The Hindu : Tale of two anniversaries

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Nov 12, 2003

Opinion

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Tale of two anniversaries

By Inder Malhotra

Purely by coincidence the birth anniversary of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, a towering leader of the freedom movement and, as independent India's first Deputy Prime Minister, the only near-equal that Jawaharlal Nehru ever had, and the death anniversary of Indira Gandhi, the country's third and much-remembered Prime Minister, fall on the same day, October 31.

Until now this had not caused much comment, leave alone friction or bickering. But this year proved to be an exception to the rule, presumably because of the proximity of Assembly elections in several States in which the two main contenders, Congress and BJP, have heavy stakes.

The Deputy Prime Minister, L.K. Advani — whose admirers say that, like the Sardar he, too, is the Iron Man or `Loh Purush' — went to Patel's ancestral village in Gujarat, Karamsad, on the occasion. The glowing tributes he paid to the Sardar were eminently well deserved.

The bulk of the credit for integrating the 562 former princely States into the Indian Union does go to Patel. But Mr. Advani seems to have been carried away by the exuberance of his own verbosity when he declared that but for Sardar Patel "the country would have been divided into hundreds of units instead of just two".

He was even more off beam when he regretted that the "credit for the freedom struggle goes to only one family, although countless people had sacrificed their lives and many more had spent years behind bars".

Surely, someone in Mr. Advani's position must know that the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty is talked of not because of its stewardship of the freedom movement but owing to its role after Independence. Three generations of this family ruled the country, by democratic choice, for 37 of the first 42 years since Independence. Not even her worst sycophants have claimed that Indira Gandhi was in the forefront of the freedom struggle. Rajiv Gandhi was five days less than three years old on August 15, 1947.

The Gujarat Chief Minister, Narendra Modi, who fancies himself as "Chotta Sardar", was characteristically crude when he told his audience that members of the Nehru-Gandhi family's "fourth generation had joined politics and were eager to grab power". In this country no one can grab power. He or she has to be elected.

It is doubtless true that all through the Nehru era and that of Indira, Sardar Patel's role in leading the country to freedom, in integrating India, in rehabilitating the victims of history's largest mass migration in peacetime, and in building up the post-Independence administrative structure around all-India services was deliberately downplayed and his memory sidelined. This did no credit to either father or daughter.

But, in heaven's name, what prevented the BJP-led Government in New Delhi during the last five years from commissioning a history project to inform the country of Vallabhbhai's yeoman services to the nation? Or was it too busy rewriting ancient history and projecting astrology as an authentic science?

Sadly, this is not all. The crowning irony about the BJP's praise of the Sardar is that the great man's memorial at Karamsad, where Mr. Advani and Mr. Modi spoke, is in poor shape. For, the trust maintaining it has no money and neither the Union Government nor that of "Chotta Sardar" in Gandhinagar has responded to its desperate appeals for funds!

The tale of the two anniversaries cannot be complete without a mention of the ruckus that took place at Shaktisthal, Indira Gandhi's samadhi in New Delhi, during a memorial meeting, hosted by Delhi State's Congress Government, on the morning of October 31.

Family feuds have been one of the attributes of most of the dynasties that have dominated the political scene in the subcontinent — the Bhuttos in Pakistan, the Bandarnaikes and the Senanayakes in Sri Lanka and so on. The Nehru-Gandhi family here is no exception though mercifully its tussles have been confined to verbal exchanges between Indira Gandhi and her younger daughter-in-law, Maneka Gandhi, and the conspicuous estrangement between Ms. Maneka Gandhi and her sister-in-law and Congress president, Sonia Gandhi.

This seems to have come into play also on Indira Gandhi's 19th death anniversary. Sanjay and Maneka Gandhi's son, Feroze Varun Gandhi, has bitterly complained that he and his friends were "prevented, most rudely, by securitymen" from entering Shaktisthal to pay homage to his grandmother.

What explanation, if any, he has received from the authorities concerned no one seems to know. However, the grapevine has it that the security detail was somewhat nervous about the "horde of hangers-on" that Mr. Varun Gandhi insisted must be allowed in along with him.

The men on duty were unwilling to risk this in view of the presence of many VIPs in the enclosure to which the young man was headed. To borrow words from the Time magazine used in a different context, it seems that rising youngsters in politics, like Bollywood heroes, are unable to move around "without a hundred buddies".

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