4 - ‘Captain who … steered India’

Summary

From August 1947 to December 1950, the ‘Captain who … steered India’, in the words of Jawaharlal Nehru, the outsized figure of the central government and the Congress party was Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel. This part follows closely the trajectory of Patel's presence and significance between June 1948, Mountbatten's departure from India, and December 1950, Patel's death, and finds his influence beyond any inference, in a clear display of elite prowess against public power, despite the fact that for much of this time Patel was periodically unwell, following the heart attack that he suffered in the wake of Gandhi's assassination. Nehru, who visited him in his periods of convalescence in either Dehradun-Mussoorie or Bombay, could not govern easily without him, and many matters remained delayed within the overall reorganisation of government machinery in this transitional stage. When they were given, Patel's views were characteristically conservative and commanding, as can be seen from his note on the economic situation in the country from July 1948:

Economic malaise [is] because we [are] not able … to ensure co-ordination between … government, industry, and labour.… A sense of frustration in industry … [as labour] wields the big stick.… If we approach capitalists … in the right manner, we shall achieve their cooperation.… Among them there are patriots … what is required is a small committee of the Cabinet to supervise.

Whether it was making judicial appointments to the then-Federal Court from provinces, where he prevailed upon Nehru to appoint Mehr Chand Mahajan from East Punjab in place of Ram Lal, whom the prime minister favoured, not only because he was senior to Mahajan but also because he had a reputation of being impartial, whereas Mahajan was a ‘bit of rolling stone’. Or, whether it was the doings of the Sangh, which held a meeting on Janmashtami 1948 at Ajmer, regardless of its ban since Gandhi's assassination, where Mukund Malaviya, nephew of Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya, demanded a ‘Hindu Raj’ and warned that ‘more blood will be shed in India soon than during the last 2000 years’, it was to Patel that Nehru deferred to. While complaints flooded that summer of 1948 on police behaviour, not leaving Rameshwari Nehru, whose secretary Masud was arrested on ‘meagre evidence’, for Patel, it was best to leave the police alone and instead work ‘cooperatively’ between communities.