The Old Man’s weakness for the westernized Nehru over the home-spun fellow Gujarati [Patel] was yet another aspect of “Swadeshi” Gandhi’s self-contradictory personality. How Jawaharlal managed to become the “spiritual son” of Gandhi is a mystery. Wrote MN Roy in “The Men I Met”: “It can reasonably be doubted if Nehru could have become the hero of Indian Nationalism except as the spiritual son of Gandhi…To purchase popularity, Nehru had to suppress his own personality…”{Roy/11}
