Person · nationalist & home minister · India

Vallabhbhai Patel

Date

1875–1950

Function

Authority & administration

Confidence

Not assessed

Location

21.170, 72.831

Worth knowing

V.P. Menon did the drafting and much of the persuading; Patel supplied the deadline and the willingness to use the army. The whole operation took about two years and is the main reason the map of India looks as it does.

About the place

Placed at Surat, near Bardoli where the 1928 satyagraha he led took place and where the women of the taluka gave him the title Sardar. He was born at Nadiad and died in Bombay.

Connections (6)

• Life routeBardoli

  Bardoli made Patel. He had run Kheda in 1918 under Gandhi's direction; Bardoli in 1928 was his own campaign, held together through eight months of land attachments and forfeitures against a government that could not collect, and it ended in an inquiry that gave the cultivators nearly everything. The women of the taluka named him Sardar during it, and he ran the Congress organisation from then until independence.

• Court associationJawaharlal Nehru

  Patel and Nehru disagreed on almost everything — planning, the treatment of the RSS after Gandhi's murder, the handling of Kashmir, the temperament of the administration — and both offered to resign over it more than once. Gandhi chose Nehru for prime minister in 1946 although the provincial committees had overwhelmingly nominated Patel. They then governed together for three years until Patel's death, which is the least remarked-on fact about the first Indian cabinet.

• CampaignJunagadh Uparkot

  Junagadh's nawab acceded to Pakistan in August 1947 although his state was overwhelmingly Hindu and had no land connection to it. Patel answered with an economic blockade and a provisional government formed at Rajkot under Samaldas Gandhi; the nawab flew to Karachi taking his dogs, the dewan invited India in, and a plebiscite the following February returned over ninety-nine per cent for India. The argument used there is the one India declined to apply in Kashmir.

• Power passed toDadra

  Dadra and Nagar Haveli were taken from Portugal in July and August 1954 by volunteers of the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh, the Azad Gomantak Dal and the United Front of Goans — not by the Indian government, which kept a careful distance and said so at the International Court of Justice. The tract then governed itself for seven years before merging. It is the only part of the republic that was independent for longer than a week.

• Court associationShyamji Krishna Varma

  Shyamji Krishna Varma's 1905 India House at Highgate, London, hosted Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (1906-1909) as its chief inmate. Savarkar was Varma's protégé during his London period and the author of the 1909 book 'The Indian War of Independence 1857' (banned by the British in 1910). The India House-London Veterans' Society connection between Varma and Savarkar framed the formative London-Paris revolutionary network of 1905-1914.

• CampaignHyderabad

  On 13 September 1948 Vallabhbhai Patel, as Deputy Prime Minister and Home Minister, ordered the Indian Army into Hyderabad — Operation Polo — after thirteen months of failed negotiation with the Nizam Mir Osman Ali Khan over accession, and in the face of Razakar militia violence. Hyderabad surrendered on 17 September; the Nizam remained as rajpramukh until the 1956 reorganisation. The action brought the largest and wealthiest princely state into the Union.

On these journeys

• Decolonisation, partition and integration
• The mass movements — Champaran to Quit India

Sources

Wikipedia, “Vallabhbhai Patel”. V.P. Menon, The Story of the Integration of the Indian States (1956); Sardar Patel’s Correspondence (ed. Durga Das).

• Wikipedia — Vallabhbhai Patel