As prime minister, Jawaharlal had ultimate responsibility for many of the decisions taken during the tense period 1947–49, but it is true to say he was still finding his feet as a governmental leader and that on many key issues he simply went along with what Patel and Mountbatten wanted. Nehru was the uncontested voice of Indian nationalism, the man who had “discovered” India in his own imagination, but he could not build the India of his vision without help. When the Muslim rulers of Hindu-majority Junagadh and Hyderabad, both principalities surrounded by Indian territory, flirted with independence (in Hyderabad's case) and accession to Pakistan (in Junagadh's), the Indian army marched in and took over with scarcely a shot being fired. In both cases the decision was Patel's, with acquiescence from Nehru. It was Patel who managed the integration of the princely states into the Union with a combination of firmness and generosity: “We are all knit together by bonds of blood and feelings…. Therefore, let us sit together as friends.” What could have been messy and administratively a nightmare was managed with remarkable smoothness and efficiency under Patel's firm hand.
There were clashes in the cabinet on some of these issues, and in late 1947 Patel even told Mahatma Gandhi that he was seriously contemplating resignation. But the Mahatma persuaded his two disciples to try to work together. This they did; it was then the Mahatma turned against both of them when funds due as part of the national division of assets were not released to Pakistan by India because Patel (backed by Nehru) feared the money would be used to buy arms for war against India in Kashmir. Gandhi fasted against his own government; Patel offered to resign, but the Mahatma ended his fast only when his government gave in to his demands.
In the philosophical differences between Gandhi and Nehru, Patel occupied the middle ground. On economics, he was Gandhian in his desire to promote self-sufficiency and Nehruvian in his respect for industry, but he set far greater store by private enterprise. The Nehruvian vision of the country's foreign policy as an emanation of the nation's self-respect would have appealed to Patel, but he was far too much of a hardheaded realist to accept what he saw as the more woolly-minded of Nehru's international ideas. Patel was not in favor of India joining the Commonwealth, and he was severely critical, in private and directly in writing to the prime minister, of Nehru's Tibet and China policy.
In political style, Patel was much more of a pragmatist than Nehru; ever the hard-boiled realist, he was not easily swayed by passion, emotion, or ideology. A superb organizer and fund-raiser during the struggle for freedom, Patel proved an excellent administrator in government. His strong support for the civil servants, whose loyalty was initially suspect because of their service to the British Raj, preserved India's “steel frame.” It was Patel who, in the teeth of opposition from nationalist politicians who had been jailed (and worse) by Indian civil servants in the service of the Raj, insisted upon incorporating into free India's Constitution two articles protecting the positions, the independence, and the privileges of the Indian civil service. Without this the administration might have disintegrated. Patel ran his Home Ministry as firmly as he administered the country as a whole, and he brooked little interference from Nehru. He was firm and decisive in integrating the princely states, and his political toughness was never better seen than in his determination to pursue the use of force on Hyderabad and Junagadh, actions he executed swiftly and brilliantly.
Patel was, of course, far more conservative than Nehru, even if he was not the “Tory” of the Congress Party (a distinction even the British privately conferred upon Rajaji). Nehru gave in to his insistence on the maharajahs’ privy purses being guaranteed in perpetuity (a policy that would be undone two decades later by Nehru's daughter, Indira Gandhi). Yet Patel was hardly a monarchist: in 1939 he had personally led a popular movement against the Thakore of Rajkot, declaring that a “state cannot survive whose raja wastes money on dances while the peasants die of starvation.” It was rather his sense of what it would take to persuade the princes to join the republic, as well as his own integrity that was at stake: Patel was always known as a man who, once he gave his word, never failed to keep it. Patel also differed with Nehru on the question of the right to property and fair compensation for the expropriation of land, an issue on which his views initially prevailed. As the historian Sarvepalli Gopal put it, “The differences between Nehru and Patel derived from a conflict between two different systems of thinking and feeling; what enabled an avoidance of open rupture was mutual regard and Patel's stoic decency.”
Political clashes were, however, inevitable. When the time came for the position of governor general of India to be converted to that of president of the republic (upon the adoption of independent India's new Constitution on the symbolic date of January 26, 1950, the old Independence Day becoming the new Republic Day), Patel engineered the election of his crony Rajendra Prasad as the Congress candidate at the expense of the incumbent governor general, Rajaji. Jawaharlal had been completely bypassed; he was so surprised that he actually asked Prasad to withdraw and propose Rajagopalachari's name himself. Prasad cleverly suggested that he would do whatever Nehru and Patel agreed upon, at which point Nehru understood and threw in the towel. One of Prasad's first acts upon election was to ask that January 26 be changed to a date deemed more auspicious by his astrologers. Jawaharlal flatly turned him down, declaring that India would not be run by astrologers if he had anything to do with it. This time, Nehru won.
But it is true that a key area that divided Nehru from Patel was the issue of the treatment of India's Muslim minority, and this may be where the two men's admirers diverge irreconcilably. Both Nehru and Patel strove, like their mentor Mahatma Gandhi, to keep the country united. But once Partition had occurred, Patel was inclined to see India as a state that symbolized the interests of the Hindu majority, while Nehru's idea of India explicitly rejected the two-nation theory; having spurned the logic that had created a state for Muslims, he was not about to succumb to the temptation of mirroring that logic by allowing India to become a state for Hindus. “So long as I am prime minister,” he declared in 1950, “I shall not allow communalism to shape our policy.” Patel, on the other hand, was suspicious of the loyalties of Muslims who remained in India and felt those loyalties had to be proven. On one occasion, he proposed that Muslim officials should seek permission from the government before visiting Pakistan; Nehru objected to any double standard (other officials required no such permission in those days), and the prime minister prevailed.
And yet, this does not mean that Patel was communalist in his approach to India's Muslims. As home minister, Patel dealt with the communal disturbances that accompanied Partition firmly and evenhandedly; he transferred army units from Poona and Madras to restore order in Delhi, and asked the army to move ten thousand homeless Muslims into the Red Fort to protect them from Hindu rioters. But he saw Muslims in India, in the words of the historian Sarvepalli Gopal, as “hostages to be held in security for the fair treatment of Hindus in Pakistan.” Temperamentally, the Sardar was more inclined to draw the conclusion from Partition that an entire community had in effect seceded; he once suggested in 1948 that if Hindus were expelled from Pakistan, an equal number of Muslims should be expelled from India, an idea that appalled Nehru, who slapped it down immediately.
No wonder, then, that readers aware of my views on communal bigotry should presume my hostility to Patel. But one must make allowances for the temper of the times; and more important, Patel's fundamental decency became apparent on a communal issue on which he and Nehru in fact disagreed.