A young person once asked me a question that said as much about our public discourse as it did about how we remember our nation-makers: “What is so special about Sardar Patel?” Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel’s 150th birth anniversary on October 31 seems an appropriate moment to put some things in perspective.
Patel is not a figure to be merely remembered; he is a presence to be understood. For without Patel, we may never have had the India we take for granted today — a seamless nation-state stretching from the Himalayas to the Indian Ocean, from Kutch to Kohima, one uninterrupted tricolour flying over one uninterrupted territory.
Patel achieved a feat unmatched in the long arc of India’s civilisation. For millennia, this land possessed cultural unity and civilisational cohesion — but never, until 1947-49, a political whole. The Mauryas and the Guptas came close, but parts remained outside their direct authority; even the British only governed a patchwork of directly ruled provinces and only indirectly controlled princely states. In that delicate and volatile moment of Independence, when over 560 princely states could have splintered the subcontinent into balkanised chaos, Patel completed the unfinished task of history. He delivered, in less than a year, what other nations took decades or centuries to accomplish. His statesmanship places him in the same league as Otto von Bismarck and Abraham Lincoln — leaders who turned maps into nations.
What Patel forged is so deeply foundational that we have forgotten its significance. Today, a young Indian from Meghalaya can make Mumbai her home without feeling like an outsider. A farmer in Kutch and a student in Kashmir instinctively recognise each other as citizens of the same republic. The fact that we rarely recall which city once had a Maharaja or which region was never British India is not a lapse of public memory; it is a tribute to Patel’s extraordinary success. He ensured that the transition from a civilisational nation to a modern state was smooth and remarkably bloodless. Where force could have been used, he preferred persuasion; where coercion was possible, he chose consensus. It speaks not just of his administrative genius but of India’s inherent civilisational unity — a unity he activated and brought into the constitutional realm.
Yet, for decades, independent India was encouraged to forget Patel. The Congress party, in thrall to one family, confined him to the margins. His historic contribution was deliberately downplayed so that the Nehruvian narrative could dominate every chapter of post-Independence history. The man who truly kept India whole was kept out of national consciousness. It is among the great distortions of our republic.
It took Narendra Modi, a son of Gujarat, the land Patel also called home, to correct this injustice. Over the past decade, Patel has been restored to his rightful pedestal in the national imagination. The Statue of Unity, the world’s tallest statue, is not merely a monument. Just as the Statue of Liberty symbolises core American values, the Statue of Unity proclaims the foundational truth of India that is Bharat — that we are the oldest, deepest-rooted and the only still-living civilisational state in the world.
There is also a deeper continuity that binds Patel’s legacy with Modi’s decisions. Patel wished to secure Kashmir’s full integration, but Nehru’s blunders internationalised the issue and left a festering wound. Seven decades later, Article 370 stood as a scar on the map Patel stitched together. On August 5, 2019, that injustice was finally undone. With the constitutional reorganisation, a long-deferred chapter of Patel’s vision was completed. Kashmir was fully and irreversibly reunited with India — not by war, but through Parliament and popular consent.
Similarly, when people of newly independent India sought to rebuild Somnath, Patel, despite Jawaharlal Nehru’s objections, offered unwavering support. He believed that decolonisation was not merely about replacing flags — it required civilisational reassertion, a cultural renaissance. The reconstruction of Somnath was not a temple project. It was a reclamation. In Ayodhya, the construction of the Ram Mandir under Modi, unsurprisingly again opposed by Congress, follows the same philosophical arc — restoring what invaders destroyed, healing historical trauma, and reaffirming India’s timeless spirit.
Look around today: The elimination of Naxalism from vast stretches of the country, the tough stance against terrorism from across the border, the quiet but firm pursuit of national security — these are not isolated measures. They are part of a larger project to remove every fragment of disintegration left behind by Partition, to strengthen the nation Patel secured, and to fulfil the unfinished business of geopolitics and civilisation.
In many ways, Narendra Modi stands as the true inheritor of Patel’s legacy. What Patel did internally — welding together diverse regions into a single nation state — Modi is extending externally: Securing borders, stitching infrastructure, asserting sovereignty, and reigniting a sense of collective pride. Patel built the architecture of unity; Modi is reinforcing it with purpose.
Today, as India reclaims its ancient name Bharat, one can sense a civilisational arc that Patel started finally coming full circle. Under PM Modi, national integration has been fortified with cultural confidence; economic rise is matched with geopolitical assertiveness; and the world increasingly recognises Bharat as one of the principal poles of the world. But this journey started with Sardar Patel when he picked up the scattered pieces of a wounded civilisation and welded them into a single Republic. That is what is so special about Sardar Patel.
The writer is CEO, Bluekraft Digital Foundation and was earlier director (content), MyGov
