Vallabhbhai Patel: The Boss

Monday, Jan. 27, 1947 Time

The Boss

Gandhi's toes were blistered. As he walked the flower-strewn paddyfield paths of eastern Bengal last week, through lines of Hindus and Moslems who wept and knelt to touch his bandaged feet, other Hindus and Moslems in distant Bombay chopped at each other with long knives. Twenty-two people died in the Bombay riots, including some Untouchables who were caught in the middle.

While Gandhi preached love and nonviolence to the Bengalis, an old jailbird named Vallabhbhai Patel, who calls himself "a blind follower of Gandhiji" and whom the British Raj had imprisoned eight of the past 16 years, had 40 Indian Communists, whom he hates, clapped into jail.

In short, everything was as usual in India, where the people are more fertile than the land and the paradoxes are more fertile than the people. India's pullulating contradictions obscured the view at a moment when it was more important than ever that the world understand what was going on in the seething subcontinent.

Princes & Paupers. On the 17th anniversary of the Indian Congress' Purna Swaraj (complete independence) resolution of Jan. 26, 1930, India was almost completely free of Britain but in danger of lapsing into anarchy. The infant country faced these problems, among others:

¶ Hatred between the Hindu and Moslem communities, which flared last August into the Great Calcutta Killing when 6,000 died, has now hardened into a grim struggle over Pakistan.

¶Rising prices and falling production have intensified the conflict between millions of the poorest and some of the richest people in the world. Strikes are bubbling all over India. Communist power is rising. The Congress Party is likely to split into right and left groups and the Moslems face a similar division.

¶While Gandhi continues to attack industrialization, some of his most devoted followers go ahead with plans to make India the industrial heart of Asia.

¶Freedom for India does not affect the princely states, where 93 million (25%) Indians live. These are more or less despotically ruled by an anachronistic group of princes who have, on the average, 11 titles, 5.8 wives, 12.6 children and 3.4 Rolls-Royces. Sooner or later a free Indian nation will have to deal with them; right now the Communists are advocating expulsion of the princes.

Power Is the Spur. To bring under control this vast interplay of seemingly irresistible forces and immovable bodies would take more than the fanaticism of Moslem Leaguer Mohamed AH Jinnah, more than Jawaharlal Nehru's eloquent idealism, more, perhaps, than Gandhi's combination of mysticism and manipulation. India needed an organizer. It had one. Gandhi listened to God and passed on his political ideas to Vallabhbhai (rhymes with "I'll have pie") Patel; Patel, after listening to Gandhi, translated those ideas into intensely practical politics.

Patel has no pretensions to saintliness or eloquence or fanaticism. He is, in American terms, the Political Boss. Wealthy Hindu and Parsi industrialists (like C. H. Bhabha, Patel's son's employer, who has just become Works, Mines and Power Minister) thrust huge campaign funds into his hands. With their money, Congress Party patronage, and ceaseless work, he has built a machine that touches every one of India's conflicts. In every fight his objective is the same—power for India.

As Home and Information Minister of the new Central Government, as boss of the Congress Party, Patel represents what cohesive power Free India has. This cinder-eyed schemer is not the best, the worst, the wisest or the most typical of India's leaders, but he is the easiest to understand, and on him, more than on any man, except Gandhi, depends India's chance of surviving the gathering storms.

Interrupted Rubber. The first movement Patel ever organized was a student revolt against a teacher he accused of profiteering in pencils and paper. Later, Patel went to London, studied law 16 hours a day, topped the list in a bar examination and headed back for his beloved India without stopping to tour the Continent. He has never left India since.

His legal career was mainly defending murderers and bandits and frightening district magistrates with his caustic tongue. One magistrate, hearing that Patel was expanding his practice, moved his court to a town out of Patel's reach. In later years Gandhi found in Patel "motherly qualities" that eyes less inspired than the Mahatma's never saw. Today, Patel is coldly pleased when his enemies call him "the Iron Dictator" and "Herr Vallabhbhai." Enemies and friends tell an anecdote of his criminal law days. He had just put his wife in a Bombay hospital, returned to Ahmedabad to argue a murder case. He was on his feet when a telegram arrived. He read that his wife had died, put the telegram into his pocket and went on with his argument as if he had never been interrupted.

In 1915 Patel was playing bridge in Ahmedabad's Gujerat Club when he first saw his fellow lawyer Gandhi, fresh from agitational triumphs in South Africa. At that time Patel dressed in fancy Western clothes and affected the manners of the most pukka sahib Briton. When his eyes fell upon Gandhi, Patel interrupted his game long enough to make a few scathing remarks. A year later he joined Gandhi's movement.

By 1927, when Patel had become the mayor of Ahmedabad, unofficial capital of Gujerati-speaking India, his extraordinary skill as an organizer showed itself for the first time during the great Gujerat floods. Everything broke down—transport, communications, all methods of distribution. The general Indian attitude used to be to regard such catastrophes as acts of God What little relief there was usually came from a British Government which took its good time to relieve distress. Patel initiated an unheard-of fund-raising drive for the relief of the flood victims. Supplies were moved into the flood areas by hundreds of volunteers wading through waist-deep water, carrying boxes and sacks on their heads. When lumber was required for constructing small bridges or building houses, Patel arranged for it all without making a single approach to the Government. It seemed a miracle to Indians when all the lumber arrived on the scene in the needed sizes. By the time the Bombay provincial representatives got there, no official assistance was needed.

Nothing like it had ever been seen before in India. Here at last was organization by and for Indians.

Somber Masterpiece. Now that India seems to require miracles of organization if its Government is to survive, Indians recall Patel's organizational masterpiece, the Bardoli no-tax campaign of 1928. Despite the fact that crops had been bad for several years in the Bardoli district, a 25% tax increase was ordered by the Government assessors. This was precisely the opportunity Gandhi had been waiting for to launch the first real experiment in mass civil disobedience.

Patel took charge. Dressed in simple dhoti and shirt, he trudged from village to village, day after day, exhorting the peasants at every stop to stand fast and pay no taxes. "Some of you are afraid your land will be confiscated," he said in one speech. "What is confiscation? Will they take away your lands to England?" In another speech he set forth the principle that was to govern every Congress struggle of the future: "Every home must be a Congress office and every soul a Congress organization." Under Patel's orders the peasants' buffaloes, which the Government might have taken, were brought right into the peasants' houses. No servants would work for the Government collectors. Nobody would sell them food or give them water. Some property was, of course, confiscated and sold, but bidders were few. In all Bardoli not one rupee was collected in direct taxes.

A stunned Government finally asked Gandhi for terms. The upshot was a 6¼%, not a 25%, increase in taxes. Patel emerged from Bardoli with a new and exalted status. He received the unofficial title of "Sardar," meaning captain or leader, which he has carried ever since. (Lawyer K. F. Narriman was the first to call Patel "Sardar"; years later he and Patel quarreled and the Sardar forced Narriman out of Bombay politics.)

Money Makes the Mare Go. After Bardoli, Patel became recognized as the Congress Party's chief organizer and disciplinarian. He checked up on what Gandhi's followers ate, drank and wore. He passed on the party lists in provincial elections. He approved party-sponsored legislation, and personally drafted much of it. No detail was too unimportant or sordid for Boss Patel. Recently he took charge of negotiations between the Congress Party Ministry in Bombay and the Western Indian Turf Association, which wanted to renew its license for the Bombay racetrack. Patel, who has never seen a horse race, knew what the traffic would bear. He upped the license fee from half a million rupees to three million.

Although he has handled millions in party funds, Patel has no personal love of money. With his daughter Maniben, who acts as his secretary (she has accompanied him on most of his sojourns in British prisons), he now lives in a little suite in his son Dahyabhai's Bombay house. He eats little, drinks no alcohol, quit smoking when he first went to jail. In recent years he has had serious stomach trouble. His only exercise is a walk when he rises, at 4:30 a.m. His only recreation is bouncing a ball across the room to his grandchildren. He has never seen a movie. He cares little about the world outside his country. Of 300 books in his Bombay library, every one is by an Indian, mostly about India.

Patel's closest friend is probably Ghanshyam Das Birla, jute and cotton magnate, who boycotts his own textile mills by wearing khadi (homespun).* Though Birla dotes on Gandhi, he dreams of an industrialized India. (Birla has contracts with Britain's Nuffield for an India-assembled automobile called the Hindustan Ten.) India's liberals and leftists are stridently suspicious of Patel's friendship with Birla and the other big industrialists, but Birla insists that he seeks no Government favors. Says he: "I already have all the money I need."

Bedside Talks. Last week, sicker than usual, Patel stayed in bed. Few other 71-year-old men would call it a rest. From his visitors and from the distant effects of his bold and subtle schemes, it was apparent that in Patel's mind, at least, India was no chaos, but a puzzle to be fitted together with thought and patience.

Arthur Henderson, Under Secretary of State for India, came in for final talks on the liquidation of those superlatively damned and praised institutions, the Indian Civil and Police Services. The question boiled down to a matter of severance pay; the 850 remaining British members wanted to get out. It was up to Patel to find the new men who, with the 750 Indians in the two Services, would rule India.* Nehru called twice. He and Patel have a deep bond of mutual attachment to Gandhi and to Indian independence. Otherwise, politically and temperamentally, they are antipodal. Two subjects almost certainly mentioned in Nehru's bedside talks with Patel were the Moslems and the Marxists.

The Moslem League's Jinnah, also exhausted by the crisis and the long trip from the London conference (TIME, Dec. 16), was at Karachi struggling with a problem which Patel had fashioned for him. By meeting most of Jinnah's demands, Patel had passed back to the Moslems the decisions on whether or not they would enter the Constituent Assembly, which reconvenes this week. Patel, who has said that he could end communal strife in Congress Party provinces in six months, wanted a settlement; if he could get one, time would work in his favor in the struggle for control of India. He had the police power and his Hindus had the majority.

New Techniques. A settlement of the communal issue, even if it was temporary, would allow Patel to turn his attention to the growing labor strife. Late last summer, when a famine impended, a Communist-led strike had tied up south India railroads; a nationwide 25-day postal strike in July was also Communist-inspired. Two weeks ago Karachi dock workers walked off ten grain ships for ten days to get a wage of 94¢ daily. As a result of the stoppage, the rice ration in New Delhi was cut from twelve to eight ounces. In New Delhi 100,000 children were out of school because of a teachers' strike (87% of Indians are illiterate). In southwestern India even the aboriginal Warli tribesmen refused to perform farm work, tried to chase landlords off the land.

The worst recent labor flare-up came last fortnight at Cawnpore, where militant Communist-and Socialist-led workers have developed some new bargaining techniques. They locked a labor inspector in an office and made a factory manager stand bareheaded in the sun for four hours until he agreed to reinstate four discharged employees. When the district magistrate ordered the arrest of 100 labor leaders, workers marched in protest, women in front. Police used lathis. Workers threw stones. When the police opened fire, six were killed. Last week 100,000 Cawnpore workers were still out.

As if in answer to the strike wave, police last week raided Communist headquarters throughout India. Patel's Home Ministry denied that it had ordered the raids, but few familiar with the workings of the Criminal Intelligence Department believed that it was coincidence that brought police simultaneously to Red headquarters in Delhi, Bombay, Calcutta, Lucknow and seven other cities. India's Communist leader, smart, tousled Puran Chandra Joshi, followed the Moscow line by blaming the British for the raids.

The raiders were more thorough than bright. They searched homes as well as offices, spent 5½ hours going through the files of one Delhi office. A police official turned up a copy of Molotov's famous Paris speech of Aug. 5. He did not like what he read. "Who is this man?" he snapped. But Molotov was present only in spirit.

In spite of recent Communist gains, the Socialists, led by lithe, 44-year-old Jai Prakash Narain, are still the strongest group in the Congress Party's left wing. Narain went to the Universities of California, Wisconsin, Iowa and Ohio State, became a convert to Communism in Chicago, where he sat up late talking to intellectuals. Returning to India, he soon abandoned Communism for Socialism because the Communists tried to impose a Moscow-dictated line on India. Narain's estimated 1,000,000 followers (out of India's 4,000,000 industrial workers) do not include Narain's wife. She says: "I am faithful to Jai Prakash domestically, but to Gandhiji politically."

Which Way? Fidelity to Gandhiji was still the dominant note in Indian politics. But what did it mean in practical terms? Gandhi, in steaming Bengal, talked of love, and sang:

If they answer not to thy call, walk alone, If they are afraid and cower mutely, facing the wall, O thou of evil luck, Open thy mind and speak out alone.

Patel would not walk alone if he could help it. He was obviously trying to base the new Indian nation on a compromise of the communal issue, a mildly rightist line in the labor split—plus full use of the police power (which Gandhi deplored but Organizer Patel did not). When the British Cabinet Mission reminded Patel last spring that he might be sent to jail again for defying the Raj, Patel replied calmly: "My bags are packed." That is the way he understands the game, and that is the way he plays it, in & out of power.

The strong, repressive arm of law & order would be no permanent solution in a country where the average per capita wage is 5¢ a day and a quarter of the population of Bombay and Calcutta sleep on the streets. But the other horn of the dilemma is unrestrained freedom for communal and class conflict which, in a weak, new state, might disastrously degenerate into chaos. Patel is obviously going to try it his way. The Boss has performed miracles of organization before.

*Khadi is the official Congress uniform, supposed to symbolize Gandhi's cottage industry drive and to emphasize Congress leaders' connection with the toiling masses. But hand spinning is so inefficient that a khadi outfit costs as much as a good suit of English tweeds. *To Indians there are few if any callings higher than the Civil Service. A recent movie ad, stressing its subject's sacrificial devotion to her art, said: "She turned down an I.C.S. man to become a movie star!"