ramana wrote:"Operation Polo" was launched mainly by Sardar Patel as things were getting from bad to worse in Hyderabad State. You can read Narendra Luther's book on Hyderabad.
This is like saying, Nehru denied Patel permission to conduct Op. Polo, yet Patel went ahead and did it unilaterally because he believed this to be the right approach. Any backing up for this kinda logic, where is the data? In any GoI internal bickering, there have always been 2 or 3 camps on what kinda move to take, whether the govt is of Charan Singh's or IG's. Even with fighting the maoists now, there are 2 or 3 camps on what moves to take, some say development, some say fight the oiseaules to the death, some say do a combo, and some disagree on % if %s can be allocated in terms of resources and energy. My opinions on fighting the naxal problem itself has changed more or less from fight the oiseaules completely and then focus on development once the mess is cleared to fight and develop at the same time. This is based on reading people who make informed commentary, such as EN Rammohan, Ajai Sahni, KPS Gill, etc. If you go by ex-DGP Vishwa Ranjan's comments, Chhattisgarh government is bumbling from one disaster to another. I wont still blame it all on the Raman Singh government, but I will attribute some measure of the blame to the CG government. Whether the INC ruled states have co-opted the maoists or otherwise is a very different debatable issue, but fact remains that Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand are at the top of the pyramid in terms of laggards.
Is that logic harder to extrapolate backwards in time? Since you are from a legal background, I am pretty sure you can understand the concept of "precedent." How do you not allow an == between Hyderabad and Junagadh or Manavdar? The Nizam had taken the matter to the UN, Hyderabad was the largest princely state and it was a prized possession for which everyone would have fought. Btw, Narendra Luther is an unimpeachable EJ with considerable connections to Fundacion Vicente Ferrer, you will go with everything he says? I pointed out the same to you sometime back also.
In any case, you can read the ruminations and evolution of the debate on these matters in VPM's tome, including where Nehru stood, where Patel stood, where others who mattered stood, and which point won and what precise reasons that led to its victory. You will also figure out that Patel co-opted Nehru, and Nehru did nt fight to the death cos he had his vanity. There is more material, including Patel's thoughts compiled in Maniben Patel's diary. From her book, you see these kinda remarks:
Both of them were great men by any standard, resolutely patriotic, doggedly brave, tenaciously incorruptible, self-sacrificing through thick and thin, and fired by the pure love of their country.
Now the approach in itself of either person is in debate, Nehru was downright wrong, not the nationalism/patriotism of the debater. Is that so hard to get? That is what is going on here, by moving the goal-post from the issue to the person and then the personality and the character and the attributes, people are making a serious slide towards ideological anarchy dominated by groupthink of one kind in Himalayan proportions. Now you can disagree, but the trend is there for people to see and make their own conclusions. I see a huge slide.
Patel was the Home Minister, he was not doing the diplomazy chai-biskoth with furriners on precedents issue. That was done by JLN, who was also the EAM. Now you can say, why should he be EAM, why not someone else, why take some many jobs. But then there was a decision and he became that, and he is answerable to people esp those who were also pressing him on various other matters including Commonwealth membership, J&K, NAM, china, etc. Even if some other person had become EAM, he/she was going to owe an explanation. There are demarches if things get hot, you can ignore them now, not when India was dependent on the west for food production/setting up institutions/etc. Give the man his due, Nehru was not Grade A in external affairs matters, but he was not a Grade F either. He was somewhere between B to D depending on how you see things in the context of the state-of-affairs in those days based on information available then. You remove away those conditionings and you end up with trashy grading schemes. He was definitely Grade A in building institutions that last even today. He did nt destroy them with all the political baggagery that came later esp under Indira, Morarji, Charan Singh, Rajiv, and beyond.
Indira may have been JLN's daughter, but she was on her own. If you ask me, she is the one to be beaten for destroying India, not Nehru. She was the worst PM we ever had, despite 71, despite standing up to Kiss-ass-inger and Fraudson and calling the bluff of any Enterprise. There are still facts that point to her standing down on a nuke threat if she went ahead in W.Pak and that was one reason why she went express-ly into the smiling buddha. If you dont threaten, nothing happens. If you threaten, even a sparrow becomes a hawk. This is the land of Khalsa. Indira was no different. You cant give her great rewards for being the only man in the cabinet and other self goals. She was street-smart, savvy yet she was vindictive and oiseaulish. These kindsa multi-dimensional opinions are easy to arrive at if you just open your mind and read around instead of believing that she was agmark white cos of Pokharan and 71.
In Nehru's era, there was reasonable internal peace despite the graveness of the Partition (I believe there was just one, independent of all the whines on T-dhaaga, you cant equate the one and only The Partition with petty politics, thats my opinion) and the impact it had on people migrating across the Radcliffe line. The % of people who suffered the Partition misery remains small when compared with people who did nt. Sure, they suffered the most and monumentally (I admit), but is it so hard to estimate numbers here? Was Nehru only responsible to the people who migrated across the Radcliffe line and not to the others who were looking forward to all the attendant garbage of a normal life? You can say what blasphemy, but if you sit in the hot-seat, these are judgment calls you will be forced to make because the resources are limited. Nehru made certain judgment calls and in hindsight, some were right, some were wrong, some were so-so. To whitewash the rights as if they belong to someone else, and to put a heavyduty -20Diopter lens on the wrongs is ridiculous.
Seriously, you bring that in to the discussion ? Wow. You have a knack of introducing your pet biases and prejudices when one is seldom looking.
You have said things and gotten people to talk about it when others saying the same thing have been ripped apart.
Nehru was a social butterfly pretending to be philospher. New Delhi abounds with such.
