Sardar Patel let his brother take his ticket to England
Vallabhbhai Patel scrimped for years to study law in England, but his papers arrived addressed to V. J. Patel, initials he shared with his elder brother. Vithalbhai insisted an older brother could not follow a younger one, so Vallabhbhai let him go first, and only later made the trip himself.
Patel was born in Nadiad, Gujarat, one of six children; his birth date was never recorded, and he simply wrote 31 October 1875 on his exam papers. He boarded with other boys while attending schools in Nadiad, Petlad and Borsad, and one well-known story has him lancing his own boil while the barber meant to do it trembled. Finishing school only at 22, he was thought unambitious, yet he became a lawyer in several Gujarat towns. In 1909 he received a note in court saying his wife Jhaverba had died after cancer surgery in Bombay; he pocketed it, finished cross-examining the witness and won the case.
Back from England, he became one of Ahmedabad's leading barristers, dressed in European style and played bridge well. In 1917 he met Gandhi and became secretary of the Gujarat Sabha. He toured Kheda village by village, organising a non-violent refusal to pay taxes, and set up volunteers to help farmers hide valuables from seizure; thousands were arrested, though not Patel. During the Non-cooperation movement he recruited more than 300,000 members, raised over 1.5 million rupees, burned his English clothes and switched to khadi.
He led peasant campaigns in Borsad and Bardoli and served as the 49th president of the Indian National Congress. After independence in 1947 he became India's first Deputy Prime Minister and Home Minister, organising relief for partition refugees. About 565 princely states had been freed from British suzerainty, and with Jawaharlal Nehru and Louis Mountbatten he persuaded almost all of them to join India.
That work earned him the name Iron Man of India, and his role in founding the All India Services made him the patron saint of civil servants. He died on 15 December 1950. The Statue of Unity, about 182 metres tall and the tallest in the world, was dedicated to him on 31 October 2018 at a cost of 420 million US dollars.
Source: Vallabhbhai Patel
