External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar has been bitterly attacked on Twitter after he cited Narayani Basu’s new book on V.P. Menon to claim that Jawaharlal Nehru did not want Vallabhbhai Patel in his cabinet in 1947. Historian Ramachandra Guha, Congress leader Jairam Ramesh published screenshots of letters written by Nehru to Mountbatten in 1947, and scholar Srinath Raghavan wrote an article to negate the claims.

ThePrint asks: Does the Jawaharlal Nehru-Sardar Patel ‘rivalry’ matter to India in 2020?

Nehru-Patel’s mutual admiration is well documented, but people want to imagine a post-truth history devoid of facts

Purushottam Agrawal
Professor and author

The supposed ‘rivalry’ between Jawaharlal Nehru and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel does matter to those who neither have a sense of history nor a vision for the future.

Disagreements and rivalries are part of healthy debates and political processes. But it is amusing to see pygmies attempting to measure the giants. In order to hide their poverty of imagination of the future, such people imagine a sort of post-truth history with no regard for facts.

Nehru’s relations within Patel, and for that matter Mahatma Gandhi, Subhash Chandra Bose, Maulana Azad and C. Rajagopalachari were marked by mutual respect and courage to own up to political disagreements. There is no aspect of these disagreements that has remained a secret. Nehru and Patel’s mutual admiration has been documented and is easily available to the public, including External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar.

However, the point is that no low is low enough and no lie is embarrassing enough if it can be used to denigrate Nehru. But, why is it so important for the Hindutva brigade to denigrate Nehru? The answer is that apart from him being modern, Nehru was also deeply steeped in Indian traditions and culture, by which he maintained an evergreen connect with people and cautioned them constantly against how disastrous communalism is for the country. The Hindutva camp cannot but pathetically hate Nehru.

Nehru-Patel equation matters in 2020 because their contributions are central to Indian identity

Dr Mujibur Rahman
Faculty, Jamia Millia Islamia & editor, ‘Rise Of Saffron Power’

Yes, it does matter enormously. Nehru and Patel are the key architects of modern India whose contributions are central to the Indian identity. Their decisions taken in the 1940s and the 1950s continue to have tremendous consequences for the Indian democracy.

I was, in fact, present at the panel discussion where Karan Thapar, Verghese George, Shivshankar Menon and S. Jaishankar were speakers at the book launch of Narayani Basu’s VP Menon: The Unsung Architect of Modern India. I have a different interpretation of Jaishankar’s claims (based on Basu’s book) that Patel’s name did not figure in Nehru’s first list of Cabinet members. Patel’s name wasn’t the only one to be left out. Even B.R. Ambedkar and Maulana Azad weren’t included until Gandhi intervened. I am not sure about the exact list, but it was in the context of general discussions over Nehru ‘s choice of Cabinet members. Nehru did not have an ill-feeling for excluding Patel’s name. That said, Nehru did have fundamental differences with Patel on minority rights and economic development.

During the panel discussion, questions such as “What would happen if Patel was the first PM of India” were asked. I think we should also ask: “Had Nehru sided with Gandhi on Partition instead of siding with Patel, what would have happened to India’s independence”? Sardar Patel and Muhammad Ali Jinnah, both Gujaratis, desired to be India’s prime minister. But their ambitions were not respected by Mahatma Gandhi, another Gujarati, because he backed Nehru for the post.

Historical facts cease to make sense for the BJP. It just wants to vilify Nehru

Apoorvanand
Professor, Delhi University

Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel is, in fact, an empty vessel in which the RSS and the BJP are filling their meaning. And so is the figure of Nehru. A story is being woven in which Patel is the wronged innocent hero and Nehru the scheming villain. Historical facts don’t matter here because these two leaders are as mythical as Ram who had to have a birthplace to be liberated by his people. It was the political force that ultimately turned even that into a legal reality.

So, it is futile to present facts because they are only for curious minds. When the minds of Hindus are so programmed that they want Akbar to be defeated at the hands of Rana Pratap, it is naive to expect that historians can win against politicians.

We make up facts according to our wishes. So, it is impossible to rescue Patel from the BJP that now has External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar as its latest rabble-rouser. What is needed is a new political force that can replace the BJP. Unless that is done, academic matters will always be adjudicated by politicians.

By Pia Krishnankutty, journalist at ThePrint

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