BJP president Amit Shah said on Wednesday that all of Kashmir would have been under India’s control — with no need for Article 370 — if only Vallabhbhai Patel, and not Jawaharlal Nehru, had been in charge of the situation after independence. “Even today, a big part of Kashmir is under Pakistan. I don’t have any hesitation in saying that if the Kashmir issue had been handled by Sardar Patel instead of Jawaharlal Nehru, then a part of Kashmir would not have gone under Pakistan, and Article 370 too would not have been required, because Kashmir would then have been like any other territory of India,” Shah said. There would also have been no question of UN intervention in Kashmir had Patel, who oversaw the unification of Hyderabad, had been in charge of assimilating Kashmir as well, he said. The BJP president was speaking in the north Karnataka district of Bidar, at an event to mark the 66th anniversary of the unification of the former princely, Nizam-ruled province of Hyderabad with India. This was Shah’s first visit to Karnataka after taking charge of the BJP. He laid the foundation for a statue of the Sardar and a “memorial to martyrs” in the tiny village of Gorta, which was formerly a part of the princely Hyderabad state. The BJP is building the memorial in memory of villagers who were killed, allegedly by the Nizam’s irregular army of Razakars, for raising the national flag in the village on May 9, 1948. A few months later, Sardar Patel launched ‘Operation Polo’ against the Nizam, during which Indian forces defeated the Razakars and completed the annexation of Hyderabad. The Sardar’s action prevented the alignment of Hyderabad with Pakistan, Shah said. “If today this former Nizam state is part of India, the credit must go to Sardar Patel. It is because of his determination and his ability that we are all together, we have to always remember this,” Shah said. “On this day of liberation from the old Nizam state, I pay rich tributes to Sardar Patel on behalf of all countrymen.” And yet, Patel had died poor, and his family remained invisible in independent India — in sharp contrast to Nehru’s family, Shah said. “Have you ever heard of the whereabouts of Sardar Patel’s family? Despite being a visionary and the unifier of India, the former advocate died with barely a few hundred rupees in his possession,” he said. The princely state of Hyderabad was spread over parts of what are today Karnataka, Telangana and Maharashtra. The BJP under Shah seeks to use the narrative of the Gorta resistance in its campaign to expand its base in election bound Maharashtra, as well as in Telangana and Karnataka. Despite uncertain historical evidence, the BJP has labelled the alleged killings at Gorta the “Jallianwala Bagh of South India”. The “martyrs memorial”, scheduled to be inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on September 17, 2015, will cost Rs 27 lakh, contributed by young BJP workers from 54,000 polling booths in Karnataka. Shah described the losses suffered by the BJP in the assembly bypolls as minor aberrations, and expressed the confidence that it would win big in Maharashtra. “Don’t be disappointed by the recent election losses. These are temporary losses. The opposition perhaps has not realised that we have entered their bastions in Assam and Bengal,” Shah said. September 17 is commemorated as the day of Hyderabad’s union with India. To mark the day Karnataka’s Congress Chief Minister Siddaramaiah too garlanded a statue of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel in Gulbarga — which is one of the six north Karnataka districts that make up the Hyderabad-Karnataka region.
