Misunderstanding Nehru-Patel: They often disagreed with each other but worked closely, presented a united front

It is easy for us to sit in judgement today after 73 years over the great men who fought for India’s independence and then ruled the country. Judgement based on hindsight is a dangerous game played by especially those who are in a hurry to use history selectively to prove their prejudiced view of it. Let us leave history to the historians.

Sardar Patel was 14 years older than Nehru and was a leader of the masses in his own right.

The “highly educated” and “learned” people who rule the country today are teaching us a new history of India. I am not merely referring to the assertions that in ancient India, we had all the scientific and technological inventions of today like airplanes, rockets, TVs, spacecrafts and artificial intelligence but to their fulminations about the more recent events surrounding our Independence, the integration of the princely states and the roles played by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and the Deputy Prime Minister and Home Minister Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel. Their version is that whatever the Sardar handled was a great success and whatever was handled by Nehru turned out to be a great blunder. Thus, while they are trying to co-opt the Sardar as one of their own (what an irony), Nehru is being projected as a villain.