VP Menon on Sardar Patel’s approach in economic sphere

Japan K Pathak, Ahmedabad: Sardar Patel was never a Finance minister, but how was his economic approach? V.P.Menon who worked closely with Sardar Patel wrote an article post Sardar’s passing away. Here is an excerpt from Menon’s article throwing light over Sardar’s approach to economy:

In the economic sphere, Sardar was an advocate of gradualism and disliked the revolutionary approach.

He yielded to none in his conviction that the prosperity of the country depended upon rapid industrialisation.

Often has he been pictured as the friend of the capitalists who was oblivious of the interests of labour and the poor. Nothing can be farther from the truth. He came of a peasant stock: and his heart was ever with the poor.

But he knew that to dispossessed the rich would not automatically elevate the poor. He would never pull down anything unless he could put something better in its place. What he wanted was to level up the poor without levelling down the rich. He wanted to build the new structure on the solid foundations of the old. He knew that nationalisation of industries had no meaning so long as the Government did not have the trained and specialised personnel to run these industries. Mere nationalisation without the necessary man power would be a leap in the dark.

Sardar knew that if sufficient confidence was created among the moneyed classes, they would themselves come forward for investment and industrialisation would proceed rapidly. For the rest, he relied on appealing to the patriotism of the moneyed classes; his experience had shown him that they were never impervious to such appeals. I remember his summoning the industrialists to Mussoorie in connection with the Gandhiji Memorial Fund. They rose to the occasion and willingly produced more than what Sardar had asked for Sardar knew that the centuries-old habits of a people cannot be changed in a day by legislation.

Before the British occupied this country, the rich men used to conceal their wealth due to want of stability. It was only during the later years of British rule that capital in this country lost to a certain extent its proverbial shyness due to the confidence created by a stable administration. Sardar wanted that flow of capital to be maintained and he was too robust a realist to scare away capital by menacing speeches and menacing legislation.

– DeshGujarat