This is a transcript of the podcast Learning From The Mavericks: Sardar Vallabhai Patel by Ramji Raghavan
Nearly a century ago, on Saturday, 23rd July 1927, it began raining heavily in Gujarat in India. Private and public offices had closed for the weekend. People hoped that the rain would stop or subside by Sunday evening. The 52-year-old president of the Ahmedabad Municipality was uneasy and restless. He couldn’t sleep.
Way past midnight, he decided to do a round of the city. Walking alone on Gandhi Road in the dark, menacing night and pouring rain, he came to the conclusion that Gujarat was heading towards calamity. He knocked on the door of his friend, Harilal Kapadia, who was shocked to see his friend drenched. He ushered him in, gave him a hot cup of tea, and persuaded him to change into a fresh set of clothes.
The men set out street by street, first-hand knowledge of the situation. They woke up the municipal engineer and formed a team at the municipal office. By daybreak, they had made arrangements for the drainage of the rainwater that had accumulated in the low-lying areas of the city.
Over the course of the next few days, Gujarat experienced unprecedented rainfall. Rainfall like it hadn’t seen in the past 50 years. Kheda District alone had 100 inches of rainfall. Thousands of villages were marooned or destroyed. People had to live on treetops for survival, without food or water for four to five days at a stretch. Older people and children would often fall off the treetops into the raging current from exhaustion.
In the midst of a seemingly insurmountable crisis, the president of the municipality had gathered over 2000 volunteers who went from village to village, sometimes risking their lives, swimming across deep waters, providing vital help to starving villagers marooned in their homes. Working round the clock, they provided food grains and clothes at low prices, distributed seeds to plant after the rainwater receded to revive agriculture, and rebuilt 72000 houses. It was a tremendous and stupendous example of leadership on the edge by the president of the municipality, who won great praise from not only his colleagues and friends but also from the government, which was persuaded to release 13 million rupees, a large sum of money then, for the relief efforts.
Two decades later, Jane Mooney went to see the former president of the Ahmedabad municipality, and said, “ You’ve led a great and interesting life. Why don’t you write a book about it?,” and Sardar Patel, now independent India’s first Deputy Prime Minister, who along with Gandhi and Nehru had led India to her independence smiled and said, “We do not write history. We make history.” These words so inspired me that when we produced the first brochure for Agastya Foundation in the early 2000s — a lovely blue brochure with an orange A on its cover — the back cover carried the Sardar’s quote: We do not write history. We make history.
People call Patel Sardar, or chief, and India’s Iron Man. Patel had made a stupendous commitment to serve his country, to help it win its independence from a great power. Julius Caesar famously said of his great rival Pompeii, “Pompeii has merely done something. I stand for something.” Patel stood for his people and their independence from colonial rule. As Patel said, “our delight is in doing service to people.”
Patel had a genius for detail. He got information from on the front lines and often from walking on the streets and villages. This helped him build his intuition, his feeling for a situation. He could see something at the smallest level and imagine what it might become, and take actions to preempt a problem or seize an opportunity.
Patel had a tremendous bias for action, for hands-on immersive engagement backed by immense will, which he brought to play again and again, in times of uncertainty and crisis. Like, during the Gujarat Floods, he always set a great personal example. As the Deputy Prime Minister of India, he acted decisively with an iron will to politically integrate the princely states into the federation.
Patel had a great ability to bring people together as a unified team. He once said, If you can give me only a hundred true men who will fight until death, I assure that success is certain.
In his biography title Sardar Vallabhai Patel, India’s Iron Man, author B Krishna writes that Patel had the unique ability “to make his people exude courage, hope and buoyancy. An ability in great demand at every level, everywhere in today’s Covid 19 Crisis. He had extraordinary persuasive skills which he demonstrated on numerous occasions, as well as in his pivotal role in managing the Gujarat Floods.
In his eulogy, delivered after Patel’s death by GS Bajpai, the Secretary-General of India’s Ministry of External Affairs, paid tribute to “a great patriot, a great administrator and a great man.” A rare combination of qualities in any historic epoch in any country. We do not write history, we make history. Great and inspiring words from a great man.
Listen to this episode of the podcast Learning From The Mavericks here: https://youtu.be/nzjPt-8oFCg
