Golwalkar accepted a written constitution. At Somnath, he said restoring the idols “would be a point of honour and sentiment with the Hindu public”. His secularism was stern and unsentimental: “If I were a member of a minority community,” he told the Assembly, “I would forget that I belong to a minority community.”
He was not the RSS’s man; he banned it. Nor was he a pluralist of Nehru’s temperament. He was a Congress statesman who wanted a neutral state and unquestioned minority loyalty. However, his differences with Nehru were real. In 1946, Rajmohan Gandhi records, many provincial Congress committees nominated Patel for the party presidency, and none nominated Nehru. Gandhi asked Patel to step aside, and he did. They quarrelled over the first President, Rajagopalachari or Rajendra Prasad; over the Congress presidency in 1950, Tandon or Kripalani; and over China, where, in November 1950, Patel pressed for “a military and intelligence appreciation of the Chinese threat to India”. Less than three months before he died, Patel said at Indore: “Nehru is our leader... I am not a disloyal soldier.” The tale that Nehru snubbed his funeral is false. He told Parliament he was leaving for Bombay “to pay our last tribute”, called Patel “a friend and a colleague and comrade above all”, and was at the cremation. What do we owe him? First, the unity he forged was an invitation as much as a command. It endures only if every region, language and faith feels that the Union is theirs. Second, the neutral, fearless civil service he called a steel frame: it exists to serve the Constitution, not the party of the day.