Ramachandra Guha: How would Vallabhbhai Patel have viewed the BJP’s pernicious misuse of his legacy?

Later this month, we shall mark the sixtieth anniversary of the death of India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. This column focuses on one key aspect of Nehru’s political career – his collaboration with Vallabhbhai Patel.

These two men worked shoulder-to-shoulder during the freedom struggle and in the early years of Independence. They had their disagreements, as any two individuals working together would, whether as fellow members of a cricket team, or spouses in a marriage, or directors in a company. Yet, when one looks at their relationship in its entirety, it was emphatically a partnership in which their distinctive strengths were pooled together in the service of the land they both so deeply loved.

This essential complementarity is denied by Narendra Modi and his party colleagues who miss no opportunity to denigrate Nehru and elevate Patel at his expense.

When the British ruled us, Nehru and Patel helped make the Congress a mass organisation representative of most sections of Indian society. Both spent many years in jail. Yet perhaps even more important was their work in the first cabinet of free India. The British left this land in a state of division and disrepair.

Perhaps no new nation was born under more unpropitious circumstances;...

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