Translation error: What Sardar Patel said about money for Babri Masjid

Early in December, Amit Malviya, the head of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s propaganda wing, claimed in a post on X that Jawaharlal Nehru had wanted to rebuild the Babri Masjid using public funds. To support this, he cited the English translation of the diary of Maniben Patel, daughter of Sardar Patel, and shared a page from the introduction of the book.

The English edition, Inside Story of Sardar Patel: The Diary of Maniben Patel, 1936-’50, was published in 2001, while the original Gujarati diaries had remained unpublished until 2025. Just last month, selections from the original Gujarati text were finally released by the Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel Memorial Society in Ahmedabad.

Compiled by RS Patel, the society’s secretary, these newly published excerpts Samarpit Padchhayo Sardarno have raised serious questions about the way the English volume was compiled and translated – an edition that had long been treated as a key source by researchers.

Inside Story of Sardar Patel: The Diary of Maniben Patel, 1936-’50 was published as part of the Collected Works of Sardar Patel, with PN Chopra as chief editor and Prabha Chopra as editor. The translation from the original Gujarati diaries was carried out by UM Choksi, former deputy chief editor of the Gazetteers of Gujarat, though his contribution was acknowledged only in a...

Read more