It was meant to be a celebration of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel’s 150th birth anniversary. Instead, the BJP’s ‘Sardar@150 Rashtriya Ekta Padyatra’—a 152-km journey on foot across Gujarat—turned into an attack on the Congress and former prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru for allegedly failing to give India’s first home minister his due, prompting state Congress leaders to quip that it was a sign of the saffron party’s “desperate need” to associate with a national leader from the Independence movement.
The yatra began from Karamsad in Anand district, where Patel grew up, on November 26 and concluded at Ekta Nagar, where the Statue of Unity is located, on December 6, coinciding with the anniversary of the Babri Masjid demolition.
Over a series of events, the BJP projected Sardar Patel as a leader aligned with its ideology of nationalism, arguing that he never got his due in the Congress, and cited anecdotes to cast Nehru and the party in a poor light.
At the launch of the padyatra, Vadodara Lok Sabha MP Hemang Joshi invited Congress MP Rahul Gandhi to join, while several Union ministers addressed public gatherings, claiming that Prime Minister Narendra Modi was the true inheritor of Sardar Patel’s legacy.
At the concluding ceremony, Vice-President C P Radhakrishnan stated that Sardar Patel’s legacy echoed in the call of Atmanirbhar Bharat and Viksit Bharat given by PM Modi, even as national party president J P Nadda, Defence Minister Rajnath Singh and others said that his policy decisions signalled the “second coming of Sardar”.
Since 2014, the BJP has seized opportunities to attack the Congress over the alleged injustice meted out to Patel and his differences with Nehru. With the Sardar @150 celebrations, the saffron party went a step further, portraying Modi as the successor to Patel’s vision. BJP leaders blamed Nehru for the Kashmir issue and accused the Congress of suppressing Sardar Patel’s legacy with the intention of “wiping out” the Iron Man’s contributions.
While Union minister Mansukh Mandaviya likened Patel to Otto von Bismarck, the former chancellor credited with unifying Germany, Nadda claimed that Nehru caused a “nasur (deep wound)” to India by not allowing Sardar Patel to deal with the Kashmir issue when he had made the rulers of Hyderabad and Junagadh accede to India.
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Rajnath Singh, on the other hand, stirred up a controversy when he stated during his address on December 2 that it was Sardar Patel—“also a son born out of a Gujarati mother like PM Modi”—who thwarted Nehru’s plan of building Babri Masjid by using funds from the government treasury.
In response, the Congress sought an apology from Singh. Senior leader Jairam Ramesh took to X to cite entries from the original diary of Sardar Patel’s daughter, Maniben, to state that Singh was “spreading falsehood to improve his relations with PM Modi”.
The narrative is not new. On October 31 this year, the BJP’s official X handle posted pictures of the Sardar Patel gallery in the Statue of Unity Complex in Ekta Nagar that mentions details of two attacks on him—one on January 20, 1939, in Vadodara’s Mandvi and the second on May 14, 1939, in Bhavnagar—allegedly orchestrated by the Muslim League, and questioned the Congress’s “86-year-long silence”.
‘History of sidelining leaders’ vs ‘No role to play in India’s freedom’
A senior BJP leader from Gujarat denied that the party had “usurped” Sardar Patel’s legacy, saying the party has never shied away from giving credit where it is due, regardless of the person’s political affiliations.
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“Sardar Patel is, of course, one of the greatest leaders that the country has seen. His contribution to unifying the nation can never be celebrated enough. However, it is not just Sardar Patel that the BJP has recognised. The Congress has a history of sidelining and ignoring some of its most loyal and great leaders,” he said.
“The PM Modi-led government has also bestowed the Bharat Ratna on Pranab Mukherjee in 2019, without staking any claim on Mukherjee’s legacy. Having said that, nothing has stopped the Congress party from also giving Sardar Patel his due…,” he added.
Accusing the Congress of apathy, the leader added, “Does the Congress proclaim Sardar Patel as their great leader? Not one Congress leader has even visited the Statue of Unity since it was inaugurated in 2018. Today, in the age of social media, several facts about Sardar Patel that were suppressed for several years have become known to the public. It is for people to see who is really walking on Sardar Patel’s path.”
A Congress leader from central Gujarat, from where Sardar Patel hailed, hit back, saying, “The fact is that the BJP does not have a national leader from India’s Independence struggle on whom they can prop their narrative of nationalism. The BJP cannot deny the truth that it had no role to play in India’s freedom. It is natural that the BJP has chosen a Congress leader who best fits their narrative by trying to brush aside the truth that the same leader had banned their parent organisation, the RSS.”
