It is often imagined by the Indian Right that Patel was India’s “rightful” first prime minister but was somehow cheated out of the position by Nehru. Modi himself flirted with this thought when, in October last year, he attacked Nehru, bemoaning the fact that Patel would have made a better prime minister. More recently, politician Subramanian Swamy had a more detailed take on the matter:
This, as you may know, is an extremely popular tale on the internet. As you also might know, Pradesh Congress Committees voting to elect the prime minister is an absurd proposition ‒ a bit like Modi getting elected by BJP state units.
A variant of this conspiracy theory is that the Pradesh Congress Committees thought they were electing the Congress president (and not the prime minister). But the Congress president at the time of Independence somehow became prime minister (the exact process is never explained). Problems here too: Pradesh Congress Committees don’t elect Presidents, delegates of the All India Congress Committee do. Moreover, Nehru was not the Congress President when India gained independence, JB Kripalani was. Tragically, no one informed Kripalani of this mechanism and he remained bereft of prime ministership right until his dying day.
The simple reason as to why Nehru became PM was that he was, by far, the Congress’ most popular politician (after Gandhi, of course). Right from the 1937 provincial elections, Nehru was the party’s star campaigner, enthralling crowds with his Hindustani oratory. Patel had an iron grip on the Congress party itself but he was many miles behind Nehru as a popular leader. The Sardar himself conceded this: at a massively attended Congress rally in Mumbai, he told American journalist Vincent Sheean, “They come for Jawahar, not for me.”
Thus, in 1946, when the Viceroy formed his interim government, Nehru was, unsurprisingly, given the highest post. Later, on August 15, 1947, he naturally took office as prime minister, without the least opposition from anyone in the Congress.
The most recent espousal of the theory that Nehru was responsible for Partition came via the RSS’s Kerala mouthpiece, which argued that Nathuram Godse should have targeted the first prime minister instead of Mahatma Gandhi since he was responsible for acceding to the creation of Pakistan.
Whatever be the wrongs of Partition, it was a decision taken jointly both Nehru and Patel. In fact, if anything, Patel was far more receptive to the idea and Nehru only came around much later and far more reluctantly. VP Menon, the architect of the Partition Plan, informs us that as far back as December 1946, Patel had accepted the division of India while Nehru would only acquiesce six months later. Abul Kalam Azad, a staunch critic of Partition right till the very end, was disappointed with Patel’s support and writes in his memoir, India wins Freedom, that he was “surprised and pained when Patel in reply [to why Partition was needed] said that whether we liked it or not, there were two nations in India”.
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