Quota not the solution

To understand the Patidar, or Patel, stir in Gujarat, let us look at the background. Reservations for communities other than Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes actually came to Gujarat before the Mandal Commission report was implemented under Prime Minister V.P. Singh.

In the 1970s, a further 10 per cent reservation for Other Backward Classes was introduced in Gujarat, for communities identified by the Bakshi Commission as socially and educationally backward. This excluded Patidars, who were and are, of course, socially dominant.

A second round of reser-vations came in the 1980s. I was 15 in 1985 when I participated in this round of agitations by the Patidars. This was in Surat and the tally of those killed — the victims being mostly the poor and those of lower castes on whom the Patels unleashed their fury — was over 100. I had actually forgotten the details of the agitation (assuming I had known them all in 1985 — one just goes along with what the others say at that age). I spoke to the writer and civil servant Chandubhai Maheriya and he reminded me that this was after reservations for OBCs were increased to 28 per cent. The implementation of the Mandal Commission report kept adding castes to the list.

In 1999, Atal Behari Vajpayee’s government added the Ghanchi community to the list and at that point Prime Minister Narendra Modi became an OBC. Another of the early beneficiaries of reservation was a group that may be called neo-kshatriyas or kshatriyas. According to the varna system kshatriyas are, of course, “higher” in caste than Patels, but in mercantile Gujarat honour is not at a premium and the warrior was not seen with any great respect. Their social and educational status qualified the kshatriyas as being OBC.

This upset the Patels as kshatriyas are the great rivals of the Patidars politically and any understanding of Gujarat’s politics should begin here. The Bharatiya Janata Party is mostly the party of Patels. The Congress, and it still has a substantial vote share in the state (north of 30 per cent), is mostly a party of the kshatriyas.

This formulation was solidified when chief mi-nister Madhavsinh Solanki cobbled together his Kham coalition, which was a front built with kshatriya, harijan (Gujaratis still use this word instead of dalit), adivasi and Muslim support. This coalition was ranged against Patels, who went, greatly attracted by Hindutva, into the open arms of the BJP.

The rift between the kshatriyas and Patidars extended into the BJP. When the party took power in the 1990s, there was a split almost immediately. The Patidar group (led by Keshubhai Patel) won out over kshatriya Shankarsinh Vaghela, who though a Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh man left and joined the Congress. He remains its leader in the state. Caste was bigger than ideology in the BJP till Mr Modi came and turned the attentions of the party towards a different target: Muslims. This unified the BJP, or at least papered over the caste cracks.

In my opinion a lot of the Patidar fury in the 1980s about putting the lower castes in their place. Some of it was a “positive” emotion in favour of reservations, but as much of it was a negative one that sought to deny it to others. This has, of course, not changed and others have commented on how the current agitation seems to be both for and against reservations.

There is another aspect which needs attention. The Gujarat model of gross domestic product growth was focused on manufacturing. Gujarat is the only major state whose manufactu-ring:services ratio is skewed in favour of manufacturing. This is not a new development and has always been the case. Factories find it easier to operate in Gujarat rather than call centres and the main reason for this is lack of English.

This is remarkable for a community that has deep and old ties with the Anglicised world including the United States and the United Kingdom. However, it is apparent to those listening to the Patidar agitators immediately, that these are not the sort of urban, educated people we would encounter in our other cities. I have long been urging the Gujarat government to change its policy of denying English to government school students till Class 5, by when it is too late. In my opinion when he was chief minister, Mr Modi, who is modernist, tried to change this but was made to back off by the RSS.

I once interviewed him on the subject and though he said he was clear about this (he made much of the fact that certain subjects would be taught in English and others in Gujarati from Class 5 onwards) it seemed to me that he would have been happier if the no-English rule could be changed.

One fallout of this policy is that the great software and services sector boom across our cities has been missing in Gujarat. Though it has three major cities (Ahmedabad and Surat are fourth and eighth in the list of India’s top 10 cities by population), there is no significant presence of Infosys, Wipro, Accen-ture, Tata Consultancy Services or any other such firms which offer so much opportunity to residents of Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru and elsewhere, whose basic skill is knowledge of English.

This aspect of the Gujarat model of development has more or less gone unnoticed all these years. But it will be increasingly remarked upon because it
was a result of government policy. In my opinion, reserva-tions will not solve this problem (assuming we take the Patidars at their word and believe them when they say they are protesting for reservations and not against other communities having them). The problem of lack of social mobility and lack of white-collar opportunity is not going to disappear in Gujarat and is not the problem of just the Patidar community. It affects all Gujaratis. It is the creation of a particular kind of economy that is dominated by factories and trading, which has positives and negatives.

This is a historical phenomenon and not the doing of Mr Modi alone, of course. The agitation would have happened and been just as fierce even if he had not moved to Delhi.

— Aakar Patel is a writer and columnist