Source: Print
In his last week’s National Interest column analysing Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s seeming obsession with India’s first PM Jawaharlal Nehru, Shekhar Gupta noted that a new biography of V.P. Menon — a senior civil servant who worked closely with Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel — by Narayani Basu “asserts with much documentation that Nehru had indeed excluded Patel from the list of his first Cabinet members. Referring to this claim, Karan Thapar wrote on 2 February that the book “more or less confirms something about which there has been a lot of speculation”.
At a time when pitting Patel against Nehru has become the stock-in-trade of the Narendra Modi government, it is not surprising that this particular point in Basu’s important book has attracted attention.