After tasting spectacular success in Gujarat, the 22-year old Patidar (Patel) leader Hardik Patel, clamouring for either bringing his prosperous community within the ambit of OBC reservations or scrapping caste quotas altogether, has sought to move farther afield. He was in the capital on Sunday for networking and appeared before the national media as well.
On the basis of all that he has said so far — in Ahmedabad and New Delhi — it is not so far clear if the ambitious Patidar leader, who is admittedly inexperienced given his age, has a grasp of the country’s social reality. He has described the Kurmis — found mostly in Bihar and also in UP — as being from his own caste. Some do indeed use Patel as a last name. But that is where similarities end.
The Kurmis of North India are already a designated OBC group, and have traditionally been “backward”, which cannot be said of the Patels of Gujarat, arguably the most well-to-do community of the state in all respects, disproportionately represented in business, industry and government jobs without quotas. The Patels are also prominent among the prosperous Indian diaspora, particularly in North America, and have done much to make Prime Minister Modi’s overseas events spectacular.
Even so, there are bound to be disadvantaged folk among the Patidars of Gujarat, just as there are — in every state of the country — individuals and families in need of support among the upper castes. Mr Patel has sought to stress this, but he need not have.
Normal logic would suggest that just as the brahmins and other sections of the traditional upper castes cannot be made beneficiaries of caste-based reservation for educational opportunities and employment, the system would be hard-pressed to include the Gujarat Patidar into the OBC category so that they may qualify for state support. Doing so would make a mockery of the very purpose of affirmative action in the framework of the Indian system of reservations.
There was a reservation system for the Scheduled Castes and Tribes from the start on the ground that they had suffered extreme backwardness and hardship for millennia and needed positive discrimination in order to advance socially, educationally and economically. Even for these special categories, reservations were meant to have a finite time-span. But in his time Prime Minister V.P. Singh bought in 27 per cent reservations for the OBC category in order to win the political support of these castes.
The cause of the genuinely needy may have been served better if quotas followed the economic or class principle, rather than a caste mandate. As for the young Mr Patel, he invokes caste possibly with an eye on political networking beyond Gujarat.
