OPINION

“Work is worship but laughter is life. Anyone who takes life too seriously must prepare himself for a miserable existence. Anyone who greets joys and sorrows with equal facility can really get the best of life.”
This statement can easily be mistaken as a thoughtful musing of a spiritual saint who has renounced the world, and has dedicated his life to a greater cause. It is difficult to believe that the aforementioned is one amongst many non-political quotes of the iron man of India, SardarVallabhbhai Patel. 

EARLY LIFE & PEASANT STRUGGLE
Born as one amongst five brothers and sisters in a peasant family of Ladbai and Jhaveribhai Patel in village Nadiad in Kaira district of Gujarat, Vallabhbhai was set for a far greater cause of independence and integration of independent India. In his formative years, his mother has had a profound impact on his psychology. Like in a normal rural setting, the mother would gather all her children and narrate stories from Ramayana and Mahabharata.  While it impacted the spiritual quotient of young Patel, it was his father who introduced him to the world of peasantry.

Sir  John  Strachey, a British Indian civil servant used to address his civil servants-in-training by saying, "The first and most important thing to learn about India is that there is not and never was an India." Historian David Ludden in his book Contesting the Nation: Religion, Community, and the Politics of Democracy in India writes 'the territory that we use to describe the landscape of Indian civilization was defined politically by the British Empire. India was never what it is today in a geographical, demographic, or cultural sense, before 1947.' Many like Winston Churchill had predicted that post independence, India would disintegrate and fall back into the Middle Ages.

 India, after attaining independence faced massive challenges. One of the biggest tests the leaders of the time faced was to have a defined boundary of the land whose geographical sense had flowed among the masses through ages. Diana L Eck in her book, India-A Sacred Geography describes this land of Bharata to have been 'enacted ritually in the footsteps of pilgrims for many hundreds of years.' Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru writes about this sense of unity of India as an emotional experience. In Discovery of India, he explains the experience of instilling sense of oneness among the peasants of India, 'I tried to make them think of India as a whole...the task was not easy; yet it was not so difficult as I had imagined, for our ancient epics and myths and legends, which they knew so well, had made them familiar with the conception of their country.' 

Sardar Patel dominated Indian politics from 1917 to 1950. First, he was at the forefront of the freedom struggle. Then, after Independence in 1947, as Deputy Prime Minister, he held the crucial portfolios of Home, States and Information and Broadcasting. The ‘Iron Man’ and a founder of modern India, he restructured the Indian bureaucracy after the transfer of large number of officials to Pakistan, integrated the princely States into the Indian union, and had an important role in shaping the Indian Constitution.
 
Following territorial consolidation, the immediate goal was for the Government, industrialists and labour to participate in a great national effort for recovery and reconstruction. The objective was to bring an improvement in the living standards of countrymen. The British had taken what they had to, leaving behind, in his words, only their statues. Many of the instruments of economic control that had been put in place by the British government to gear the Indian economy towards the war effort were still operating. So, imports remained severely restricted, and foreign currency earned from India’s exports for the war had still not been transferred by the Bank of England to the Reserve Bank of India. As a result, a sizeable sterling balance had accumulated, but war-damaged England was in no position to settle the dues.

Each person draws lessons his own way. Sir Bertrand Russell explaining the theory of relatively once stated, “If everything was relative to one another there would be nothing for it to be from”. He further stated that each person measures time his own way, a girl and a boy travelling would find the train journey engrossing, a flea travelling in the same compartment fulfilling, a sick man nerve wracking and so on. Similarly hearing the speech of Shashi Tharoor and now reading his book one wonders how did a nation that can be pointed out on a world map with a pencil; rule a subcontinent that is nearly the size of a clenched fist. How did four thousand British civil servants rule four crores Indian citizens for nearly two hundred years? The answer is simple -- lack of unity and cohesive defence structure.
Are we repeating the same mistake, which allowed the invasion of India from the Delhi Sultanate until 1947? Do we as a nation, even though we boast of Chanakya, subconsciously lower the defence forces for vested interests; are we not learning from our history.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent visit to the home state of Gujarat definitely underlined the fact that he is rattled by poor state of economy and administration. Not that I seek to write a treatise on how BJP could lose in Gujarat in the upcoming assembly polls, on the contrary the Prime Minister’s personal push could actually see his party pass the finishing line ahead of the Congress for the fifth time in the row.

But then as mentioned, it has to be Narendra Modi’s personal push which would see the party through as the present BJP chief minister Vijay Rupani emerges almost as a non-entity in the Google search. Its important for the Prime Minister to win Gujarat to retain his stranglehold over the party as next year states of Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan go to polls, where the reigning chief ministers Shivraj Singh Chouhan, Raman Singh and Vasundhara Raje have been leaders in their own right much before Modi rose on the national stage.

If Modi faces a debacle in Gujarat, and the triumvirate named above emerge victoriuous in their pocket boroughs, the inner dynamics of the Bharatiya Janata Party would change ahead of 2019 Lok Sabha polls. This is something Narendra Modi can ill afford and he would leave nothing to chance. Thus the plan to pitch-in his chosen BJP chief ministers – Devendra Fadnavis (Maharashtra), Yogi Adityanath (Uttar Pradesh), Trivendra Singh Rawat (Uttarakhand) and Raghubar Das (Jharkhand), to push the campaign full throttle ahead.