Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, whose 150th birth anniversary falls on 31st October, was among the lodestars of the first-generation leaders that navigated India before and after independence. Reminisced as the Iron Man of India, his case, however, has been different from that of Nehru and Gandhi, the two icons considered, and rightly so, secularists with hardly any blemish.

Patel carries the burden of historical (mis)judgment and is often labelled as anti-Muslim. Does this charge stand the honest audit of the past?

Let’s first understand what made Patel a villainous figure in some quarters. While Sardar started as a true lieutenant of Gandhi Ji and a champion of Hindu-Muslim unity from 1917 onwards, French orientalist author Christophe Jaffrelot writes that he meandered to Hindu fundamentalism in the later phase. Perhaps as a reactionary to the Muslim League’s aggressive separatist politics! The change in Patel’s attitude came about when Jinnah took over the League leadership in 1937; his diatribes against Hindus and the Congress upset him considerably. The two-nation theory shook his faith, says late Muslim scholar Rafiq Zakaria in his book, Sardar Patel and Indian Muslims.

At the same time, Patel also began to show some sympathy to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and said publicly in Jaipur in 1948 that he willed “to turn the enthusiasm and discipline of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh into right channels". At this time, many in the Congress, including Nehru and Maulana Azad, felt that he was drifting towards the Hindu right. Azad, though, later subdued his views and praised Patel’s administrative skills in his autobiography.

The picture of Patel as a “communalist" was etched more in the Muslim psyche when, as a Home Minister and Deputy Prime Minister, he ordered Operation Polo to crush pending rebellion in the state of Hyderabad after Nizam refused accession into India and instead mulled to secede to Pakistan or run as an independent state in the heart of India.

But beneath the veneer of perceived facts and believed notions has been lying the truth.

Sardar, as noted by Jaffrelot himself, made a firm solidarity among all Indians a kernel of his faith quite early in his career as a political and social worker. When the Khilafat Movement was at its peak and it was solely a Muslim cause, Patel was........

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