15/11/2020 Vallabhbhai Patel - Wikipedia

Nehru and Patel

Patel had long been the rival of Nehru for party leadership,
but Nehru usually prevailed over the older man, who died in
1950.[87] Subsequently, J. R. D. Tata, the Industrialist,
Maulana Azad and several others expressed the opinion that
Patel would have made a better Prime Minister for India than
Nehru.[120] These Patel admirers and Nehru's critics cite
Nehru's belated embrace of Patel's advice regarding the UN
and Kashmir and the integration of Goa by military action
and Nehru's rejection of Patel's advice on China.[121]
Proponents of free enterprise cite the failings of Nehru's
socialist policies as opposed to Patel's defence of property
rights and his mentorship of what was to be later known as
the Amul co-operative project.[122][123] However, A. G.
Noorani, in comparing Nehru and Patel, writes that Nehru
had a broader understanding of the world than Patel.[124]

Historian Rajmohan Gandhi argues:

Patel the realist was home minister and deputy

premier, Nehru the visionary was premier and foreign The coat of Patel, on display at the
minister. The two constituted a formidable pair. Patel Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel National
represented Indian nationalism’s Hindu face, Nehru Memorial, Ahmedabad
India’s secular and also global face. Their partnership,
necessary and fruitful for the country, was a solemn
commitment that each made to the other.[125]

Legacy
British historian Philip Ziegler depicts Patel as:

the Tammany Hall boss of the Congress Party: tough,

unscrupulous, knowing, a pragmatist concerned with
the realities of power, indifferent to abstract theorizing.
Nehru and he viewed each other with suspicion and
some distaste, most of the time, however,
remembering that they were indispensable to each
other.[126]
The central hall of the Sardar Vallabhbhai
In his eulogy, delivered the day after Patel's death, Sir Girija
Patel National Memorial
Shankar Bajpai, the Secretary-General of the Ministry of
External Affairs, paid tribute to "a great patriot, a great
administrator and a great man. Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel was
all three, a rare combination in any historic epoch and in any country." [97] Bajpai lauded Patel for his
achievements as a patriot and as an administrator, notably his vital role in securing India's stability in
the aftermath of Independence and Partition:

Among Patel's surviving

...History holds many examples of the fruits of freedom squandered by lack family, Maniben Patel lived
of attention to stability and order, the twin foundations of society. Though a in a flat in Bombay for the
revolutionary in his fight against foreign rule, Sardar Patel was no believer in
abrupt or violent change; progress by evolution was really his motto. And so, rest of her life following her
although in August 1947 power changed hands, and with it the spirit of the father's death; she often led
administration, the machinery of Government was preserved. As Home the work of the Sardar Patel
Minister and Minister for States, the Sardar had a double task, conservative Memorial Trust, which
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