Modi also attacked Congress, saying it was remembering the country's first Home Minister "only after" the BJP decided to make the "statue of unity" in his memory in Gujarat.
"It is our achievement that for 60 years when you forgot him, we have forced you to remember him," Modi said as he took a jibe at the Congress for "waking up" to install a statue of Maratha king Chhatrapati Shivaji in the Arabian Sea.
"For you, Vallabhbhai Patel may be a political leader, but for us he is a national leader. Congress leaders will never be able to understand our feelings for Patel," he said.
Leader of Opposition in Rajya Sabha also lamented that no one in the country had thought of writing a biography on Patel, till the Sardar Patel Trust in 1977 asked Mahatma Gandhi's grandson Rajmohan Gandhi to write one after some research, 30 years after independence.
He also appeared to attack the Gandhi family when he said a lot of "planning" is done to build the "glamour and attraction" of a family.
Rahul Gandhi came under attack after he said RSS ideology had led to the killing of Mahatma Gandhi and that Modi has nothing to do with the ideology of the Father of the Nation or Sardar Patel.
"He (Modi) has spent his entire life in RSS and has nothing to do with the ideology of Mahatma Gandhi and Sardar Patel. Its (RSS') ideology killed the Mahatma and Patel proposed to ban it after that," Rahul said.
