did more than anyone else to promote the unity of our country”.

During the frenzy of riots in the national capital in 1947,Patel put hundreds of Muslims in Red Fort and he brought army from Pune and the then state of Madras to protect them,he said,adding that he went and prayed in Nizamuddin to send a signal to Hindu rioters.

“He went to Amritsar and pleaded with angry and emotional Hindus and Sikhs there not to attack refugees who were fleeing our country to go to Pakistan…. This is the kind of secularism Patel promised and practiced,” Tharoor said.

Modi has been accused by critics of not doing enough to stop the 2002 riots in which over 1000 people,a large number of them Muslims,were killed.

Tharoor said Patel was both a nationalIndra B. Tamang, who grew up in a mud house in a farming village in Nepal, has reached a pinnacle of society after more than three decades of loyal service as a butler, cook and caretaker to a socially prominent American family.

The cook became the master—as the inheritor of two apartments at the Dakota, the legendary West Side apartment building, and a valuable collection of Russian surrealist art—after the death last year at the age of 98 of Ruth Ford, a film and stage actress who was the wife of Zachary Scott, a dashing...