Sardar Patel and Pandit Nehru, and the amazing ignorance of Narendra Modi

Gandhi (on reading a hate-letter from a person who says that he, the writer, is unfortunate to be living in the same age as Gandhi): Tell me, what sort of reply should I send him?

Patel: Tell him to poison himself.

The Mahatma could not have guessed then that the man giving him this advice was the future deputy prime minister of India and the Sardar could not have known that he, as deputy prime minister and home minister, would have to answer difficult questions about the assassination of his leader.

Prime Minister Nehru and home minister Patel had different perceptions on the role of the RSS in the Gandhi assassination. But, as Rajmohan Gandhi tells us in his epic biography of Patel, Nehru wrote to Patel on February 3, 1948: "I have been greatly distressed by the persistence of whispers and rumours about you and me… We must put an end to this mischief".

Patel, addressing the Congress in the Constituent Assembly for the first time after Gandhi's departure, called Nehru "my leader". The home minister had no doubt in his mind as to who had conspired to kill Gandhi.

"It was the fanatical wing of the Hindu Mahasabha", Patel wrote to Nehru, on February 27, 1948, "that (hatched) the conspiracy and saw it through". A ban followed.

The country's leading socialists targeted the home minister for his ministry's failure to protect Gandhi and asked him to resign. They did not know that Patel had already sent in his resignation to Nehru who had refused to countenance it.

Patel heard his critics patiently and then said he had had several arguments with the Mahatma to let police be stationed in the house he was staying in, but Gandhi had turned the idea down outright. And then Patel told his socialist critics not to "exploit the greatest misfortune and calamity of the nation for party ends".

Patel's death stunned the nation, Nehru more than anyone else. He was now all in all but all alone. The BJP's prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi is reported to have alleged that Nehru did not attend Patel's funeral.

Only the ignorant will believe this. Prime Minister Nehru went to Bombay to attend the last rites of his comrade and before doing so, told Parliament "…he will be remembered as a great captain of our forces in the struggle for freedom and as one who gave us sound advice in times of trouble and in moments of victory, as a friend and a colleague on whom one could invariably rely, as a tower of strength which revived wavering hearts".

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