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Source: Getty

In The Media
Carnegie India

Nehru Never Excluded Patel from Cabinet List. Louis Mountbatten and V.P. Menon Got it Wrong

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.

Link Copied
By Srinath Raghavan
Published on Feb 12, 2020

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.

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This article was originally published by the Print.

About the Author

Srinath Raghavan

Nonresident Senior Fellow

Srinath Raghavan is a nonresident senior fellow at Carnegie India. His primary research focus is on the contemporary and historical aspects of India’s foreign and security policies.

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Srinath Raghavan
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Srinath Raghavan
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Carnegie does not take institutional positions on public policy issues; the views represented herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of Carnegie, its staff, or its trustees.

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