Completion of construction of the 182 metre (597 ft)-high Statue of Unity — the world’s tallest and twice the height of the Statue of Liberty in New York harbour — in Gujarat in commemoration of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel (1875-1950) at a massive cost of Rs.3,000 crore is a belated, even if not fitting, tribute to one of the great architects of India’s long freedom struggle, which accelerated when Mahatma Gandhi returned from South Africa to British-ruled India in 1917. Within three decades thereafter, under the uniquely innovative freedom movement led by the Mahatma, Patel — his most committed and loyal disciple — and the Harrow and Cambridge-educated Jawaharlal Nehru, almost two centuries of British rule over India ended.

Quite appropriately, the largest share of the credit for ending the exploitative British Raj is unanimously given by historians to Mahatma Gandhi who conceptualised an unprecedented freedom struggle based on the moral principles of truth, satyagraha (self-sacrifice) and ahimsa (non-violence). However the freedom movement, which aroused the nationalism of the subcontinent’s passive public even as it confounded the rulers of British India, required extraordinary mass mobilisation and organisation capabilities. This was provided mainly by Patel who inter alia organised the peasants’ tax revolt of Bardoli (1928) and the historic Dandi salt march (1930) even as he developed Congress into a countrywide cadre-based political party.

Unsurprisingly, given his party building and organisational skills, Patel became the most popular leader of the pre-independence Congress party. In 1946, the heads of provincial Congress committees elected him president of the party with an overwhelming majority. As such, he would automatically have become the first prime minister of independent India. Unfortunately, Gandhi advised him to stand down in favour of Nehru. Swallowing his disappointment he complied, and served as deputy prime and home minister, discharging a major role in thwarting the “imperial strategy” of Winston Churchill which if it had succeeded, would have further divided post-partition India into over a dozen independent kingdoms. Through patient but firm negotiations with hereditary rulers, Patel secured their accession to the Indian Union.

Unfortunately, after his death from a heart attack in 1950, Patel’s great contribution to the freedom movement and consolidation of India into a successful union of states was soon forgotten. Moreover, his ideological preference for free markets and private enterprise was quickly jettisoned as under prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, India took the socialist road with disastrous results. Similarly Patel’s death-bed warning on the geo-political and military implications of the takeover of Tibet by China was ignored. Seventy years later, his enormous contribution is being acknowledged. But it’s highly unlikely that Sardar Patel whose 300,000 tonne cement concrete, steel silent likeness is compelled to witness the divide-and-rule politics of contemporary India, would have approved of this extravagant monument.