Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel: India’s iron man, Balraj Krishna, Rupa publications; Rs.995, Pages 316 One of the profound injustices of post-independence India is that the huge role played by Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel (1875-1950), an important member of the triumvirate or trimurti of Gandhi, Nehru and Patel in the freedom movement, has been obfuscated and obscured. It’s important to remember that even after being hopelessly outmanoeuvred and hoist with their own petard of liberal grandstanding by Gandhi and the Congress party, the departing British rulers, drawing inspiration from dogged imperialist Winston Churchill, did their darndest to retain the subcontinent in their sphere of influence. By stoking the political ambitions of Mohammed Ali Jinnah and expressing faux concern for the safety and future of the Muslim minority in an undivided India, this landmass with a history of unity was hastily and clumsily divided into India and Pakistan. Moreover, Churchill’s imperial strategy was to partition the subcontinent into “Pakistan, Hindustan and Princestan” as recounted by Lord Wavell, viceroy of India in 1945. Although the demand of the subcontinent’s elite Muslims succeeded for various reasons and wrong turns of the Congress leadership as detailed in this refreshingly enlightening book, the third prong of Churchill’s strategy which would have resulted in the emergence of a weak and balkanised India, was thwarted by the firm hand of Sardar Patel in his capacity as home minister and minister of states of free India. A stirring recitation of India’s movement for self-determination apart, the great service that Balraj Krishna — a veteran former journalist (Hindustan Times) and author of several books including Great Indians: Surendranath Banerjea to Gandhi (2010) — has done to citizens is to throw illuminating light on the life and times of Vallabhbhai Patel, whose light has been hidden under the bushel by free India’s historians. The predominant image in the public mind of Vallabhbhai Patel is of a homespun, rustic politician uncomfortable with the English language, the mirror opposite of the glamorous and urbane Jawaharlal Nehru. But while it’s true that Patel was the son of a petty landowner in rural Gujarat, he spoke and wrote excellent English and was a highly successful lawyer in the subordinate courts who pressed on to qualify as a first class first barrister of the Middle Temple, London (1913). Subsequently, he “fearlessly” built a lucrative practice in the Ahmedabad high court, which was more than the Harrow and Cambridge-educated Nehru — also a barrister — ever did. However when he met Mahatma Gandhi in 1917, the haughty Patel who “had his collars laundered, not in Ahmedabad, but by Bombay’s best laundry”, immediately responded to Gandhi’s call to become a full-time worker of the Congress party and fight for India’s independence. Inevitably and very quickly, Patel became the Mahatma’s right hand man and deputy commander, putting into practice Gandhi’s revolutionary satyagraha (self-sacrifice) and ahimsa (non-violence) strategies to consolidate the freedom movement and enable it to gain momentum in the struggle for political independence from British rule. By the mid-1930s, after his capable…
