Rattling old skeletons
Modi has opened a debate with his glorification of Patel
India had several iconic figures in its struggle against the British for independence. They were all outstanding men in their own right. To my mind, five of them stood out. Foremost, needless to say, was Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi who gave the independence movement a unique spirit of non-violence that captured the imagination of not only Indians but the rest of the world as well.
Then, in no particular order of merit, came Jawaharlal Nehru, independent India’s first prime minister, Vallabhbhai Patel, deputy prime minister, Maulana Azad, and Subhash Chandra Bose. In a separate category was B.R. Ambedkar, a major framer of the Indian constitution and leader of the “untouchables”.
Azad, a great scholar and intellectual, was the face of the liberal Muslims in the Congress party, while Mohammed Ali Jinnah, an outstanding lawyer, came to represent Muslims who wanted to have their own homeland, Pakistan.
Bose was perhaps the most flamboyant and charismatic of them all, while Nehru was considered secular and forward-looking. With his upper class Harrow school and Cambridge University background, Nehru was also respected internationally.
Gandhi designated Nehru his heir though many felt Patel was a more hardheaded and abler person to lead the country. Patel, a Gujarati like Gandhi, accepted Gandhi’s decision with grace and was content to be Nehru’s number two.
Patel was a Hindu conservative realist, while Nehru was an agnostic leftist idealist who wanted India to play a major role in world politics. Patel warned about China’s expansionist designs — he was to prove right with Beijing’s armed takeover of Tibet and its claims over Indian territory, which led to the 1962 IndoChina conflict in the Himalayas. Nehru, on the other hand, believed in a policy of Hindi Chini bhai bhai (India and China are brothers). Patel would probably have been more in favour of the private sector, whereas Nehru championed the public sector. And Nehru prevailed. Patel died in December 1950 and Nehru had nobody to seriously rival him.
It is Vallabhbhai Patel who is in the news of late. Narendra Modi, the prime ministerial candidate of the main opposition, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), who has been addressing mass rallies all over India, has appropriated Patel as his ideal leader. (Lal Krishna Advani, the BJP patriarch, also did so earlier). Modi has announced a grandiose plan. He intends to build the world’s tallest statue, two and a half times the height of the US Statue of Liberty. This one will represent Patel and be called the “Statue of Unity”. Its estimated cost? A mind-boggling Rs 25 billion (about $400 million). Couldn’t that kind of money be better spent in building more schools and medical centres, which the country urgently needs? When Dalit leader Mayawati built many such statues of herself and her mentor, Kanshi Ram, all over Uttar Pradesh, the state she once ruled over, she was roundly criticised by the BJP. And now here is Modi planning to do the very same thing.
The controversy has also put the focus on Patel, popularly known as the “iron man of India”. True, he had a firm grip on India and was mainly responsible for uniting the country by bringing the princes and the virtually autonomous kingdoms they ruled, into the Indian realm. When one of them, the Nizam of Hyderabad, tried to assert his independence, Patel ordered Indian troops to march into the Nizam’s state. Tough action was also taken in Kashmir when Pakistani irregulars, backed by the Pakistan Army, tried to take over the state’s capital, Srinagar.
However, Patel was the home minister, in charge of the police and national security. He was somehow unable to prevent the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi by a Hindu fanatic, Nathuram Godse. Patel sent in his resignation, which Nehru refused to accept. The plot to kill Gandhi was hatched by a group called the Hindu Mahasabha, consisting of fanatical Hindus who accused Gandhi of selling out to Pakistan. They are not unlike the extremist elements of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the ideological wing of the BJP. The RSS, even the BJP itself, has always had mixed feelings about Gandhi. Modi might have opened a veritable can of worms with his lavish glorification of Patel, as it may renew interest in the conspiracy that resulted in the death of the father of the Indian nation.