His noble soul remains country’s inner monitor

IFeature no memories of the outstanding adult male. As a two-three yr older, I was lucky enough to have seen Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel many times. Including on his last birthday, on October 31, 1950, when my parents took me to his home to greet him and join a two-family photo-op. But all those real ‘sightings’ as I would like to think of them, have been wiped off my mind’s screens.Jawaharlal Nehru, I was lucky enough to have seen oftener. And I have sharp recollections of each one of those occasions. And yet, if I were to close my eyes and try to conjure images of those two men, the Sardar’s head and face would come as sharply into my imagining view as that of the Pandit. In fact, rather more so.Weird?Perhaps.But let me ask myself why that is so.A quotidian explanation is that Patel has figured in home conversation through the years as much as Nehru has. Through the years, through the decades. He has been talked about within the family, remembered, missed, analysed, critiqued, commemorated. He has never been forgotten. Never been shelved on the pantheons of the “great gone”. He has been alive, there, right there where he had been as when he lived.A more objective and conceptual explanation for his seeming ever-present personality is that the need for him to be there, here, right here, has been insistent, persistent. If only Patel had been with us…And a list, long and lengthening, emerges when he is recalled as the person who would not have allowed such and such to have happened, seen to it that such-and-such took place, ensured that so-and-so scalawag would have come nowhere near the power he came to wield, that such-and-such good man would not have been put out to pasture. And more significantly, if only Patel, as home minister, had lived to, say, 1955, when he would have reached 80, India’s administrative officialdom would have been set on a path of incorruptible integrity, uncompromised professionalism and trusted adherence to fair rules fairly implemented, with the freedom to speak its mind frankly but egolessly. Its police would have become not just non-partisan but hugely cherished as a force for the protection of the common weal undeflected by temptation or by bullying.An India in 1955 under Prime Minister Nehru would have deferred to deputy Prime Minister Patel and passed at its Avadi session a resolution not for a socialistic pattern of society but one that allowed for equity through balance , not through state capitalism. If Patel had stayed with us for another two years, till 1957, Pandit Nehru, in the handsome noble-mindedness that was his, might have heeded party opinion and vacated his office after the 1957 elections to let a still hugely popular 82-year-old Sardar Patel become Prime Minister. And Patel, in his pragmatism, would have conceivably persuaded Nehru to serve as deputy prime minister handling external affairs as only he could. Patel? PM? At that age? Why ever not? Let us not forget that Morarji Desai was 83 when he finished as PM, Manmohan Singh 81. And they could have gone on for another term at the very least.In 1962, China would not have dared trifle with an India that had been steeled into defensive invincibility under over a decade of Patel’s iron-hand, and certainly not Pakistan in 1965.But all this is sheer fantasy, a waste of reader-time. No such thing happened. A stricken Vallabhbhai Patel, his time come, died way back in 1950, at age 75, humming the lines of Narsinhrao Divatia… Mangal mandir kholo Dayamay…and Nazeer Akbarabadi’s Hai bahar-e-bagh duniya chand roz…Nehru and Patel never hid their differences. They never let their differences hide their disciplined trust in each other.Let Congress not hide the fact that post-independence and especially post- Nehru, it sought, mistakenly and absurdly, to obfuscate Patel’s name, imagining that would please the ‘High Command’. It squandered a great legacy of its own at the altar of sycophancy. And cloaked history in the haberdashery of ‘smiling pickthanks’ loitering in the corridors of favour. It did that in vain. A ‘command’ higher than High Commands rules history.Equally, let those outside Congress and others who seek to take his name distancing it from Gandhi and Nehru not forget that if there was one person the dying Patel was thinking of, yearning to join Yon High, it was Gandhi. And if there was one person he told his party and his followers to strengthen, it was him he described in his last days as his leader, the country’s Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru.Let no one forget those God’s own truths.Historians and even more than historians, scrabblers of historical bits and pieces who would like to be thought of as historians, will argue the hollow hypothetic that Gandhi made a mistake in choosing Nehru over Patel as his successor, and by extension, the man a future India would install as its first Prime Minister. How scrabblers make Bharat Bhagya Vidhata-s of their busy little selves!Gandhi knew what he was doing. He knew too that Patel and Nehru knew what he was doing and why.Let me say it pat.Patel was closer to Gandhi than Nehru was.Patel was the younger brother Gandhi leaned on.Nehru was nearer to Gandhi than Patel was.Nehru was the younger comrade Gandhi relied on.Patel was of Gandhi’s blood.Nehru was of Gandhi’s pulse.Gandhi laughed with Patel.Patel joked with GandhiGandhi checked his tears with Nehru.Nehru could dissolve in Gandhi’s hug.Gandhi saw India strong in Patel’s grip.Gandhi saw Indians stable in Nehru’s clasp.Gandhi saw India’s map on Patel’s palm.Gandhi saw India’s life in Nehru’s eyes.One was the camphor-wick in his prayer hub.The other, its glowing flame.We can douse the one only to diminish the other. Let us know that if the Republic of India has a spine in its life, it comes from Ambedkar’s resolve, if it has a glow in its life, it comes from Nehru’s light. But if it has an inner monitor, it comes from the veracity of Patel’s noble soul.As he sat, impassive as a lava-laden volcano, beside the Mahatma’s slain body, Patel lost all attachments to power, even to life. But he was no quitter. Even the letter of resignation he sent to Nehru, came from a sense of emptiness, not an urge fir relinquishment. He was not quitting life. Life was quitting him.His statues, old and new, short and tall, live in him; not he in his statues.He gives them his iron; he does not need their metal.Praise of him is needed by us the praise givers , he is fine without it.He is where he feels close, beside his leader and his leader’s wife he called Ba, with an intonation only he was capable of and she recognised as his. Only his.Pranam, Sardar! Pranam!Gopalkrishna Gandhi is a student of modern Indian history. The views expressed are personal