I write this on Sardar Patel’s birth anniversary — October 31 — which also happens to be the anniversary of Indira Gandhi’s assassination.

If I was writing that preceding line last year, or on any year since 1984 until this year, I would probably have put it the other way round.

Probably.

The obscuring of the statesman’s birth anniversary by the assassination of India’s third prime minister has galled. It has seemed to be so not right, so muddled.

Jumping queues, elbowing someone out, stealing the limelight is the stuff of puerile, competitive politics. A politics we know well. But why should Time, oceanic, deep, vast, encourage the calendar in political one-upmanship?

Neither the Sardar nor Indira Gandhi willed the dates of their arrival and departure.

And yet…

Ever since Sardar Patel died, his birth anniversary has been observed by the Congress with a progressive regression, with an incremental indifference. The Congress can deny this only if it wishes to compete for a prize in incredibility. And the Indian State, for the years that it has been ruled by the Congress, has done likewise. Non-Congress governments at the Centre lacked both time and interest to correct the egregious error.

The most striking neglect took place in 1975, the centenary of the Sardar’s birth. Reason: India was under its one and only — so far — national emergency.

India was in a state of utter fear, fear of the ‘supreme leader’. No one dared ask her why the centenary of a man so supremely important to us was being passed by virtually unobserved. No one, not even leaders of the Gujarat Congress, dared ask her. Ask her? Why, they would not have dared ask even her home minister.

Now, in 2014, the year the Congress and its allies have suffered the worst-ever defeat at the national polls, comes the Great Correction — a new order of commemoration. And it is as loud in its happening as the neglect was in its not-happening.

I rejoice at this correction. Sardar Patel was not just central to the Congress’s struggle for freedom, not just foundationally, definingly, vital to the emergence of India as we know it, but a leader in whose hands the integrity of the nation was safe. And so I feel joy at what is a rectification — something that was needed was being done. It is time, with its fresh knowledge of where it stands in the public’s estimation, the Congress realized that it cannot be selective about repaying its arrears of gratitude. It cannot put on its plenary backdrop the cut-outs of the pre-Indira Gandhi greats as a sequence of also-rans, a sepia succession intoned merely for the record. It cannot perpetuate the myth that India is the Congress and the Congress is equal to a particular family. Jawaharlal Nehru, with his sense of history and of basic fairness and decency, would have revolted at that thought.

I believe that Sonia Gandhi subscribes to that myth. She is too aware of what can be called simple truths, bare facts, to believe in that myth. But such is the none-like-you, nothing-but-you, we’re-sunk-without-you servility in her party that she does not call its bluff. And Dr Manmohan Singh does not believe in it either. But he is too deeply imbued by a sense of something he owes to a party that made him, an ‘outsider’ and a non-politician, prime minister of India.

It is clear as can be that in this Great Correction lies a great opportunity for Prime Minister Narendra Modi. In speaking of the Sardar, he appears handsomely non-partisan (Patel was after all a Congress leader), selfless (it is not his own birth anniversary), a good Gujarati (obviously) but no more than the Mahatma was (those two were ‘inseparable’), an admirer of Patel’s statecraft and of Patel’s no-nonsense politics (which is, please note, his own).

This ‘use’ of Patel by the National Democratic Alliance is the offspring of the disuse of Patel by the Congress. This ‘owning’ of Patel is a result of the Congress’ disowning of Patel. The embrace has followed the cold-shouldering.

Co-option is not less egregious than disinheritance. If in 1975, fearful people flinched from celebrating the Patel centenary, should people now attend Patel’s birthday celebrations with another version of fear, fear of seeming to be not conforming?

Sardar Patel was the symbol of integration, not some monochromatic sameness called ‘unity’. As Rajmohan Gandhi explains in his biography of the Sardar, his integration policy brought more people into India, including Muslims, than were lost to Pakistan. This was about bringing people in, including them in the rhythms of a new India, not steam-pressing them into some new-fangled conformity. That is what needs to be understood, acknowledged.

But there is more to all this than just one individual’s stature and its acknowledgment or non-acknowledgement.

What we are witnessing is a playing out of posthumous rivalries by contemporary adversaries for present and future gain. This may or may not help the adversaries; it is harming us as a people.

Nehru as PM in 1950,was a very confident PM at that, but the DPM was formidable. The nation was with Nehru, Congress MPs were behind Patel.

And yet, a largeness of heart overpowered all other emotions, ambitions. The two leaders made no secret of their differing viewpoints. In letters to each other, both offered to quit, leaving the ‘reins’ in the other’s hands. And both withdrew their impulsive offers. Both walked out of crucial cabinet meetings, only to meet up again and resolve the precipitating difference in the nation’s larger interest.

The Sardar, in 1950, was getting on to 75. Crumbled within himself after the Mahatma’s assassination, he had already been through a heart attack. At a session of the All India Congress Committee, in Nasik, that September, Patel told delegates from Gujarat to “do what Jawaharlal says”.

And on October 2,1950, at Indore, Patel said: “I have been referred to as Deputy Prime Minister. I never think of myself in these terms. Jawaharlal is our leader. Bapu appointed him as his successor and had even proclaimed him as such…It is the duty of all Bapu’s soldiers to carry out his bequest. Whoever does not do so from the heart in the proper spirit will be a sinner before God.”

November 14, 1950 was the prime minister’s 61st birthday. The 75-year-old deputy prime minister, ill and fatigued, sent him a hand-written greeting. On November 23, the prime minister came calling. “I want to talk to you alone when I get a little strength…”, Patel said to Nehru. “I have a feeling that you are losing confidence in me.…” Nehru replied, “I have been losing confidence in myself”.

By the first week of December, he had lost the will to live. Patel’s daughter Maniben heard him repeat Nazir’s line,“Zindagi ka yah tamasha chand roz…” Doctors told him he should shift to Bombay, where the cold is less severe. To his loyal colleague in the cabinet, N.V. Gadgil, who came to say goodbye, Patel said, “Make me a promise…I am not going to live…” And then taking Gadgil’s hand into his own, “Whatever your difference with Panditji, do not leave him… .”

Rajendra Prasad, who would not have been president but for Patel, Nehru, who may well have left the prime ministership but for Patel’s offering to vacate office himself, Rajaji, who was denied the presidentship largely due to Patel’s preference for Prasad but retained Patel’s affectionate esteem, were all there, and in scarcely concealed tears, as the Iron Man’s pyre was lit on December 15,1950.

Who, in the Bharatiya Janata Party or in the Congress, dare deny this legacy?

For we need to see, in our fractious times, how Nehru and Patel furled their egos and worked together.

We need them to work together again, Nehru to secure our pluralism and Patel to safeguard our integrity. And both to keep us from the coarsening of what can only be called our political iman.

A chance is presenting itself, on November 14 this year, for the prime minister to close the divide that is being kept wide open. A chance has come to him to invite the Congress president, not just to join but to lead the official celebration of Nehru’s 125th birth anniversary.

That would be a Patel-like thing to do. Vintage Patel.