His noble soul remains country’s inner monitor

I have no memories of the great man. As a two-three year old, I was lucky enough to have seen Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel many times. Including on his last birthday, on October 31, 1950, when my parents took me to his home to greet him and join a two-family photo-op. But all those real ‘sightings’ as I would like to think of them, have been wiped off my mind's screens.

- Gopalkrishna Gandhi

Jawaharlal Nehru, I was lucky enough to have seen oftener. And I have sharp recollections of each one of those occasions. And yet, if I were to close my eyes and try to conjure images of those two men, the Sardar’s head and face would come as sharply into my imagining view as that of the Pandit. In fact, rather more so.

Weird?

Perhaps.

But let me ask myself why that is so. A quotidian explanation is that Patel has figured in home conversation through the years as much as Nehru has. Through the years, through the decades. He has been talked about within the family, remembered, missed, analysed, critiqued, commemorated. He has never been forgotten. Never been shelved on the pantheons of the “great gone”. He has been alive, there, right there where he had been as when he lived.

A more objective and conceptual explanation for his seeming ever-present personality is that the need for him to be there, here, right here, has been insistent, persistent. If only Patel had been with us...

And a list, long and lengthening, emerges when he is recalled as the person who would not have allowed such and such to have happened, seen to it that such-and-such took place, ensured that so-and-so scalawag would have come nowhere near the power he came to wield, that such-and-such good man would not have been put out to pasture. And more significantly, if only Patel, as home minister, had lived to, say, 1955, when he would have reached 80, India’s administrative officialdom would have been set on a path of incorruptible integrity, uncompromised professionalism and trusted adherence to fair rules fairly implemented, with the freedom to speak its mind frankly but egolessly. Its police would have become not just nonpartisan but hugely cherished as a force for the protection of the common weal undeflected by temptation or by bullying.