Opinion: Congress is leading in Patidar districts. Why?

Gandhinagar, Gujarat, India

As election season heats up in Gujarat and the media awaits the final ‘masterstroke’ from the BJP President Amit Shah to quell the restive Patidars, public interest in the deeper underlying reasons for the social disquiet in the state remains limited. The media remains focused on individuals and their political moves. As Congress Vice-President Rahul Gandhi toured the state over the past few weeks, the buzz around personalities and key players has acquired greater traction.

Three angry young men Hardik Patel, Alpesh Thakore Jignesh Mevani for whom Amit Shah derisively coined the acronym HAJ, are threatening to undermine the Vibrant Gujarat narrative and hurt the BJP’s electoral performance.Though there is a good reason to believe that the BJP is resilient enough to contain the challenge, it is the attacks from the Congress on the already fraying development narrative in Gujarat, that has caused some alarm in the ruling establishment.

Notwithstanding the angry voices of Alpesh Thakore representing OBC grievances, or Dalit activist Jignesh Mevani who first drew our attention to the atrocities against young men of his community at Una earlier this year, its Hardik Patel and the Patel Anamat Andolan Samiti (PAAS) whose voice is heard loudest. This is not without reason. Hardik Patel the young man from Viramgam in North Gujarat has muddled the BJP’s developmental and Hindutva agenda by resurrecting the issue of reservation his community had once so vehemently opposed.

Many among the Patels, however, argue that not only are Hardik’s demands for reservation in the Other Backward Class category untenable but unrepresentative. These are the voices of those Patidars who have lived up to the popular image of the community as both affluent and dominant. They are industrialists, diamond merchants, real estate developers, and of course owners of large landed properties.  With them are large sections of the Patidar diaspora too, the thousands that went out to live their dreams of prosperity in East Africa, the US, UK and later Australia.

So when a forty-thousand strong gathering filled the GMDC grounds in Ahmedabad on August 25th, 2015, most of us were in a state of utter disbelief. In all the long decade I’d lived in the city, I never saw a political rally or a march comparable in scale to the ones I’ve grown up within Kolkata. In fact, there were hardly any rallies at all. The Opposition was virtually decimated and civil society threatened and bullied into silence. So when the dramatic events of the day unfolded with the arrest of the young leader of PAAS, and the violence unleashed on his angry supporters later that night, it was evident that the there was a political churn in the state.

That the churn would come from the Patidar community, known for their unflinching loyalty to the BJP, and through the seemingly ‘unreasonable’ demand for reservations was doubly surprising.

Barring a few academics, most political commentators in the media had made us believe that the Gujarat model of development had rendered the reservation question redundant for all time to come. This was largely because it was the Patidars who spearheaded the violent anti-reservation agitations in the 1980s and had vigorously argued the case for ‘merit’ as the prime driver of Gujarat’s 'Vikas'.

So it was not clear as to why some months ago, a song curiously titled 'vikas gando thhayachhe’ roughly translated as ‘development gone crazy’ would go viral on social media and meld into the deep reserves of Patidar resentment.

For sociologists observing these developments over the longue duree, the Patidar churn is not surprising. For them what we see today are manifestations of a series of separate but inter-related social phenomena. Foremost among these are the peculiarities of the class/caste configurations that define the Patidars as a distinctive social group.

David Pocock one of the earliest anthropologists to study the community in the 1950s, described Patidars as intensely ‘hierarchical and competitive’ and drew attention to the practice of hypergamy (the drive to marry one’s daughter up) as the structuring principle of their community life. Even if the community cohered around kinship ties and common religious, sectarian or social values, he argued that the ceaseless drive to leverage power among wealthier Patidars normalised the existing inequalities within it.

Pocock studied these developments through documenting the historical process through which the Kanbi or a cultivating caste became the larger group known as Patidars in the mid-twentieth century. His study focused on the two main groups within the Kanbis, the Leva Kanbis and the Kadva kanbis.

These groups were distributed unevenly in the regions of the south, central and north Gujarat. The wealthiest among them, the Leva kanbis came from Kheda district in the fertile Charotar tract the region, lying roughly between Ahmedabad and Baroda while Kadvas resided in parts of northern and southern Gujarat.

The Kanbis, in general, were known to be skilled cultivators who lived in a spartan manner, remained committed to a strict work ethic and were the earliest to take to commercial agriculture.  They directed their spending to improvements in farming and benefited greatly from the patronage they received from the British since the mid-19th century, particularly from the positions they acquired as tax collectors and village headmen known as patels.

The wealthier within the caste developed new practices of collective holding and sharing the produce of large tracts of fertile land. They legitimised this new landholding order through deeds known as ‘pattis’ from which the title Patidar acquired currency. They often farmed the richest areas of the village through hired farm labour of the lesser Kanbis.

Sociologists have long held that the Patidar community offered unique insights into the nature of social stratification and mobility within Gujarat pointing to the fact that far from being a conservative agricultural community, the Patidars were deeply aspirational. They moved from being agricultural labourers, to agrarian capitalists, to manufacturers and entrepreneurs. In the period between the World Wars they rose to prominence as Gandhian nationalists who drove the Kheda satyagraha under the leadership of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel.

(Disclaimer: The author writes here in a personal capacity).