'Not Job of Foreign Minister': Jaishankar, Ramachandra Guha in Spat Over Nehru's Patel 'Snub'
New Delhi: External affairs minister S. Jaishankar and historian Ramachandra Guha on Thursday got into a Twitter spat over whether India's first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru had kept Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel off the country's first Cabinet.
On Wednesday, Jaishankar unveiled a new book on civil servant and one of the key players during the formation of India's first government, V.P. Menon.
After the event, Jaishankar tweeted thrice:
Learnt from the book that Nehru did not want Patel in the Cabinet in 1947 and omitted him from the initial Cabinet list. Clearly, a subject for much debate. Noted that the author stood her ground on this revelation. pic.twitter.com/FelAMUZxFL
— Dr. S. Jaishankar (@DrSJaishankar) February 12, 2020
Exercise of writing history for politics in the past needs honest treatment. "When Sardar died, a deliberate campaign was begun to efface his memory. I know this, because I have seen it, and at times, I fell victim to it myself. " So says VP Menon. pic.twitter.com/UuQ2YbYxyS
— Dr. S. Jaishankar (@DrSJaishankar) February 12, 2020
The book in question is Narayani Basu's The Unsung Architect of Modern India. "[In it] Basu cites an interview which Menon had given to H.V. Hodson in which he confirmed the claim [that Nehru had excluded Patel from the list of people he had chosen for the first Cabinet]," The Print noted in its report.
Menon's mediation, the book says, got Patel included eventually.
Nehru has long since been a target in a campaign of retrospective vilification led by the Bharatiya Janata Party, whose government at the Centre Jaishankar is a part of. A component of the smear drive has been the steady attention to Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel by the BJP, whose leaders allege he was brushed aside by Nehru and forgotten by the Congress.
Also read: The BJP Wants to Erase Nehru. Let's See What India Would Have Been Without Him
Jaishankar had kept the debate comparatively open-ended in his tweets.
Meanwhile, historian Ramachandra Guha wrote in with his criticism of the line of thought that Nehru had kept Patel out of the Cabinet. In a tweet, Guha said such promotion of "fake news" did not befit the minister and was best left to the BJP's online army.
This is a myth, that has been comprehensively demolished by Professor Srinath Raghavan in The Print.
Besides, promoting fake news about, and false rivalries between, the builders of modern India is not the job of the Foreign Minister. He should leave this to the BJP’s IT Cell. https://t.co/krAVzmaFkL— Ramachandra Guha (@Ram_Guha) February 13, 2020
To this, Jaishankar was sharp in retort, and said some foreign ministers do read books.
Some Foreign Ministers do read books. May be a good habit for some Professors too. In that case, strongly recommend the one I released yesterday. https://t.co/d2Iq4jafsR
— Dr. S. Jaishankar (@DrSJaishankar) February 13, 2020
Guha then made a pointed reference to books Jaishankar must have read in his JNU days.
Sir, since you have a Ph D from JNU you must surely have read more books than me. Among them must have been the published correspondence of Nehru and Patel which documents how Nehru wanted Patel as the “strongest pillar” of his first Cabinet. Do consult those books again. https://t.co/butT0uqA3c
— Ramachandra Guha (@Ram_Guha) February 13, 2020
Guha also pointed to an article by Ashoka University professor Srinath Raghavan, which was recently published on The Print, as evidence that the claim of the snub was untrue.
Raghavan, too, got involved in the debate and cited documents which could debunk Jaishankar's claim, retweeting Jaishankar's original tweet.
The claim that Nehru dropped Patel from the cabinet list does need scrutiny. Thanks to @internetarchive all the documents are easily accessible. And they clearly show that it is wrong. My take (do check out the links to documents): https://t.co/2fnB2rNIA1 https://t.co/9reccQLZ9K
— Srinath Raghavan (@srinathraghava3) February 13, 2020
As the back and forth over the Nehru-Patel debate expanded to include more people, the book's author herself tweeted that it was detrimental to the topic of the book, which meant to focus on V.P. Menon, to "focus on that particular dynamic."
And I'm sure @srinathraghava3 will agree, that some amount of historical debate & disagreement is necessary -- but without hijacking the main purpose of this book, which is the story of VP Menon (and not so much about Nehru vs Patel)
— Narayani Basu (@narayani_basu) February 12, 2020
In the meantime, Congress brass too got involved. Rajya Sabha MP Jairam Ramesh sought to remind Jaishankar that his supposition was false by tweeting photographs of letters written by Nehru to Lord Mountbatten, in which Patel's name is on top of the list of Cabinet ministers.
Problem with this very accomplished and erudite Foreign Minister is that he wishes to forget the books he read before becoming Foreign Secretary in Jan 2015.
Do refresh your memory by reading the following series of letters:https://t.co/lkDYpfaxHu
— Jairam Ramesh (@Jairam_Ramesh) February 13, 2020
Thiruvananthapuram MP Shashi Tharoor too said that Jaishankar (and perhaps Menon's recollections of Patel's exclusion) were wrong.
This article went live on February thirteenth, two thousand twenty, at three minutes past seven in the evening.Jai, I have the highest regard for VP Menon, a hero of Indian Independence from my state, but human recollections can be wrong. Read this carefully documented refutation of the "Patel's omission from Cabinet" story (for which VPM was the only source): https://t.co/VCy66XkkGw
— Shashi Tharoor (@ShashiTharoor) February 13, 2020
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