EWS verdict is advantage BJP in Gujarat
THE Supreme Court’s decision to uphold 10 per cent reservation for Economically Weaker Sections (EWS) in government jobs and educational institutions could not have happened at a more fortuitous time for the BJP. Gujarat votes in early December and the EWS reservation was a longstanding demand of the Patidar community, which uses the Patel surname. This was indeed the demand that in 2015 lit the spark for the Patidar Anamat Andolan spearheaded by Hardik Patel.
Apparently inspired by Rajasthan’s Gujjar agitation, which was propelled by a clamour among Gujjars to be re-designated as a Scheduled Tribe from an OBC and claim a larger share of the reservation pie, the Patidars saw no future in agriculture, their traditional calling, and sought greater representation in educational institutions and government jobs. Because farming had ceased to be lucrative, they complained they did not have enough capital to launch their businesses and compete with the established entrepreneurial communities.
The Patidars comprise nearly 20 per cent of Gujarat’s 64 million people and are regarded as socially and politically influential. The community began supporting the BJP after the Congress forged the ‘KHAM’ (Kshatriya, Harijan, Adivasi and Muslim) formula, conceptualised and implemented by former Chief Minister Madhavsinh Solanki and endorsed by Indira Gandhi, in the late 1980s. The Patidars perceived ‘KHAM’ — which won the Congress a record 149 of the 182 Assembly seats — as an alienating move and gravitated towards the BJP in the 1990s. The Patidars formed the bedrock of the BJP’s electoral success from 1995 to 2017, when the reservation protests caused a breach. Five years back, the BJP lost seats in the Patidar belts of Saurashtra and north Gujarat and was routed in such surefire seats as Morbi and Unjha by the Congress.
What happened thereafter? The BJP was rattled by the toll that the Patidars extracted. It was down to 99 seats, just a little above the halfway mark of 92. Its political reflexes kicked in. It worked on the community’s influencers and even weaned away some of the Congress’ Patidar legislators. Notable among the defectors were Unjha’s Asha Patel and Morbi’s Brijesh Merja. Both retained their seats in a bypoll as BJP candidates. Their desertion and re-election testified as much to the BJP’s deft footwork as the Congress’s inability to take advantage of the gains accrued in 2017. That election nearly broke a 22-year jinx and opened a window for the party to recover before the next battle. Forget being unable to keep its newly elected MLAs, the Congress lost 22 of them to the BJP, which shored up its position in the legislature.
The SC’s ruling has brought cheer to Gujarat. Hardik Patel, now in the BJP after a brief stint in the Congress, has welcomed it as have Ashok Gehlot, who’s stationed in the state as a Congress observer, and Gopal Italia, Aam Aadmi Party’s chief in Gujarat.
It says something for the BJP’s ability to weld together disparate social groupings with seemingly irreconcilable interests through three factors: an all-encompassing Hindu identity, pride in being a Gujarati, encapsulated in the ‘Gujarat asmita’ slogan, and assimilation with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s persona and messages after he ruled as CM for 13 years. In every election since 2014, the Congress has been perceptibly overcome with a sense of the impending doom, manifest in an oft-heard refrain. What’s the use? In the end, every Hindu, with exceptions, votes for the “lotus” because they must be faithful to the BJP’s Hindutva.
To be noted is that notwithstanding Modi’s origin from the most backward caste, the Teli or oil-pressers — a fact that the BJP exploited in the Hindi heartland to its advantage — and his roots in poverty, he has overcome both these seeming disadvantages in a mercantile society like Gujarat’s, marked by economic mobility and financial success, and has been embraced by all communities, barring minorities.
The acceptance was facilitated by Modi’s self-calibration of his political personality as a “serious” administrator, which came into play when he replaced his predecessor, Keshubhai Patel, in 2001, after a devastating earthquake and a sense in the BJP that the Patel government was mired in inefficiency and corruption, an overt emphasis on governance, infrastructure creation and investment generation rather than caste and a conscious reach-out to the business community heads. These factors bolstered Modi’s image as a “modern” ruler, a portrayal that contrasted with his “rustic, caste-driven” peers in the northern states.
The focus on urban Gujarat had a flip side which the BJP tided over as long as the Hindutva element was dominant and the Congress trashed as a “party of the minorities”. The agenda slipped when agrarian distress afflicted the countryside in 2017. While Modi once overcame farmers’ protests over his government’s “forcible” recovery of pending electricity dues, five years ago, he was faced with the unwanted aftermath of demonetisation and the Goods and Services Tax regime on small traders and farmers. It was not just the Patidar ferment that upset the BJP’s rural voters: Their earnings were down and there were no jobs.
In 2022, although the BJP has claimed to have cleaned up the rural act, it’s not clear whether farmers are comfortably placed. For instance, the lumpy skin disease that infected cattle claimed an estimated 5,800 bovine animals and drained the pastoral communities of their earnings. The non-viability of farming, exacerbated by the high cost of fertilisers and diesel, remains an issue.
The BJP was unsure if it had regained the Patidar support. Therefore, it embarked on a campaign to woo OBC groups through “sneh milans”, launched by Chief Minister Bhupendra Patel in August.
Modi remains the BJP’s biggest mascot. No wonder, he kicked off the BJP’s electioneering on November 5 at Valsad with the claim, “We made this Gujarat”, as though one of India’s most business-savvy states existed as an area of darkness before 2001.
