Let’s be absolutely clear. The so-called Statue of Unity that has just been completed in Gujarat is not a statue of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, freedom fighter and major leader of our independence movement. The statue is actually a monument to Narendra Modi, to Amit Shah, to Mohan Bhagwat and also to their political ancestors: K.B. Hedgewar, M.S. Golwalkar, V.D. Savarkar and Nathuram Godse. The statue is a mammoth symbol to honour Sardar Patel’s sworn political enemies, a multi-thousand tonne salute to everything Patel stood against, to every political idea he dedicated his life to fight and dismantle.
There is a lot of talk from the Hindutva brigade about how much better it would have been if Patel and not Nehru had become the first Prime Minister of India. So, let us imagine Patel at the helm of the Central government in, say, 1950. Let us imagine someone at the time proposing the construction of a massive statue of Mahatma Gandhi for an amount then equivalent to the nearly ₹3,000 crore that this grotesquerie has cost today. Imagine this and you immediately see Patel’s famously baleful stare. Imagine this and you have no choice but to imagine the tsunami of cold fury of which the man was capable when confronted with hypocrisy, deception, pomposity or grandiose buffoonery.
What that money will fetch
After Sardar Patel’s anger had subsided somewhat, his first question would have been: if this massive sum can be put together for a project, surely the desperate needs of the poorest sections of our society have to come first? The proper, abstemious Gujarati in him would have shuddered at the colossal waste of money on the Narmada atrocity; the man who gave up the life and career of a rich and successful barrister and cultivated humility and simplicity for the rest of his life would have been utterly revolted by the pride and puffery a statue such as this implies, by the greed for reflected glory it reveals in the promoters of this project; the self-respecting Swarajist in Patel would have been infuriated that the plan involved the fabrication of parts of the statue abroad; the anti-imperialist in him would have seen this obscene sthambha as a symbol of oppressive centralised power lowering down at the miniaturised common man in the surrounding areas below.
“My only desire is that India should be a good producer and no one should be hungry, shedding tears for food in this country,” Patel once said. India is still a poor country, people are still shedding tears for food. Nearly ₹3,000 crore, no matter from where it came, is a lot of money. This money is desperately needed in several different areas: in health care, education, agricultural support and urban improvement. Hell, if you wanted to show a certain kind of muscular patriotism, the sum would even have been handy being spent in upgrading equipment and combat gear for our soldiers. Instead this money is spent by Modi & Co. in yet another exercise in self-promotion and self-advertisement.
Insult to injury
Sardar Patel had no time for religious extremists of any kind. It didn’t matter whether you were Muslim or Hindu; if you were misusing religion and religious sentiments to further your political power, Patel was not your friend. While he may have had more sympathy towards some Hindu traditions than Jawaharlal Nehru, neither Nehru nor Patel was blind to the fact that the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and Hindutva lot consistently bowed to the British rulers while Congress leaders, like themselves, were slammed into jail where some of them even died. After the murder of Bapu, Patel’s anger towards the RSS was unimaginable, and he banned the organisation. He lifted the ban only after the group signed an agreement saying they would stay away from politics. That assurance was given in shameless bad faith, and today we have the irony of that same RSS trying to hollow out the legacies of Gandhi, Nehru, Patel and Ambedkar even while building the gigantic Trojan Horse in Narmada district.
I’m sure there are people in Nagpur chortling into their falangist white shirts, thinking this is sweet revenge, that this statue of Patel will actually be a mausoleum of Gandhi’s and Sardar’s principles and ideology. The statue itself stares over a land destroyed to make the Narmada Dam and so-called Sardar Sarovar, where thousands of people were ripped out of their traditional lands to create an irrigation project that would benefit only a very few, a project that has failed dismally. To erect this obscene pile on the site of that robbery and disastrous planning is to add insult to injury. The insult is as much to the poor people of Gujarat as it is to Sardar Patel, one of their greatest champions.
This statue may be intended as the place to inter Patel’s idea of India, but in time, when history kicks back, it might well become the mausoleum for the toxic ideology of Hindutva.
