MY FAVOURITE NATIONAL LEADER

my favourite national leader is Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel. Born in an ordinary peasant family at Karamsad in Gujarat (1875), he showed signs of leadership from his boyhood days. He went to England to study law and became a barrister. Returning to India he started practice as a lawyer in Ahmedabad. His meeting with gandhiji in 1917 proved to be a turning point in his life. Though he scoffed Gandhiji at first, he soon became his follower. He gave up his thriving practice and life of luxury and joined the freedom movement.

He displayed his capacity as a capable organizer and a masterful leader by organizing and leading civil disobedience movements at various places. As a mayor of Ahmedabad during the period 1924-28 he displayed his qualities as an able administrator. His leadership of the successful no tax movement of Bardoli peasants against the British (1928) earned him the title of 'Sardar'. Soon he was at the forefront of the freedom movement.

He became free India's first Home Minister and successfully solved the colossal problems facing the country in the wake of partition. When the British rule in India ended, more than 600 Princely .States became independent. By the master stroke of Merger in the Indian Union. By his swift and timely action he succeeded in saving the Princely States of Junagadh and Hyderabad and in preventing Pakistan from forcibly capturing Kashmir.

His death in 1950 was a great loss to India. People of India still fondly remember this Iron Man of India. We miss him very much at this period of national crisis when the divisive forces of separatism, regionalism, communism and parochialism are threatening the unity of India.

Sardar will always be remembered as the maker and unifier of our nation. When he died in 1950, London Times rightly called him a leader of a greater stature than Bismark, the maker of modern Germany.