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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.

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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.

    Recent Work

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    Recovery, Resilience, and Adaptation: India From 2020 to 2030
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      Srinath Raghavan

Srinath Raghavan
Nonresident Senior Fellow
Srinath Raghavan
Domestic PoliticsSouth AsiaIndia

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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