A key argument that many critics of Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister, have made over the years is that India would have been a different country if Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel was independent India's first leader. Patel was independent India's first home minister.
A plethora of BJP leaders have made the claim the country would have taken a different path if Sardar Patel was the first prime minister. In February 2018, Prime Minister Narendra Modi told the Lok Sabha, “Had Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel been the first prime minister, a part of Kashmir would not have been under control of Pakistan.” The critics of Nehru and his successors in the Nehru-Gandhi family allege that Sardar Patel's legacy had been ignored by successive Congress governments.
A new book by historian and analyst Narayani Basu, V.P. Menon: The Unsung Architect of Modern India, is expected to trigger more debate on the 'Patel vs Nehru' issue. Basu is the great-granddaughter of V.P. Menon, a British-era civil servant, who was political reforms commissioner to multiple viceroys. Menon played a key role in overseeing the Partition and integration of princely states into the Indian Union and worked closely with Sardar Patel in the period after independence.
In a review of the book for Business Standard, journalist Karan Thapar writes, "Narayani more or less confirms something about which there has been a lot of speculation. Nehru did not intend to make Sardar Patel a member of his first cabinet until V.P. Menon stepped in and ensured Sardar's inclusion."
The book claims Nehru did not include the name of Sardar Patel in the list he submitted for independent India's first cabinet to viceroy Lord Louis Mountbatten. Narayani Basu writes V.P. Menon went to Mountbatten and warned "you will start a war of succession. Congress will split in two...". The book claims Sardar Patel's name was included in the name of ministers after Mountbatten met Mahatma Gandhi.
The book also claims V.P. Menon believed Nehru "had begun a sustained and deeply calculated move to whitewash Sardar Patel from public memory..."
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In November 2018, Narayani Basu had written an article explaining the relationship between Sardar Patel and V.P. Menon for The Wire.
In the article, Basu argues, Menon's “reading of Patel was astute: between Nehru and Patel, it was the Sardar who was the better ruler”. She writes that Menon felt that the newly independent India “needed a man who could and would hold the reins of power with an iron hand”.
Narayani Basu wrote in the article that Menon's fortune's declined following the death of Sardar Patel in 1950. V.P. Menon was one of the founding members of the Swatantra Party, which advocated free market reforms, as opposed to the socialist policies of the then ruling Congress. Menon died in 1966.
