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 management of the nuts and bolts of the Bardoli peasants revolt (1928) and Gandhi’s historic Dandi salt march (1980), Patel established his reputation as the most able administrator and organiser of the Congress party.

The feature of this biography of the iron man of India’s freedom struggle is that it doesn’t obfuscate the ideological tension between Patel and the aristocratic Nehru who although he had no previous work or party organisation experience, was appointed president of the Congress party in 1929 through the influence of his highly successful barrister father Motilal. With typical youthful brashness and unwarranted intellectual arrogance, Jawaharlal quickly declared himself a socialist and after he was again appointed president of the Congress party at Gandhi’s behest in 1936, declared that he had “reached the logical fulfilment of socialism — namely communism”.

The author makes it clear that Gandhi and Patel were staunchly opposed to Nehru’s woolly socialism. In a letter to a friend written in 1936, Gandhi wrote: “Jawaharlal’s way is not my way. I accept his ideals about land etc. But I do not accept practically any of his methods. I would strain every nerve to prevent a class war.” Likewise, Patel had nothing but contempt for socialists whom he described as “sappers and miners” of the Communist Party.

Yet despite his reservation about Nehru’s half-baked socialism, when the critical election for the presidency of the Congress party was held in 1946, and Patel was endorsed by 16 of the 20 provincial Congress chiefs, Gandhi ill-advisedly requested his “blind follower” to stand down in favour of Nehru. It was a monumental blunder because it was a foregone conclusion that the president of the party would automatically be appointed the first prime minister of free India.

With the benefit of hindsight, it would be useful to speculate a contra-factual history of post-independence India had Patel been sworn-in as first prime minister in 1947. For one, India would have quickly transformed into a developed agricultural and industrial country. Unlike Nehru, Patel harboured no hatred against business and private enterprise. Indeed like Gandhi, he was grateful to industry and business leaders who had generously funded the freedom movement and established large and successful conglomerates in the teeth of discrimination and opposition from the British India government.

At the end of World War II, the business houses of Birla, Tata, Lalbhai, Shri Ram, Walchand Hirachand and Jamnalal Bajaj were poised to make a great leap forward and would have conquered Asian, perhaps even Western markets long before the emergence of the highly successful chaebols and zaibatsu of South Korea and Japan hugely impacted global business and industry.

But it was not to be. With his naïve belief that government bureaucrats and clerks could transform into successful businessmen, after the assassination of Gandhi in 1948 and the death of Patel two years later, Nehru made a sharp left turn and led the nation down the untested road towards socialism. Patel who had strong roots in rural Gujarat and like Gandhi, believed that agriculture, which provided livelihoods to over 70 percent of the population, should get development priority, would have poured the taxes of industry into rural India and the country would have recorded 10 percent annual GDP growth rates ab initio and transformed into a developed nation by now.

In 1950 after warning Nehru of the dire implications of the annexation of Tibet by the communist government of China, and reportedly divested of his home affairs portfolio by Nehru because of his failing health, Patel passed away following a massive heart attack and was soon forgotten by the establishment — including a sycophantic intelligentsia — busily engaged in reaping the private gains of socialism. Almost seven decades later, the Bharatiya Janata Party — an offshoot of the militant Hindu majoritarian Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) whose members were involved in the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi and on which Patel, in his capacity as home minister, had imposed a brief ban after independence — has cynically constructed a 300,000-tonne statue, the world’s tallest, in memory of Sardar Patel. A great irony for a towering leader who built the Congress party and united India, which the BJP seems determined to once again divide and rule.

Dilip Thakore

 

Coming of age books

The Hill School Girls series, A. Coven, Duckbill books; Rs.225, Pages 123, 122 & 110

School stories have always had a special place in the hearts of young readers as is evident in the continuing popularity of series like St. Clare’s and Malory Towers by Enid Blyton. Perhaps part of the appeal of these novels lies in the fact that school, especially boarding school, provides a context for placing an unusual amount of agency in the hands of their young protagonists. Though surrounded by figures of authority and constrained by rules, which they delight in flouting, the youngsters arrive at solutions to the problems they encounter.

The Hill School Girls series follows this tradition but within an Indian context. Beginning with the first book Alone, which introduces the reader to the new avatar of the Hill School in Lailapaani with its greater emphasis on cooperation, empathy and holistic learning, the books follow the lives of Elizabeth, Ayesha, Maitreyi and Mahrukh, all class VII students, along with a supporting cast of adults and schoolmates. Each book is written in the first person and focuses on one protagonist at a time, but it also traces the gradual fading away of the girls’ reservations about each other as they learn to accept the quirks of each individual’s character and meld into a group of friends.
The narrator of Alone is Elizabeth who is a day scholar and lives in town with her parents. As the book progresses, we are introduced to the other members of the quartet, who are initially forced to spend time together only because they are collaborating on a school project.

Apart from the meticulous, book loving Elizabeth, there is Ayesha, who has a chip on her shoulder and is really touchy and secretive about the reason she left her earlier school. The third member of the group is Maitreyi who carries the ‘awful burden’ as she calls it, of being the daughter not only of a teacher, but one who is also a dorm mistress. And lastly there is the enigmatic, outspoken, sports and maths loving Mahrukh.

The first book reveals the mystery of a missing notebook which is precious as it belonged to the founder of the school Madhavi Sultania, and had been kept in the library for safekeeping. Along the way, the girls learn that appearances are often deceptive.

Secrets is about Ayesha and her secret which she ultimately reveals to her friends, learning in the process that something which has always been a disadvantage has the potential to become a gift, if used correctly. It’s interesting how the author manages to touch upon something as complex as the often fraught relationship between a teenager and her parents and contemporary perils of the indiscriminate use of social media, without actually lapsing into boring homilies or losing the interest of the reader.

Strangers has Maitreyi as its narrator and as the story unfolds, the girls learn about the pleasure and satisfaction of doing something for others. They also learn to explore their own strengths and, in a tongue-in-cheek nod to Enid Blyton fans, that midnight feasts are not always as much fun as they are made out to be!

Parents also have their redeeming moments and startle their children by being heartwarmingly and surprisingly intuitive at times. Just when it seems that the author is introducing too many coming-of-age concerns in these slender books, she rescues the narrative from becoming too preachy as the girls revert to their alternately sulky, preachy, quirky, imperfect and fun-loving selves.

The books retain the interest of the reader not merely because of the plot but because the girls are very real, not perfect but good, and their adventures and experiences are those to which children can relate. The author manages to gradually bring the school, its teachers, and the students to life and by the third book, the reader is actually drawn into the world of the school and its charming inhabitants.

Ranjana Kaul (The Book Review, November)