Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel died 63 years ago. His legacy is monumental. Apart from unifying over 500 self-governing princely states into a nation, Patel was one of the two men – Jawaharlal Nehru was the other – whom Mahatma Gandhi most relied upon both before and shortly after independence.

And yet, Patel has been largely ignored by Nehru’s family: Indira, Rajiv, Sonia and now Rahul.

In order to clarify important issues surrounding Sardar Patel and his legacy, which both the Congress and the BJP now claim, I spoke to Rajmohan Gandhi, the Mahatma’s grandson on the eve of Sardar Patel’s birth anniversary (October 31).

“There is no question,” Mr. Gandhi told me, “that the Congress had for long forgotten Sardar Patel. Nehru was a great visionary, Patel an outstanding administrator. The combination of Prime Minister-Deputy Prime Minister that Gandhiji proposed for the two leaders was ideal for newly independent India.”

I first met Rajmohan Gandhi, author of the definitive biography of Sardar Patel (Patel: A Life), when I was a 10-year-old schoolboy. He visited our school frequently as part of “India Arise”, a nation-building initiative he had begun. Later in Panchgani, a resort near Mumbai, he set up a world-renowned centre to spread this message. With my then very young family (two toddlers in tow), I visited the centre at his invitation and was personally taken around it by him and his colleagues.

Mr. Gandhi’s magazine Himmat had a young editor, David Davidar, who later joined one of my magazines as sub-editor. (He went on to become our Executive Editor before founding Penguin in India.) Over the years, I came increasingly to respect and admire Mr. Gandhi’s work as an author, editor and academic. Till recently, he taught at the University of Illinois. Few know that he served as a Rajya Sabha MP in 1990-92 and even fewer that he stood against (and lost to) Rajiv Gandhi in the 1989 Lok Sabha election from Amethi.

So how does Rajmohan Gandhi today see the Patel-Nehru relationship? His biography of Sardar Patel covers every nuance of that complex relationship but during our conversation Mr. Gandhi elaborated on three specific points.

One, contrary to popular belief, various Congress pradesh committees did not vote for Patel over Nehru for the post of Prime Minister. They voted for Patel over Nehru for the post of Congress President. Mr. Gandhi, however, concedes it was widely assumed that whoever became Congress President would very likely be voted Prime Minister at independence in 1947.

Two, Mahatma Gandhi’s decision to endorse Nehru and not Patel as Prime Minister was predicated on three grounds: Patel’s age (he was 71 to Nehru’s 57), failing health (“Patel had nearly died in 1941,” Rajmohan revealed to me) and Nehru’s mass nationwide popularity. That simply could not be ignored when the Mahatma made his choice, defying the majority of Congress committees. “And Patel agreed with that choice,” says Rajmohan. “He was fiercely loyal to Nehru.”

Three, Sardar Patel was positively inclined towards the RSS before the Mahatma’s assassination. He praised the role of the RSS in refugee camps during the traumatic period following independence.

However, after Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination on January 30, 1948, Patel’s attitude changed. He still made a distinction between the Hindu Mahasabha – whom he blamed for the assassination – and the RSS which he banned for a year. Patel rescinded the ban after advising the RSS leadership to work on social issues, respect the Constitution and abjure politics.

“But Sardar Patel never used the sharp language against the RSS that Nehru did,” says Rajmohan. “For instance, he never called it fascist which Nehru did.”

I asked Mr. Gandhi whether Sardar Patel would have endorsed the “secularism” today’s Congress practises. He said he would address that question another time: secularism remains a complex subject. But he agreed with me that dynastic politics is inimical to democracy because it narrows rather than widens the public’s electoral choices.

As the project to build Sardar Patel’s 182-metre-high Statue of Unity gets under way, Rajmohan’s final words during our half-hour conversation yesterday ring truest: “Patel belongs to all of India.”

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