There is no shortage of material on the 182-metre-high Statue of Unity, the tallest structure of its kind, near the Sardar Sarovar dam in Gujarat. Or the National Unity Day, celebrated on 31 October to mark Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel’s birth anniversary. Or ‘Aarambh’, the common orientation programme for freshly minted officers from the Indian Administrative Service, Indian Police Service, Indian Forest Service and the 19 central services, including the Indian Foreign Service.
This column, thus, is dedicated to a forgotten statue of Patel, and the role of a conscientious civil servant who was cast in the mould of the former’s exhortation in the Constituent Assembly in 1949: “There is no alternative to this administrative system…The Union will go, you will not have a united India if you do not have good All-India Service which has the independence to speak out its mind, which has [the] sense of security that you will stand by your work…If you do not adopt this course, then do not follow the present Constitution. Substitute something else…these people are the instrument. Remove them, and I see nothing but a picture of chaos all over the country.”
The civil servant in question is the late SK Das of the 1973 IAS batch, who never spoke about what he did. Even though I worked with him for over five years in the Uttarakhand government, it was only at Das’ memorial meeting on 29 September that Colonel VK Dougall (retired), Secretary of the Dr Dwijen Sen Memorial Kala Kendra in Dehradun, recalled his role in installing Patel’s statue at a prominent landmark in the city – a green patch sandwiched between the Clock Tower and the General Post Office. It is now called the Sardar Patel Park.
The statue that gathered dust
Soon after Patel’s death in December 1950, the Dehradun Municipality commissioned Dwijen Sen, an artist and sculptor who had trained at Santiniketan, to create an eight-foot statue of the Sardar. Having received the mandate, Sen, also called ‘Dada’ by his acolytes, spent considerable time studying the frames, portraits and pictures of Patel before finally preparing the mould. However, by the time the statue was ready for installation, Patel had lost favour with the political dispensation. Although Sen received his payment from the municipality, the statue was bundled in gunny bags and stored in the garage of the Town Hall, where it gathered dust until SK Das became Dehradun’s district magistrate in the early 1980s.
Das, a theatre and arts enthusiast, frequently visited the Town Hall, which doubled up as a hub for cultural activities in the city. During one of his visits, he enquired about the contents of the oversized, dusty sack. He was told that it was a statue of Sardar Patel that had been commissioned by the municipality but never installed. Moreover, neither the municipality chairman nor any minister or MP wanted to be associated with the statue’s installation. While one minister had agreed, he dropped off at the very last minute. A dismayed Das then decided to do the deed himself – perfectly in line with the principles of discretion that Patel had envisioned for his civil servants. It was perhaps the most befitting tribute to Sardar Patel. For several years, it was only the district administration of Dehradun that remembered him on 31 October.
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The man who saved India
Two of Patel’s most prominent biographers, Rajmohan Gandhi (Patel, A Life) and Hindol Sengupta (The Man Who Saved India), acknowledge that 31 October may not be his actual date of birth. But this is what he had entered at the time of his matriculation examination. Now, with the buzz around National Unity Day and the political resurrection of the Sardar, floral tributes will be offered by many a political dignitary, and some of his quotes will be published prominently in major newspapers.
When the National Unity Day was first announced in 2014, the official statement read: ‘This will provide an opportunity to re-affirm the inherent strength and resilience of our nation to withstand the actual and potential threats to the unity, integrity and security of our country.’ Indeed, when India gained Independence in 1947, there were very serious threats. The aftermath of Partition-related violence, coupled with the imperative of integrating over 500 princely states that covered more than 40 per cent of pre-Independence India’s landmass, as well as the Pakistan Army-backed large scale infiltration of Jammu and Kashmir, had shaken the very foundations of a new nation.
Even though the Indian Independence Act of 1947 envisaged that the princely states could join either India or Pakistan, some of the larger states like J&K, Hyderabad, and Travancore toyed with the idea of independence. Many were ambivalent about the dominion they would join. Dethroned: Patel, Menon and the Integration of Princely India, a book by John Zubrzycki, has examined the critical role Patel played in preventing the disintegration of India by ensuring the absorption of princely states into the Indian dominion.
Zubrzycki credits this landmark achievement to Patel’s powers of persuasion, coupled with the promise of privileges and privy purses and the threat of using the Army’s ‘might’. Nehru’s overt animosity for these states, which found expression in statements like princely states are the “sinks of reaction and incompetence and unrestrained autocratic power, sometimes exercised by vicious and degraded individuals,” could have potentially sabotaged a smooth transition. Many princes took it as a sign that there was no future for them in Congress-led India. This apprehension was exploited to the hilt by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who started offering blank cheques to the rulers – both Hindu and Muslim. Some monarchs were more interested in retaining their absolute power rather than ‘democratising’ their administrations.
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Iron Man of India
Patel employed a diplomatic and pragmatic approach, appealing to the princes’ proud, glorious past where their ancestors “had played highly patriotic roles in the defence of their family honour and the freedom of their land.” But he took decisive and firm action when it was most needed. For example, when Junagadh’s reclusive, canine-obsessed ruler, Mahabat Khan III, announced his state’s unilateral accession to Pakistan, Patel stepped in to undo it. Not doing so would have emboldened Hyderabad, apart from giving Pakistan an opportunity to dabble in the affairs of J&K. Patel also took decisive action when the newly anointed king of Jodhpur met with Jinnah shortly before Independence. He told him clearly that if he opted for Pakistan, India would not come to his defence if his Hindu majority population and army rose in revolt. The ruler of Jodhpur quietly signed on the dotted line.
Of equal importance was his stout defence of the administrative system and the administrators. He understood more clearly than his Prime Minister and other cabinet colleagues that running a movement was different from managing the affairs of the State. It was largely on his insistence that Article 311 was retained. Several members of the Constituent Assembly felt that civil servants were instruments of the Raj who were often on the other side of the fence in many of the satyagraha and civil disobedience movements. His statement on the imperative necessity of civil servants to speak their minds “without fear or favour” is indeed a solemn promise that young people who join the steel frame must resolve to uphold when they take the ‘national unity pledge’ under the Statue of Unity. No wonder, then, that he is regarded as the Bhishma ‘Pitamah’ of Indian civil services.
While we bask in the glory of the Statue of Unity, it is important to look around for other statues and landmarks dedicated to the man who saved India. It is crucial to place on record the contribution of civil servants like Das, who did the right thing even when the political headwinds were not entirely favourable. Then, and only then, will India’s unity rest on terra ferma.
Sanjeev Chopra is a former IAS officer and Festival Director of Valley of Words. Until recently, he was Director, Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration. He tweets @ChopraSanjeev. Views are personal.
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)