The sun blazed down at a party with loud music and even louder slogans, only partly symbolising the glorious game currently being played out in Gujarat. The extraordinarily enterprising Gujarati spirit that has raised motels in Antwerp, real-estate in Manhattan, diamond, textile and ceramic industries back home and moulded iconic leaders such as Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Vallabhbhai Patel, Muhammad Ali Jinnah and Narendra Modi was on full display in the dusty village of Bela in the heart of arid Saurashtra.

The ongoing assembly elections in Gujarat make for a fascinating spectacle because the people in a State that has, over the years, metamorphosed from championing Gandhian ideas to being the biggest marketer for Brand Gujarat and Hindutva, are now forcing a vigorous discourse on political economy on an incredulous Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The party, which has ruled the State for 22 years, and Modi, who presided over most of these victories and went on to become Prime Minister, are suddenly facing an electorate that has changed the rules of the game.

Through organically evolved leaders such as Hardik Patel, Alpesh Thakore and Jignesh Mevani, and a seemingly effortless transition of caste and community structures into defacto political entities, such as the Patidar Anamat Andolan Samiti (PAAS), Gujarat is now forcing the BJP and the PM to focus on the political economy issues brought to fore by falling agricultural prices, GST impact on small industry and 22 years of anti-incumbency. The State — which is often cited as a laboratory where economic conditions for facilitation of free private enterprise have merged with political narratives that have constrained progressive movements, alienated and persecuted minorities and given rise to majoritarianism — is now facing questions on the lack of public health and education facilities, rural development and, most importantly, agricultural growth and farm prices.

This is the most interesting and exciting feature of the ongoing Gujarat elections, especially given the sub-national socio political context. The prolonged and exhaustive efforts of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the BJP in Gujarat had coincided with the formal initiation of economic liberalisation in India when the first Janata Dal-BJP government in the State was sworn in in 1990, months before economist Manmohan Singh quoted romanticist Victor Hugo in Parliament to usher in economic liberalisation: “No one can stop an idea whose time has come.” Five years later, in 1995, Gujarat had its first BJP Chief Minister in Keshubhai Patel, whose party won with a simple majority — 122 seats in the 182-member assembly. The political dominance of the BJP has meant that the State has been turned into a promoter of Brand Gujarat, big businesses as well as Hindutva.

That has worked very well for the BJP and Modi so far.

The people have gone along and overwhelmingly supported Modi, electing him as Chief Minister in three successive elections. They stamped his prime ministerial candidature in 2014 when a staggering 60 per cent of people voted in favour of the BJP, and the party won all the 26 parliamentary seats in the State. The BJP has been the natural party of governance for two decades as the Congress lost its cadre, social base and credibility over the years. If one takes out the exceptional case of 2014, when people voted to elect candidate Modi, the Congress, one finds, still retains remnants of its support base. In the last assembly elections, the vote share difference between the BJP and the Congress was 8.92 per cent, with the BJP getting 47.85 per cent vote share and winning 115 seats, and the Congress recording 38.93 per cent votes and 61 seats in the 182-member assembly.

But something has changed in Gujarat this time around.

Even on a day when TV channels looped headlines on Rahul Gandhi’s “non-Hindu” credentials in Somnath temple — from where LK Advani had launched his Ram Rath Yatra in 1990, thus pulling the BJP from the fringes to the mainstream of Indian politics — it was not difficult to grasp that the Hindutva talk was not exciting people.

In Bela village, Morbi and at a subsequent public rally in Rajkot on November 29, the narrative remained strictly confined to political economy issues such as GST, demonetisation, joblessness, rural wages and crop prices. Just 10 km from Bela, on the same day, Modi had addressed a large rally and the arguments he made were being challenged at this village corner meeting organised by PAAS. On display was the process of how a community, the Patidars, whose revolt against the Congress in the 1980s brought the BJP to power, have once again transformed into a political entity.

A little digression is essential to contextualise the current goings-on in Gujarat.

Lessons in history

The key to understanding the Patidar phenomenon lies in the decision made by the Congress chief minister Madhavsinh Solanki in 1980 to implement the strategy devised by the reformist, backward-caste Congress president Jinabhai Darji to weave an umbrella support base of the numerically-powerful Khshtriya, Harijan, Adivasi and Muslim (KHAM) communities. Solanki assumed power in 1980 with a stunning majority of 141 seats in the 182-member assembly by wooing the groups under KHAM and the simultaneous isolation of the Patidars. The Congress had put up 111 candidates from KHAM groups and got 96 of them elected. The defeated and incensed opposition, mostly the BJP and the Janata Party, worked on the reverse caste dynamics strategy adopted by the Congress. Thirty-one Opposition MLAs were from non-KHAM groups including 22 Patidars aka Patels. Solanki naturally considered his electoral triumph a ratification of the backward caste assertion. His cabinet was populated predominantly by KHAM members and the government board and corporations, a major patronage source for politicians, were dominated by KHAM groups.

The Patidars revolted almost spontaneously. Students of the Byramjee Jeejeebhoy Medical College began a strike against a roster system in postgraduate courses that allowed unfilled reserved seats to be carried forward to the next year and also allowed for interchangeability between unoccupied seats reserved for Scheduled Castes (SC) and Scheduled Tribes (ST). Violence erupted and soon spread to the Dalit and Muslim tenements and industrial workers’ settlements in 18 of the 19 districts in the State. Nevertheless, Solanki went ahead and announced 28 per cent reservation for OBCs in 1985 with an eye on the upcoming elections. Protests led and organised by the Patels through the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), the students’ wing of the RSS, once again erupted in university campuses. Their rage intensified when Solanki won the 1985 assembly elections, that too by a thumping majority, winning 149 of the 182 seats. There was not a single Patidar in Solanki’s cabinet. This time, the violence was communal, with Muslim homes, business establishments and religious places becoming targets of attack. Of the documented 220 killings in the violence of 1985, 743 incidents were classified as communal.

The agitation ended only with the resignation of the chief minister in July 1985. The conservative Opposition, organised mostly by Patidars as well as other savarna groups, had succeeded in bringing down a popularly elected government through street mobilisation. The subsequent Hindutva upsurge in the late ’80s and early ’90s with Gujarat in the grip of the Ramjanmabhoomi movement, and the decimation of the Janata Dal by the untimely demise of its stalwart, the former Congress chief minister Chimanbhai Patel, witnessed the consolidation of the BJP in Gujarat.

The organisation of Patidars is significant in this light. It is not just Hardik Patel but a cast of totally unknown players who are guiding the electorate in Gujarat to “stay the course” on political economy issues such as GST, demonetisation, joblessness, rural wages and crop prices even as the BJP has pushed the Ramjanmabhoomi issue to the fore to cover the last mile in the heated election campaign.

“They (the BJP) say we are fools. And they would be right. For 22 years, we elected them despite not getting decent price for our groundnut, cotton, not getting education and health facilities, not getting jobs or roads in rural areas. All you see in the media are highways. They don’t talk about rural roads. They don’t exist. And we elect them for 22 years. Has any BJP MLA from Morbi asked even 22 questions about the real situation in Morbi? We are fools because we are being used and we still vote for them,” Hardik Patel told an excited and responsive crowd of over 6,000 people at Bela.

The Patidars’s organisation, PAAS, has thrown up leaders such as Manoj Panara and Dadabhai Patel who mimic Modi on stage and coordinate with PAAS conveners in every village and taluka. The BJP, Modi and local leaders are being tracked and trolled at corner meetings, roadshows and gheraos. Panara, an entertaining orator and mobiliser in Saurashtra, has been engaged in a heated exchange with the sitting BJP MLA and contestant Kantilal Amrutiya for over a month. In late September, Panara and his group tracked Amrutiya down to a residential colony in Morbi and surrounded him, chanting slogans and demanding support for PAAS. A harassed Amrutiya struggled with this aggressive bunch of PAAS volunteers for a few minutes, but soon had to give way. “Yes, I support PAAS and quota for Patidars,” he said as Panara and his comrades shouted.

Hardik Patel is following the same tactic vis-a-vis Modi. For obvious reasons, it is difficult to surround and heckle the PM, but PAAS is ensuring that a semblance of the Panara-versus-Amruitya tussle is replicated at the highest level from the arid Saurashtra to the prosperous south Gujarat cities like Surat.

It is for this reason that the PM and the BJP are leaving nothing to chance, campaigning vigorously and bringing the cadre out to propel an electorate unused to the Congress being in power towards their natural party of governance. The PM has carpet-bombed Gujarat with his powerful rhetoric and emotive appeal in as many as 18 rallies in five days between November 27 and December 6. He is scheduled to address nine more along with 40 other star campaigners in the State, even as the RSS works its cadre to guide the voter on polling days. The challenge, as shown by the close contest being predicted by the opinion polls, has not come from the Congress. It has come from the people who have organised organically on political economy issues. This has been the healthiest experiment in the Hindutva laboratory in the last over two decades.

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