It’s been a busy couple of weeks. From my India League/City Hindus Network with City Sikhs Network, event in Parliament, where I spoke about the futility of conflict, to a memorial at the Indian High Commission with the dedicated Sardar Patel Memorial Society, to meeting the PM this week and finally ending with Diwali. The Indian High Commission has rightly taken up MC’ing and running the event in the High Commission and made it even better than ever – short, sharp, focussed.
The thread to unify all these things is Unity Day – October 31st and birth anniversary of Sardar Patel.
We stand at the precipice of a world teetering on the brink, a world where the dark clouds of separatism and extremism ominously gather on the horizon.
Sardar Patel, the Iron Man of India, was not just a man of words but a colossus of action. When the subcontinent was a fractured mosaic, a jigsaw puzzle of princely states, it was his indomitable will that wielded the hammer and anvil of unity. He moulded a scattered land into a singular, invincible entity. He showed us that unity is not a mere poetic fancy but a concrete edifice upon which nations are built and civilizations stand tall.
So it is befitting the world’s tallest statue is of him in the world’s largest democracy, the most populous nation in the world, and soon, the largest economy, again, in the world.
We stand on his shoulders. Each of us. He paved the way, that there could be an Indian Prime Minister of UK. Because the world knows our character, our beliefs, our values, our creed, our brand as Indians.
Oh at times they may laugh at us – corner shop owners. No, nation builders. Democracy builders. Unifiers. CEOs, doctors, nurses and Prime Ministers.
We sacrificed even our own motherland into parts, to maintain a unity. And how ARE WE DOING? The nation he put together. Respected on the World Stage. Admired. And among enemies, feared. Yes. So be it.
Listen closely, for the words of Sardar Patel echo through time: "non-violence has to be observed in thought, word and deed. The measure of non-violence will be the measure of our success”. This makes India, Bharat, Hindustan unique among nations. It is not enough to have your freedom, it is how you achieve it that is the soul and character of a nation.
Today, as the serpents of division hiss and the wolves of extremism howl, let us not cower in fear. Let us rise, rise like the majestic phoenix, fueled by the eternal flames of unity that Sardar Patel once kindled. Let us lock arms and stand as one, a human fortress against the battering rams of division and hate.
For in unity we find our salvation. In unity, we find the promise of a tomorrow where the sun of hope dispels the darkness of discord, where the symphony of human spirit drowns out the cacophony of strife.
There is a memorial book at the home of Sardar Patel, on one page are the words by me, “Even if I have a 1000 rebirths, I will not be ever so fortunate as I am now to hail from this, his, village”.