When a 22-year-old clone of Prime Minister Modi took Ahmedabad by storm on August 25 with his fiery rhetoric that rivalled the Gujarat strongman’s best performance, it was a moment of shock for the BJP. As Hardik Patel had much of India riveted the incongruities were hard to ignore.
Mr Patel, travelling across the country to form caste alliances while openly taunting Mr Modi, is demanding quotas for his affluent Patel community in university admissions and government jobs, an action is reserved for lower castes. The irony is that the Patels, the biggest beneficiaries of Mr Modi’s business-friendly policies, are now turning on a party that they brought to power in the 1990s.
For many liberal critics who have been railing against the hollowness of Mr Modi’s policies for long, Mr Patel is a welcome entrant to the political theatre despite the unease caused by his extreme right-wing worldview. The truth is that his aggressive politics is finally proving to be more effective in unravelling many of the illusions spun by Mr Modi over the dozen odd years that he ran Gujarat. The most alluring of the illusions that he peddled across the country while campaigning as the BJP’s PM candidate in 2014 was the promise of jobs to all through the Gujarat model of development.
The revolt of the Patels or Patidars (landholders) of Gujarat is turning out to be the best reality check on this model whose achievements analysts have contested. The Patels are known as successful businessmen and for their political clout with more than a third of the lawmakers coming from their community. For such a well-placed community to seek OBC status is the strongest rebuff yet to Mr Modi. The shrinking economy which has led to closure of thousands of industries and dropping wages could be the reason why caste is bubbling again.
When KHAM, a unique alliance of the lower caste kshatriyas (OBCs), harijans, adivasis and Muslims, formed by Congress leader Madhavsinh Solanki, proved too strong, the violent protests by the Patels were turned into a communal conflict by Hindutva organisations. Mr Solanki, said in a recent interview, that in the 1981 riots when the Patels attacked harijans, Indira Gandhi asked him to hold firm and airlifted special police forces to quell the riots.
That’s how caste politics tends to play out in India, as jurist and economist Bhimrao Ambedkar points out. In his seminal 1936 treatise Annihilation of Caste, Ambedkar writes: “Hindu society as such does not exist. It is only a collection of castes. Each caste is conscious (only) of itself. Its survival is the be all and end all of existence. A caste has no feeling that it is affiliated to other castes except when there is a Hindu-Muslim riot. On all other occasions each caste tries to segregate itself from other castes.”
The RSS, from which the BJP draws its philosophy, is opposed to caste quotas, saying reservations would be unfair to the poor of the upper castes. But the BJP, although it has always lashed out at the vote bank politics of the Congress, has been equally cynical in its quota politics. In 2000, Jats in Rajasthan were classified as OBC, a prompt reward for the community’s support to the BJP in the 1999 parliamentary elections. Mr Modi has not shied away from using his lower caste origins at the hustings. Mr Modi is a Ghanchi, a prosperous merchant class that enjoys a monopoly of the oil trade but given OBC status.
The BJP’s bias leave the Muslims out of the quota reckoning although the party claims it would favour reservations based on income. A few months ago in Maharashtra, despite a court order striking down 16 per cent reservations for Marathas, the BJP government decided to go ahead with it by issuing a new ordinance, while a five per cent educational quota for Muslims upheld by the judges was scrapped.
The communal antigen is always at work. In the same week that Mr Patel stunned the BJP government into shocked silence, a speech by vice-president Hamid Ansari on the need for affirmative action for Muslims had the saffron brigade out in full cry.
Speaking at the golden jubilee of the Majlis-i-Mushawarat, Mr Ansari had merely cited the Sachar Committee Report of 2006 which had found the average condition of Muslims comparable to or worse than that most backward communities, the SCs and STs. Choosing to term that a communal statement, the VHP declared that it would “push Muslims in dark alleys of dissatisfaction whose consequences will be dangerous”.
Would that imply the Patels once again in full war paint will do no harm?
The writer is a journalist based in New Delhi
By arrangement with Dawn
