Man who steeled an independent nation

India's first home minister and deputy prime minister, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel first mobilised peasants in Gujarat, then galvanised the freedom movement, and finally laid the foundation of a strong and free nation — for all and of equals

- Rajmohan Gandhi

“I size up a man,” Vallabhbhai Patel once said to Swami Anand, his and Mahatma Gandhi's close colleague, “before he completes four steps from the door towards me.” This “boast” was made in private to an individual who could be trusted with one’s inmost thoughts. Twelve years younger than Patel and a popular writer, Swami Anand served as Patel’s personal secretary during 1928's victorious Bardoli satyagraha, drafting his leader's letters to the government and statements to the public.

Mobilising the peasants of Surat district's Bardoli taluka, that satyagraha compelled Bombay Presidency’s British rulers to take back most of the land revenue increase they had levied. There may be meaning for us today in the way the Bardoli Satyagraha was launched almost one hundred years ago. No speeches were made. A peasant, his name unrecorded, moved a resolution advising everyone not to pay the levy. Five others from distinct caste or religious groups said they supported the call. A Hindu bhajan was sung, a passage from the Qur’an was read, and the resolution was passed in solemn silence.

After victory, Bardoli’s peasants called Patel their “Sardar”, their chief. The title stuck for the rest of Patel’s life and beyond. About twenty years thereafter, between 1946 and 1948, the Sardar’s ability to “size up the man opposite” was visible as he dealt first with British officers whose associates and allies had just defeated Hitler, and then with Indian rajas and nawabs who thought their grandfathers had been the English monarch’s special friends.

Although a section of the country seceded in 1947 and formed Pakistan, the bulk of independent India was unified, thanks in fair part to Vallabhbhai Patel's clarity. Hundreds of potentially troublesome “princely states” quietly merged into the Indian Union.