Quelling dissent with sedition

Flawed Approach: Keeping Hardik Patel in jail was the only way for Gujarat govt to contain Patidar stir

The BJP in Gujarat never expected the Patels, the backbone of its support base, to turn against it. The Patels did, and the BJP government was so stunned that it did not know how to contain the state-wide agitation that at times turned violent.Taking a totally unjust approach, Gujarat slapped sedition charge against Hardik Patel, the agitation leader, and pushed him behind bars. The state government has now announced quota for the economically backward among the Patels, but the latter have rejected it.

The Patidars or Patels brought and kept the BJP in power in Gujarat for over two decades. The Jana Sangh had only about 2% of the vote in Gujarat till the 1970s and two moves in the 1980s produced a shift in the state’s politics.

Then chief minister Madhavsinh Solanki of the Congress introduced a vote bank strategy that was built around his own Kshatriya community, which was the second largest agricultural group after the Patels. To them, Solanki added the theoretical votes of Dalits, Adivasis and Muslims. This strategy was called by the acronym KHAM (Dalits are still referred to in Gujarat as Harijan, the term coined by Mahatma Gandhi) and it excluded, as is obvious, the state’s largest and most powerful community, the Patels.

The Patidars were seen as upper caste (Savarna) and they have traditionally opposed reservation because their rivals - the Kshatriyas - were classified as the Other Backward Classes (OBCs). It must be remembered that for decades before this, Patels had been Congress supporters. The success of Vallabhbhai Patel in the satyagrahas of Bardoli and Kheda was made possible by the Patel community. On the Congress’s instigation, Patidars refused to pay the British higher tax and so had to give up their lands.

Left out by the KHAM grouping, in the late 1980s, the Babri Masjid movement attracted the Patels towards Hindutva. The BJP in Gujarat is the party of Patels, just as the BJP in Karnataka is the party of Lingayats. The majority of the BJP ministers in every Gujarat cabinet (including Narendra Modi's), has been made up of Patels. So, think of the Patel agitation as that of Lingayats in Karnataka suddenly attacking their own BJP government.

This is the background to the incarceration of Hardik Patel. The young man has had cases of sedition filed against him for instigating violence against the police, which Patels believe is biased. This is because the majority of policemen in Gujarat come from the Kshatriya community. The specific charge against Hardik is linked to this. He is supposed to have said to Patels contemplating suicide in anguish that they ought to kill the policemen instead of themselves.

The case against this statement was filed in October and this is how it was reported in DH: “We (police) have filed a case of sedition against Hardik Patel for his October 3 comments here (Surat) telling his friends to kill policemen,” said Surat City DCP Makrand Chauhan, who is a complainant in the case.

And so, the BJP leaders of Gujarat are faced with the strange situation of having their supporters beaten up and jailed and relying on their traditional opponents to do this. The question is: Why is Chief Minister Anandiben Patel using the strongest possible law against the young leader of her own community?

Sedition is the incitement of violent rebellion. Hardik Patel has been hit by this law to make his bail difficult. Whether or not his actions merited the charge, it has been used cynically in this instance.

The fact is that the BJP believes it does not have an option. Hardik’s release will mean a full-scale revival of the agitation, which took the Gujarat BJP by total surprise. Having enjoyed power for 20 years, the Patel ministers confused their own success and prosperity with that of their community.

National attention

Releasing Hardik will mean national attention again on trouble in a state which the BJP has made the centrepiece of their development narrative. And it will mean an erosion of the BJP Patel voter and support base. The longer the agitation plays out on the streets of Surat, Ahmedabad, Rajkot and Baroda in India’s most urbanised state, the more it gives expression to Patel anger, and the more the Gujarat BJP believes, quite correctly, that it will suffer. And not only will the revival of the agitation undermine Modi’s fabled “Gujarat Model”, but it will also add fuel to the reservation flames around India.

In the north, their extreme violence has already produced victory for Haryana’s Jats. Closer to us, the Kapus in Andhra Pradesh have already risen up in protest. And so much is at stake in the successful handling of Hardik. The BJP’s Patel ministers have been trying to arrive at a compromise with the agitators. This has not gone far, according to reports. The Haryana BJP’s surrender to the Jats has cut the ground under the feet of the Gujarat BJP to a large extent. The party has been trying to break up the various Patel groups and has also tried to reach some agreement with a faction. This has not worked either. The fact is that Patels genuinely want either to be included in the OBC category or they want all reservations to go.

So far, what has worked for the BJP is its temporary strategy of isolating Hardik by keeping him in jail. It has cooled off the agitation or at least made it dormant. The question is how long the government can keep him locked up and what will happen once he is out. Hardik already has filed bail applications in the Gujarat High Court. Sooner or later, he will be out. At that point or before that, the BJP must come up with a plan to pacify the Patidars, or face renewed opposition from its supporters.

Patels are hardened agitators with decades of experience in mobilising support and they will not be put off by a lollipop promise. They will insist on real recompense and here the BJP will struggle. How can it be possible pass off the state’s most landed, politically powerful, business-minded community as being backward? It cannot.

 No survey will validate Patidars as being socially, educationally and economically backward. It is difficult to imagine a court in which such a proposition would pass scrutiny. Most worryingly for the BJP, the Hardik issue is linked to its long-term policies. Opponents will find it easy to say: If your own voters are saying that they are being excluded from progress, that they have no opportunity for employment and education, then what is this development that you are selling nationally and what is this “Gujarat Model”?

(Aakar Patel is a writer and a columnist)