Ramachandra Guha: What today’s farm protests share with Vallabhbhai Patel’s Bardoli satyagraha

In 1931, the annual meeting of the Indian National Congress was held in the port city of Karachi. Vallabhbhai Patel was elected president. Early in his address, Patel remarked: “You have called a simple farmer to the highest office to which any Indian can aspire. I am conscious that your choice of me as first servant is not so much for what little I might have done, but it is the recognition of the amazing sacrifice made by Gujarat. Out of your generosity you have singled out Gujarat for that honour. But in truth every province did its utmost during… the greatest national awakening that we have known in modern times.”

In 1931, the Congress had been in existence for more than four decades. Yet in this time, it had never before elected a person born in a peasant household to head the organisation, this despite Mahatma Gandhi’s own claim – and exhortation – that “India lives in her villages.” All past presidents of the Congress had been city-bred and city-raised.

Vallabhbhai Patel was the first major leader of the freedom movement who came from a rural background. Notably, it was as a mobiliser of peasants that he first made his mark on the…

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