DNA Edit: Remember The Sardar - Vallabhbhai gets his due, 68 years after his death

It should be considered no small irony that Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel has finally got his just desserts 68 years after his death, precisely on his 141st birth anniversary. And the credit for that must go to the BJP government and Prime Minister Narendra Modi personally, who has invested a lot of stake in remembering a man who was mainly responsible for unifying India in its nascent and most difficult moment.

Those claiming that it is the BJP’s effort to appropriate the Sardar are missing the point. The man whose job of unifying India was no less daunting than what Bismarck achieved in Germany more than seven decades before him, was a largely forgotten figure in the country’s modern history.

For close to six decades since Independence, his exploits were mostly buried under paeans made to one man and one family. It would be instructive to examine, for instance, how many times Vallabhbhai Patel’s name figures in Congress Working Committee resolutions between 1950 and 1989?

The administrative acumen, decisiveness and quick thinking of Vallabhbhai, or the great Sardar, was without a peer. Accounts by eminent historians and writers, VP Menon and Rajmohan Gandhi among them, testify to the man’s genius, a prince among men whose idealism was tempered in realism.

While Patel’s inclusion of three large kingdoms of Hyderabad, Junagadh and Travancore, which entertained visions of being independent, into the Indian Union are well chronicled, his welding of 563 totally varied principalities of India, one as different as chalk is from cheese, is the stuff that legends are made of.

The one state that Patel did not — or was not — allowed to handle, Kashmir, continues to be a festering wound in the body politic of India, more than six decades after Independence. Would the history of that state have been any different?

In a commemorative volume titled ‘This was Sardar’, published from Ahmedabad in 1974, Patel was quoted as saying,“...If Jawaharlal and Gopalaswami Ayyangar had not made Kashmir their close preserve, separating it from my portfolio of Home and States,” he would have tackled the problem as purposefully as he had done with the rest of the Indian Union.

Sadly, that is one subject now confined to the dustbins of history for all times to come. Still, better late than never. The Statue of Unity, a 182-metre giant structure built in honour of Patel, was inaugurated by Modi. The imposing monument, touted as the world’s tallest statue, is built near the Sardar Sarovar Dam on the Narmada River in Gujarat. To be fair to Modi, he has long supported the vision of the Sardar, much before he became Prime Minister, perhaps juxtaposing it vis-a-vis Jawaharlal Nehru, representing in the process, two competing ideological strands that existed within the Congress even during the Independence movement. Equally ironically, after overlooking Patel for a better part of the country’s modern history, India’s first home minister was felicitated belatedly by the Congress in Parliament. Call it the Modi effect.