Tall and short: Everyone wants a piece of Vallabhbhai Patel

Just the other day, a woman I had not seen since I was a child confessed to me, at a funeral, that she hadn’t recognized me at all. “I thought you would have grown to be taller,” she said with an air of mild reproof as if I had failed some examination or tricked her somehow. As the height-challenged son of moderately tall parents, this has been my burden to bear for as long as I can remember. In only one class photograph did I manage to graduate from the first row to the second row but that growth spurt sputtered out fairly rapidly. As a child, it was kind of cute. As an adult it’s just plain short. Now however I see a glimmer of hope. Not about growing taller. That is a lost cause. But of gaining some stature for my beleaguered community – that of height-challenged Indian men everywhere. I can claim Sardar Vallabbhai Patel on behalf of my community. Narendra Modi would like to build a statue of Sardar Patel that towers almost 600 feet high, almost 300 feet taller than the Statue of Liberty. [caption id=“attachment_1205099” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Statue of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel. AFP image[/caption] Sardar Patel was only 5 feet 5 inches in real life. A fairly respectable height, especially in his day and age but all his towering was figurative. Narendra Modi, my newspaper tells me is 5’10”. L.K.Advani is a strapping 6 feet. Sardar Patel would be a far bigger coup than one of the current standard-bearers for the cause of the short-ish Indian man – the dimunitive Jyoti Basu whose centenary is about to be celebrated by his party in his native West Bengal this month. They are unlikely to mention his height as part of the celebrations. If nothing else, I am grateful to the current tug-o-war over Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel for providing us with vital statistics like his height, facts often neglected in our history books which tend to blow up all historical figures into larger-than-life characters anyway. The fight over Patel is not about his legacy but bragging rights. Manmohan Singh touts Sardar Patel’s iron-clad secularism but then cannot resist saying “I am even happier that Sardar Patel was associated with the same political party of which I am a member.” It’s the fate of all historical giants to be devoured piecemeal by squabbling generations who will selectively carve out the parts that are to their greatest advantage. So one side will focus on Patel’s differences with Nehru. Another side will focus on his statements about the RSS. I choose to focus on his height. The inconvenient truth is the Congress never gave Patel his due because they were too busy gilding the Nehru-Gandhi family tree. The Times of India reports that the government’s Directorate of Advertising and Visual Publicity spent Rs 8.5 crore on Sardar Patel’s birth anniversary over the last four years. That is chump change compared to what it spends on various members of the Gandhi family – Rs 21 crore for Rajiv Gandhi alone. What Modi has astutely tapped into is the general public’s weariness with the glorification of the Gandhis at the expense of pretty much every other leader, not just Patel. However it’s not that the BJP has that much to brag about in this regard. Modi boasted that the newspaper ads across the country for Sardar Patel is “the Gujarat effect” but according to TOI, in its tenure between 1999 and 2004, the NDA issued no advertisements for Sardar Patel for two years in a row. In fact, Radhika Ramaseshan writes in The Telegraph that the BJP is not without its own Nehru-Gandhi fixation. When Varun Gandhi joined the BJP in 2004, Pramod Mahajan told journalists, “From now on, we can also proudly claim we have a great grandson of Pandit Jawarharlal Nehru and a great-grandson of Motilal Nehru in our ranks. A vacuum is getting filled.” That word “vacuum” is telling writes Ramaseshan. The BJP and RSS have never publicly acknowledged it but she says the party has long been holding out for a hero of stature from the freedom movement it can call indisputably its own. Vajpayee liked to talk about “Gandhian socialism”. Advani told INA veterans that Subhas Bose should elevated to a height that could not be matched. A relative of Bhagat Singh wanted Narendra Modi to release Singh’s Jail Diaries but other relatives scotched that idea. But the party has to stretch to claim any of these people as their own, finally having to settle for a selective reading of their lives. “For a party that calls itself a nationalist party, indeed it must be embarrassing to not own a small slice of pre-independent India’s history,” Mridula Mukherjee, a professor of history at Jawaharlal Nehru University (aah that family name again) tells Ramaseshan. Veer Savarkar was jailed in the Andamans but that was before he embraced Hindutva says Mukherjee. As humans we always want to walk in the footsteps of giants whether we fit in them or not. It’s not a uniquely Indian problem. The Republican Party in the US never tires of calling itself the party of Abraham Lincoln though Lincoln would surely be aghast at the ideological stripes of many Republicans in Congress today. An anti-affirmative action leader in California twisted Martin Luther King Jr’s words to push his anti-affirmative action agenda evoking howls of protest. Politicians routinely take a self-serving selective slice of leaders’ lives and thoughts and make that the whole truth so they can claim them for their own aggrandizement. They freeze them into statues, solid and immovable, the larger the better. We forget our leaders are not metal giants with marigold garlands. In life they were very human. They evolved, changed their opinions, sometimes even contradicted themselves. But at least Sardar Vallabbhai Patel’s height was something fixed, something that truly didn’t change over his adult life. In that sense, the community of not-so-tall Indian men clearly have a far stronger claim on the man than the political parties squabbling over scraps of the Louha Purush. A 600 foot statue built at the cost of Rs 2500 crore to commemorate a man who was 5’5”. There is delicious irony in that. Perhaps India’s original Iron Man would be amused.