A comparison of maps reveals Vallabhbhai Patel's impact. In the yellow and pink subcontinental maps of the 1930s and the 1940s, the yellow patches represented princely India, while the rest of India, directly ruled by the British, was coloured in pink. After September 1948, when a police action ended a defiance by the Nizam of Hyderabad, Independent India became a single whole: the yellow blotches had vanished.

In obtaining this outcome Vallabhbhai Patel, the deputy prime minister, had been assisted by prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru and Lord Mountbatten, the governor-general. But it was largely his doing. The doing of the neglected fourth son in a family of impoverished peasant proprietors, the lad with a chip on the shoulder who grew to become the key organiser of the 1920-47 freedom movements and then to inherit, along with Nehru, the authority of the departing Raj.

As minister in charge of the (princely) states from June 1947, Patel persuaded most of the 565 rulers of large and small principalities to merge their territories with India. These rulers had other options. If adjacent to Pakistan, they could have joined that country. Wherever located, they could have sought independence. The scope for their independence was left by the settlement of June 1947, involving His Majesty's government, the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League, whereby, in two months' time, India was to split and become free.

Eight years earlier, in 1939, Patel had personally guided a popular movement against the Thakore of Rajkot, declaring that a "state cannot survive whose raja wastes ... money on dances etc. while the peasants die of starvation". The Rajkot ruler's brother princes had reason therefore to be wary of Patel.

In 1947-48, however, Patel, 72 and far from robust, won them over. He did so, firstly, by shrewdly enlisting Mountbatten, who as governor-general and cousin to the English king was doubly useful; secondly, by warning the princes that elected leaders succeeding him and Nehru would impose stiffer terms; thirdly, by assuring them dignity and their purses; and, finally, by putting to work his personal image of a man who kept his promises.

Apart from Kashmir, Hyderabad and Junagadh -- and the principalities surrounded by Pakistan -- all princely states acceded to India in the two months preceding Independence, though some fretted or blustered before doing so; and by September 1948, Kashmir, Junagadh and Hyderabad too became part of India.

Patel performed a similar feat with the services. Following Independence, freedom fighters now turned into MPs and MLAs demanded stringent action against the Raj's officers who had arrested or repressed them. But the officers were needed to run the new India, and Patel fought for the incorporation in the new Constitution of two Articles, one making it difficult for politicians to punish officials and the other anchoring the privileges of what was the Raj's Indian Civil Service.

His successful defence of the officers -- despite protests by Congress MPs that those who had committed excesses were being protected -- and his stand that "my secretary (and all secretaries) can write a note opposed to my views" (Constituent Assembly debates, 10.10.49) evoked a cooperation from the services that was probably crucial to independent India's opening years.

Intriguingly, Patel managed, while enlisting the bureaucracy, to retain his hold over its natural adversary, the ruling political party. In broad terms, the distribution of influence in the Nehru-Patel duumvirate of the India of 1947-50 saw Patel controlling the services and the Congress party, and Nehru enjoying the confidence of the masses and the intelligentsia.

Fourteen years older than Nehru, he was never in doubt about his abilities in comparison with the younger man's. Remembering that he had come close to being appointed to Congress' presidency in the summer of 1946, when the viceroy was expected, pending the transfer of power, to invite the Congress president to lead an interim government, Patel nonetheless remained a loyal -- but also frank and questioning -- No. 2 to premier Nehru.

The temptation to break with Nehru came more than once to him but for two powerful reasons Patel checked himself. He had promised Gandhi, whose preference played a part in Nehru rather than Patel becoming Congress president in 1946, that he would stay at Nehru's side; and he did not want to split the Congress. In the late 1940s or in 1950, a Congress split would have divided India and its government along every stratum. Swallowing his hurts, Patel helped preserve the unity of the nation.

Yet he had human sympathies and biases. A steadfast Hindu, he was perhaps more affected by news of injury to Hindus or Sikhs than by a comparable report of damage to Muslims, but as home minister his conduct was driven by the law, not by his heart. As Gandhi, who probably knew Patel better than anyone else, told Delhi's Muslim leaders complaining about Patel's alleged partiality, Patel did not let biases or suspicions govern his actions. (On 19.9.47; Collected Works Vol. 89, p. 198)

In recent years, several Indians feeling let down by the nation around them and looking for a crucial "if only" have imagined a flourishing and contented India that goes back to being captained in 1947 by Patel, not Nehru. Whether such an image quite takes Patel's age and health in 1947 into account, and whether public opinion in the India of 1947, which seemed strongly in Nehru's favour, would have allowed it, are moot questions. It would be a pity, in any case, if wishes about what might have happened were to obscure our view of the remarkable things that did happen because of Vallabhbhai Jhaverbhai Patel.

Rajmohan Gandhi, a former MP, is research professor, Centre for Policy Research, Delhi. He is author of Revenge and Reconciliation: Understanding South Asian History, and Patel: A Life.

Potti Sriramulu
1901-1952: The man who set the ball rolling on India's linguistic reorganisation, he undertook a 58-day fast in 1952. It ended in his death and the formation of Andhra Pradesh, the first state to be carved out on linguistic lines. Ramulu's objective then was only to seek "fair play" for the states, to get prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru to keep up his promise of ensuring that their "self-determination" would find expression. He couldn't have possibly foreseen the regional fault lines that plague the country today.