Iron Man, we know, is a profitable superhero franchise that has been re-imagined several times over, to suit the changing times. India’s own Iron Man, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, is turning out to be a pretty malleable cultural icon, made over by the BJP and fought for by the Congress.

Patel, that doughty crusader for a unified India, would be entirely surprised at the kind of political war raging over him. BJP politicians from L.K. Advani to Narendra Modi like to trace their genealogy back to him — in the popular imagination, he combines a tough-guy image with an inflexible nationalism and cultural conservatism. His legendary differences with Jawaharlal Nehru make it easier to pitch Patel as the man whose vision the Congress failed to understand, and for the BJP to appropriate. Patel, of course, can no longer protest this ahistorical hostile takeover of his image. After the flap over Jaswant Singh’s book, the Gujarat government rushed to ban it, citing injury to Patel’s reputation — “he is considered the architect of the modern India, no one can show him in bad light.” They had to climb down from that position after court orders, but Modi soldiers on in the effort to wrest Patel’s legacy. Meanwhile, the Congress has belatedly learnt to guard its turf — sanctioning Rs 17 crore to spruce up the Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel National Memorial in Ahmedabad and lavish attention on Patel through a book and artwork.

Modi stole the thunder, claiming that Sardar Patel should have been India’s first prime minister. He freely fantasised: had Sardar Patel been the first prime minister of the country, farmers would not have committed suicide in Karnataka and Maharashtra. There would have been no terrorism in Jammu and Kashmir. He also hit the Congress where it hurts, claiming that Patel had predicted the Chinese threat, writing to Jawaharlal Nehru in 1950 and asking him to revise defence policy. Sonia Gandhi hit back, saying that to “claim that there were unbearable disagreements between Sardar Patel and Pandit Nehru is to distort history.” And indeed, despite their well-known differences, there was no personal animus between Patel and Nehru — Sardar Patel remained a Congress anchor till the end. But then again, historical fact is hardly likely to get in the way of Modi’s grandiose self-fashioning project.