How historians committed to the Congress and Congress politicians re-crafted memory.
After the death of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, freedom fighter, senior Congress leader and at the time the Home Minister of India, money was collected for a memorial.
Nehru felt the funds should be utilised instead for digging village wells and building approach roads.
Nehru objected to Patel’s statue being erected at Vijay Chowk. It was the Congress leader from Bombay, S K Patil, who managed to install a statue on Parliament Street from funds he had raised in Bombay and not from the Congress Memorial Fund.
In the following years Patel was all but forgotten in India. The only thing left of him was a vague memory of him being called 'Sardar Patel' who was somehow important in Indian history. Those who went into a little detail recalled that he had some role to play in the unification of India and that it was said that Kashmir became a problem between Pakistan because Nehru sidelined Patel.
That is where history stood. The NCERT books mentioned Patel only once in a casual way with respect to the Bardoli Satyagraha. It was only in 1991, on the suggestion of then prime minister Chandra Shekhar, that a Bharat Ratna was belatedly bestowed on Patel.
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