Vallabhbhai Patel (31 October 1875 – 15 December 1950), in full Vallabhbhai Jhaverbhai Patel, byname Sardar Patel (Hindi: “Leader Patel”),was an Indian statesman. He served as the first deputy Prime Minister of India from 1947 to 1950. He was a barrister and a senior leader of the Indian National Congress, who played a leading role in the country's struggle for independence, guiding its integration into a united, independent nation. He was one of the conservative members of the Indian National Congress. In India and elsewhere, he was often called Sardar, meaning "chief" in Hindi, Urdu, and Persian. He acted as Home Minister during the political integration of India and the Indo-Pakistani War of 1947.
Patel was born in Nadiad, Kheda district, and raised in the countryside of the state of Gujarat. He was a successful lawyer. One of Mahatma Gandhi's earliest political lieutenants, he organised peasants from Kheda, Borsad, and Bardoli in Gujarat in non-violent civil disobedience against the British Raj, becoming one of the most influential leaders in Gujarat. He was appointed as the 49th President of Indian National Congress, organising the party for elections in 1934 and 1937 while promoting the Quit India Movement.
As the first Home Minister and Deputy Prime Minister of India, Patel organised relief efforts for partition refugees fleeing to Punjab and Delhi from Pakistan and worked to restore peace. He led the task of forging a united India, successfully integrating into the newly independent nation those British colonial provinces that formed the Dominion of India. Besides those provinces that had been under direct British rule, approximately 565 self-governing princely states had been released from British suzerainty by the Indian Independence Act of 1947. Patel persuaded almost every princely state to accede to India. His commitment to national integration in the newly independent country was total and uncompromising, earning him the sobriquet "Iron Man of India". He is also remembered as the "patron saint of India's civil servants" for having established the modern All India Services system. He is also called the "Unifier of India". The Statue of Unity, the world's tallest statue, was dedicated to him on 31 October 2018 and is approximately 182 metres (597 ft) in height.
Early life and legal career
Patel was born into a self-sufficient landowning family of the Leva Patidar caste. Reared in an atmosphere of traditional Hinduism, he attended primary school at Karamasad and high school at Petlad but was mainly self-taught. Patel married at the age of 16, matriculated at 22, and passed the district pleader’s examination, which enabled him to practice law. In 1900 he set up an independent office of district pleader in Godhra, and two years later he moved to Borsad.
As a lawyer, Patel distinguished himself in presenting an unassailable case in a precise manner and in challenging police witnesses and British judges. In 1908 Patel lost his wife, who had borne him a son and daughter, and thereafter remained a widower. Determined to enhance his career in the legal profession, Patel traveled to London in August 1910 to study at the Middle Temple. There he studied diligently and passed the final examinations with high honours.
Returning to India in February 1913, he settled in Ahmadabad, rising rapidly to become the leading barrister in criminal law at the Ahmadabad bar. Reserved and courteous, he was noted for his superior mannerisms, his smart, English-style clothes, and his championship in bridge at Ahmadabad’s fashionable Gujarat Club. He was, until 1917, indifferent to Indian political activities.
In 1917 Patel found the course of his life changed after having been influenced by Mohandas K. Gandhi. Patel adhered to Gandhi’s satyagraha (policy of nonviolence) insofar as it furthered the Indian struggle against the British. But he did not identify himself with Gandhi’s moral convictions and ideals, and he regarded Gandhi’s emphasis on their universal application as irrelevant to India’s immediate political, economic, and social problems. Nevertheless, having resolved to follow and support Gandhi, Patel changed his style and appearance. He quit the Gujarat Club, dressed in the white cloth of the Indian peasant, and ate in the Indian manner.
From 1917 to 1924 Patel served as the first Indian municipal commissioner of Ahmadabad and was its elected municipal president from 1924 to 1928. Patel first made his mark in 1918, when he planned mass campaigns of peasants, farmers, and landowners of Kaira, Gujarat, against the decision of the Bombay government to collect the full annual revenue taxes despite crop failures caused by heavy rains.
In 1928 Patel successfully led the landowners of Bardoli in their resistance against increased taxes. His efficient leadership of the Bardoli campaign earned him the title sardar (“leader”), and henceforth he was acknowledged as a nationalist leader throughout India. He was considered practical, decisive, and even ruthless, and the British recognized him as a dangerous enemy.
Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel’s role in the Indian Freedom Movement
In the initial stages of the freedom movement, Patel was neither keen on active politics nor the principles of Mahatma Gandhi. However, the meeting with Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi in Godhra (1917) fundamentally changed Patel’s life.
Patel joined the Congress and became the secretary of the Gujarat Sabha that became a Congress stronghold later.
On Gandhi’s call, Patel quit his hard-earned job and joined the movement to fight for exemption of taxes in Kheda at the time of plague and famine (1918).
Patel joined Gandhi’s Non-Cooperation Movement (1920) and travelled around West India to recruit 3,00,000 members. He also collected more than Rs 1.5 million for the party fund.
There was a British law banning the hoisting of the Indian Flag. When Mahatma Gandhi was imprisoned, it was Patel who led the Satyagraha movement in Nagpur in 1923 against British law.
It was the Bardoli Satyagraha of 1928 which earned Vallabhbhai Patel the title of ‘Sardar’ and made him popular throughout the country. So great was the impact that Pandit Motilal Nehru suggested Vallabhbhai’s name to Gandhiji for the presidency of the Congress.
In 1930, the British arrested Sardar Patel during the Salt Satyagraha and put him on trial without witnesses.
On the outbreak of World War II (1939), Patel supported Nehru’s decision to withdraw Congress from central and provincial legislatures.
Patel was at his persuasive best when he spoke at the Gwalia Tank ground (now called August Kranti Maidan) in Mumbai to launch the nationwide civil disobedience movement in 1942 at the behest of Mahatma Gandhi.
During Quit India Movement (1942), the British arrested Patel. He was imprisoned with the entire Congress Working Committee from 1942 to 1945 at the fort in Ahmednagar.
Political philosophy
Patel, however, was no revolutionary. In the crucial debate over the objectives of the Indian National Congress during the years 1928 to 1931, Patel believed (like Gandhi and Motilal Nehru, but unlike Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhas Chandra Bose) that the goal of the Indian National Congress should be dominion status within the British Commonwealth—not independence. In contrast to Jawaharlal Nehru, who condoned violence in the struggle for independence, Patel ruled out armed revolution, not on moral but on practical grounds. Patel held that it would be abortive and would entail severe repression. Patel, like Gandhi, saw advantages in the future participation of a free India in a British Commonwealth, provided that India was admitted as an equal member. He emphasized the need to foster Indian self-reliance and self-confidence, but, unlike Gandhi, he did not regard Hindu-Muslim unity as a prerequisite for independence.
Patel disagreed with Jawaharlal Nehru on the need to bring about economic and social changes by coercion. A conservative rooted in traditional Hindu values, Patel belittled the usefulness of adapting socialist ideas to the Indian social and economic structure. He believed in free enterprise, thus gaining the trust of conservative elements, and thereby collected the funds that sustained the activities of the Indian National Congress.
Patel was the second candidate after Gandhi to the presidency of the 1929 Lahore session of the Indian National Congress. Gandhi shunned the presidency in an attempt to prevent the adoption of the resolution of independence and exerted pressure on Patel to withdraw, mainly owing to Patel’s uncompromising attitude toward the Muslims; Jawaharlal Nehru was elected. During the 1930 Salt Satyagraha (prayer and fasting movement), Patel served three months’ imprisonment. In March 1931 Patel presided over the Karachi session of the Indian National Congress. He was imprisoned in January 1932. Released in July 1934, he marshaled the organization of the Congress Party in the 1937 elections and was the main contender for the 1937–38 Congress presidency. Again, because of Gandhi’s pressure, Patel withdrew and Jawaharlal Nehru was elected. Along with other Congress leaders, Patel was imprisoned in October 1940, released in August 1941, and imprisoned once more from August 1942 until June 1945.
During the war Patel rejected as impractical Gandhi’s nonviolence in the face of the then-expected Japanese invasion of India. On the transfer of power, Patel differed with Gandhi in realizing that the partition of the subcontinent into Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan was inevitable, and he asserted that it was in India’s interests to part with Pakistan.
Patel was the leading candidate for the 1945–46 presidency of the Indian National Congress, but Gandhi once again intervened for the election of Nehru. Nehru, as president of the Congress, was invited by the British viceroy to form an interim government. Thus, in the normal course of events, Patel would have been the first prime minister of India. During the first three years of independence, Patel was deputy prime minister, minister of home affairs, minister of information, and minister of states; above all, his enduring fame rests on his achievement of the peaceful integration of the princely Indian states into the Indian Union and the political unification of India.
Indian National Congress
Indian National Congress, byname Congress Party, broadly based political party of India. Formed in 1885, the Indian National Congress dominated the Indian movement for independence from Great Britain. It subsequently formed most of India’s governments from the time of independence and often had a strong presence in many state governments.
1. Vallabhbhai Patel, who is also known as Sardar Patel, was the first Deputy Prime Minister of India.2. Patel passed his matriculation when he was about 22 years old.3. Patel wanted to become a lawyer and spent years studying on his own with books borrowed from other lawyers. He cleared his examination within two years. Later, he became one of the most successful barristers of the country.4. Patel wasn’t interested in politics initially. It was after meeting Gandhi in 1917 that he was motivated to quit his job and join the Independence struggle.5. Patel advocated Swaraj or self-rule and organised peasants in Gujarat in non-violent civil disobedience against the British.6. Patel worked extensively for the rights of minorities and women, and against untouchability and caste discrimination.8. “Every Indian should now forget that he is a Rajput, a Sikh or a Jat. He must remember that he is an Indian and he has every right in his country but with certain duties,” Patel had famously said.9. In 2014, the Government of India began observing Rashtriya Ekta Diwas (National Unity Day) on Sardar Patel’s birth anniversary (October 31).10. The Statue of Unity, unveiled by PM Modi, stands on the banks of the Narmada river. It is 182m high, making it the tallest in the world. The statue was built at a cost of Rs 2,989 crore.
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