Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel has resurfaced in the politico-ideological discourse. Much of the debate, however, centres on who the real heir of his legacy is—the Congress or RSS—leading to a drift from historical accounts to political and polemical sloganeering. Fact is, Patel and Nehru represented two distinct ideological positions, personalities and worldviews. Prof. Rajni Kothari has rightly summed it up—their differences were indeed fundamental.
Patel wanted the Congress to be a disciplined and democratic organisation in the making of modern India. He raised the dual membership issue and persuaded the Congress Working Committee (CWC) in 1948 to amend the party constitution prohibiting the existence within the organisation of other parties which had “a separate membership, constitution and programme”. The result was Congress Socialist Party’s (CSP) pulling out from the organisation. This weakened Nehru, who was closer to the CSP faction, and exacerbated his insecurity. He consistently attempted to impose his domination on the party organisation. In 1950, just before Patel’s demise, an intense struggle ensued to capture the Congress presidentship. Nehru unilaterally declared JB Kripalani his candidate against Purushottam Das Tandon supported by Patel. The correspondence between Patel and Nehru on Tandon shows their difference was ideological. Nehru criticised Tandon for attending a refugees’ conference in Delhi while Patel found nothing in it that violated the secular ethos. This pseudo-secularism was born out of Nehru’s proclivity to condemn all those who disagreed with his principles and traits.
Nehru threatened to resign from CWC if Tandon was elected President. Tandon finally prevailed with 1,306 votes as against Kripalani’s 1,092. Next morning, when Rajaji came to see Patel, the latter jokingly asked, “Have you brought Jawaharlal’s resignation?”
But alas! Patel’s death was also the beginning of the end of internal democracy in the party. Nehru’s man SK Sinha, Bihar’s then CM and an invitee to CWC, demanded that selection of candidates for Lok Sabha and the Assemblies be left in the PM’s hands. Nehru wove a chakravyuh against Tandon and precipitated the crisis by resigning from CWC. Eventually, Tandon was compelled to relinquish the presidentship. Strangely, he himself manipulated his elevation as party president and continued for four years.
Nehru and Patel maintained a love-hate relationship, evident from their differences on the question of administrative actions on Ajmer communal riots. Patel stood firmly with Shankar Prasad, the Chief Secretary, and opposed Nehru’s intervention through the latter’s private secretary HVR Iyengar. It was a clash of ideas. For Nehru, militant minorities were to be mollycoddled even at the cost of law and order and wanted an equal number of Hindus to be arrested to “satisfy” the minority, something unacceptable to Patel. Both expressed their unwillingness to work with each other and sent their resignations to Mahatma Gandhi. However, the emotions generated after the Mahatma’s assassination averted a major political crisis and gave birth to a strange coalition of two inimical personalities. Is it not a travesty that Indian social science textbooks and historical writings have deliberately omitted such an incidence of huge political and academic significance? The Constituent Assembly’s pledge of building one nation with one citizenship became a victim of Nehru’s myopia. He perpetuated the minority-majority syndrome and all those who opposed him were disparaged and weeded out by him and his cohorts like Rafi Ahmed Kidwai. Pseudo-secularism became a tool to destroy the Congress leadership. DP Mishra aptly described this phenomenon: “Gandhiji made heroes out of clay, but under Pundit Nehru’s leadership they are being turned into corpses.”
rakeshsinha46@gmail.com
Sinha is Hony. Director of India Policy Foundation