In a dramatic face-to-face confrontation outside Parliament’s Makar Dwar on Thursday morning, Senior Congress Leader Jairam Ramesh personally handed Defence Minister Rajnath Singh the original Gujarati diary pages of Maniben Patel — Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel’s daughter — along with a certified Hindi translation, directly rebutting Singh’s explosive claim that Jawaharlal Nehru had pushed for government funds to reconstruct the Babri Masjid and was stopped only by Sardar Patel.
The meticulously preserved diary entries, recently published in the 2025 Gujarati volume Samarpit Padchhayo Sardarno by C.A. R.S. Patel (“Aaresh”), contain detailed day-by-day accounts of cabinet discussions from the relevant period, yet make absolutely no mention of any proposal by Nehru to use public money for the mosque — completely undermining the narrative Singh presented during a public rally in Vadodara last week.
When Ramesh pressed the Defence Minister to read the pages on the spot, Singh responded that he does not know Gujarati and that the BJP already possesses an English translation of the diary, prompting Ramesh to later post photographs of the original entries on social media with the caption: “There is a huge difference between the original diary entry and what Rajnath Singh and his fellow ‘distorians’ are propagating.”
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The Congress has escalated its demand for a public apology, accusing the BJP’s top leadership of deliberately circulating fabricated history through “WhatsApp University” to malign Jawaharlal Nehru and appropriate Sardar Patel’s legacy ahead of crucial state elections.
The BJP has doubled down, with national spokesperson Sudhanshu Trivedi citing a separate 2001 English publication titled Inside Story of Sardar Patel: The Diary of Maniben Patel (1936-50) that allegedly supports Singh’s version, intensifying the bitter political and historical showdown over one of independent India’s most sensitive episodes.
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