Unite to divide

 To have built the tallest statue in the world in the form of Sardar Vallabhai Patel, the ‘Iron Man of India’ and home minister in the Nehru government, makes news and Modi who piloted the project sometime in 2012-13 knows all about making news. Patel a Congressman and second-in-command in the Congress government headed by Nehru was from Gujarat. Seventy years after Patel’s death, the Modi government came up with a bright idea of constructing the tallest statue of Patel to be dubbed as ‘Statue of Unity’ to rival Nehru. The BJP has alleged that Congress party has never given due honour to its ‘tallest leader’ and decided to correct the wrong of the past. The ‘statue of unity’, as Patel’s statue has been called by the Modi government, was meant to suggest that Patel was a unifier. The BJP believed that had Patel been prime minister, he would not have allowed partition to take place. According to records, Patel, when the issue of partition came up had said : “I would make no efforts to explain away the responsibility of the Congress for dividing the country. We took these extreme steps after great deliberation. In spite of my previous strong opposition to Partition, I agreed to it because I felt convinced that in order to keep India united, it must be divided now.” The Patel-Nehru ideological differences have always encouraged the Hindu right wing to appropriate selectively; opting to pick his post-Independence legacy while overlooking his enormous contribution to the freedom struggle. The BJP, however, may be disinclined to dive deep into Patel’s thought process, for he was an unwavering follower of Gandhi, had no love lost for the RSS and was averse to Subhas Chandra Bose, another icon in the process of appropriation by the BJP. So, the entire motive was ‘appropriation’ of the names of such leaders to create a divide in history. Thus Patel’s statue of unity in fact is being used to divide to appropriate his memory by a party whose communal ideology the Iron Man of India loathed. Patel would ever have liked his grand statue against the protests of 22 villages when throughout his life he cared more for them than tall statues or glittering public rallies. Rajmohan Gandhi, the celebrated biographer of Patel, had rejected the idea in 2013. He wrote “The country’s first home minister would not have recognized Mr. Modi as his ideological heir and would have been very ‘pained’ with his behaviour towards Muslims”. He said that Patel was a great “team builder” and “other people were prominent in his daily life”. Politics is mostly marketing, and marketing is still not well understood in Indian politics. Often confused with sales, it is reduced to catchy slogans. Modi likes to ride on the general concept that his economic mantra is succeeding because of his decisive leadership. Unfortunately, this “decisive leadership” has failed to respond to the cries of marginalisation and atrocities meted out to minorities. Despite total failure of demonetisation in netting black money and terror funding and only causing a big setback to the economy, many people still trust him. It is due to clever imagery and propaganda and silencing critics in the media, that this trust, even his questionable decisions such as the demonetisation, GST etc are interpreted positively by the many voters since they believe he intends well.