HISTORY, UNDER BJP rule, has developed a surprising tendency to dominate our national discourse. Not only has Indian history increasingly become ‘ground zero’ in the battle of narratives between Hindutvavadis and pluralists, it is being wielded as the BJP’s weapon of choice against the Congress.

Prime Minister’s Narendra Modi’s excoriating speech in the Lok Sabha on February 7th, in which he blamed the Congress Party and Jawaharlal Nehru for the Partition of India and the continuing Kashmir dispute, is the latest example of the ruling party’s invocation of historical facts to debate the political present. In the process, Modi exalted his own hero, Sardar Patel, as the man who, had he been put in charge of the country, would have prevented Partition and stopped the loss of territory in Kashmir.

This is not altogether surprising. For some years now the BJP—which, led by the Prime Minister, has sought to drape itself in a proprietary mantle of nationalism—has been seeking to appropriate the freedom struggle for itself. The complication is that the political cause to which the BJP is heir—embodied in the Jana Sangh, the RSS, and the Hindutva movement—had no prominent freedom fighter of its own during the nationalist movement. The BJP traces its origin to leaders who were not particularly active during the struggle for independence.

The lack of direct sources of inspiration means that people like Modi have to look for role models elsewhere. Modi’s favourite instrument is the doughty Congressman Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, one of India’s most respected Founding Fathers, the original ‘Iron Man’ of India and a Gujarati to boot. Adopting Patel as his hero and denigrating Nehru serves two purposes: it places an authentic freedom fighter on the BJP’s side in a contemporary retelling of history and seeks to push the Congress, led by a Nehru scion, on the defensive.

The process had already begun, lest we forget, when then Chief Minister Modi moved aggressively to lay claim to the legacy of Patel before the 2014 General Election. In his quest to garb himself in a more distinguished lineage than his party can ordinarily lay claim to, Modi called on farmers across India to donate iron from their ploughs to construct a giant 550-foot statue of the Iron Man in his state, which would be by far the largest statue in the world, dwarfing the Statue of Liberty. But it will be less of a monument to the modest Gandhian it ostensibly honours than an embodiment of the overweening ambitions of its builder. (Typically, the call to collect ploughshares has been quietly shelved; reports indicate that the statue is being cast instead in a foundry in China.)

Modi’s motives are easy to divine. His own image had been tarnished by the 2002 communal massacre in Gujarat when he was Chief Minister. Identifying himself with Patel (who is portrayed as the leader who stood up for the nation’s Hindus during the horrors of Partition and was firm on issues like Kashmir) is an attempt at character-building by association—portraying Modi himself as an embodiment of the tough, decisive man of action that Patel was, rather than the destructive bigot his enemies decry.

It helps that Patel is widely admired for his extraordinary role in forging a united India through the merger of princely states with the Union, an exercise that gave him an unchallenged standing as the Iron Man of India. Patel represents both a national appeal and a Gujarati origin that suits Modi. The Modi-as-latter-day- Patel message has been resonating well with many Gujaratis, who are proud to be reminded of a native son the nation looks up to, and with many of India’s urban middle-class, who see in Modi a strong leader to cut through the confusion and indecision of India’s messy democracy. Three years of ineffective governance has taken something of the sheen off that appeal, so the latest broadside in Parliament may well signal a desperate attempt by the Prime Minister to squeeze contemporary political benefit over a historical dispute.

It is true, of course, that the two men had their differences, which neither kept particularly secret. Just before independence, Patel was privately scathing about Jawaharlal’s ‘acts of emotional insanity’ and ‘childlike innocence, which puts us all in great difficulties quite unexpectedly”. Nehru, in turn, could not have been unconscious of the fact that the older man (Patel was 14 years his senior) was seen by many Congressmen as more deserving of the country’s leadership than the mercurial Jawaharlal. Modi made an issue of the fact that Nehru was appointed despite this, but he omitted the equally important fact that it was a fellow Gujarati, Gandhiji himself, who made the choice, in which Patel acquiesced without demur.

In his

Source: http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/essay/nehru-vs-patel-unity-in-diversity