Patel power: How one community can swing fine political balance in Gujarat

Decoding the Patel factor: The community, which accounts for nearly 14% of state's population, was once instrumental in the BJP's rise in Gujarat in the early 90s, after the Congress alienated them

A day after Hardik Patel, the Congress’ working president in Gujarat, quit the party just six months before the Assembly elections, without indicating his plans — whether he intended to join the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) or the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) — the Congress brass in Ahmedabad, including central minder Raghu Sharma, state president Jagdish Thakor, and Opposition leader Sukhram Rathva, called on Naresh Patel at his farmhouse for an ‘important’ meeting. It was as though the Congress sought to recompense the loss of one Patel with another, except that Naresh is a political neophyte, although his father, Ravji Patel, was a Congressman.

Naresh has been wooed by the Congress, the BJP, and the AAP but like Hardik, he is still silent about his prospective political moves, if any. A Rajkot-based industrialist, the 66-year-old heads the Khodaldham temple trust at Kagvad, near his home town Rajkot in Saurashtra. The temple houses the patron deity of the Leuva Patels (Leuva Patidars), one of the two sects of the Patel community; the other being the Kadvas. The Leuvas are regarded as better off than the Kadvas. They are largely based in resource-rich central Gujarat and prospered because they were open to modern business practices.

Hardik, who is 38 years younger than Naresh, attained his political chops as the head of the Patidar Anamat Andolan Samiti that agitated for a reservation quota for the Patels. He joined the Congress. In the 2017 elections, the Congress projected him as the face of Patel anger against the BJP and managed to slice the community’s votes, which were largely with the BJP since the 80s.

Hardik’s uneven career trajectory in the Congress was principally of his making because he gave the impression he was not completely integrated with its working, despite which he is still rated as a ‘political factor’, and Naresh’s recent prominence underscores the salience of the Patidar or Patel votes in the Gujarat polls.

Estimated to constitute 12-14 per cent of the population, the Congress had Patel support to varying degrees until the late 70s. However, in 1976, when Madhavsinh Solanki became its chief minister (CM), he alienated the Patels from the party almost irrevocably after forging a social coalition of the Kshatriya, Harijan, Adivasi, and Muslim called KHAM. It seemed like an unbeatable formula of the subalterns that made the Congress almost invincible until Hindutva and a Patel backlash shaped the BJP into a formidable force.

Like Uttar Pradesh’s Jats, the Patels had benefited largely from the “abolition of zamindari and tenancy reforms”, according to Oxford University professor Nikita Sud. In a paper titled From Land to the Tiller to Land Liberalisation: The Political Economy of Gujarat’s Shifting Land Policy, Sud wrote the Patels gained further 

economic strength by the early 70s “due to the thriving white/dairy cooperative revolution and the successful launch of the green revolution”.  

The Congress couldn’t breach the BJP’s support among the Patels until the Hardik-led reservation agitation opened a window of opportunity, especially after the state government, with Anandiben Patel as the CM, cracked down on the agitationists and refused to consider their demand.

“The Congress fired on us from Hardik’s shoulder and it worked,” admitted a Gujarat BJP office-bearer, adding, “But the Patels returned to us because Congress didn’t give Hardik the space he wanted. By the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, they moved back to the BJP almost totally and later their backing helped us win the local body elections.”

In the last Assembly elections, the Congress took away a big portion of the Patel votes in Saurashtra and North Gujarat. Author and former Jawaharlal Nehru University professor, Ghanshyam Shah, ascribed the ‘breakthrough’ to intra-community regional and sectarian variations. “South Gujarat Patels were firmly aligned with the BJP despite the reservation agitation,” said Shah.

Electoral history also shows that the Leuvas back the Congress more, while the Kadvas are dedicated BJP voters.  

Although Mahendra Patel, a former bureaucrat who’s in the Gujarat BJP as vice-president, claimed “Narendra Modi’s success in delivering on his promises, whether it’s the reading down of Article 370, Ram temple or enhancing India’s stature globally, will see us through the elections”, and Dilip Sanghani, a former Member of the Legislative Assembly, stressed, “Modi finally did justice to Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel’s memory by raising the world’s largest statue of his (the Statue of Unity)”, the Prime Minister and the BJP have taken no chances with securing the Patel vote.

“Some people think Modi is only appeasing the Patels,” remarked the editor of a Gujarati paper. Although the state government’s unveiling of a Rs 1,000-crore economic package for the economically backward castes (EBCs) to try and quell the 2015 agitation did nothing to mollify the Patels in 2017, the BJP is re-plugging the decision with greater intensity this time. It announced a 10 per cent reservation in education and jobs for EBCs’ children from families with an annual income of Rs 6 lakh and less.

The choice of Bhupendra Patel as CM — the third in this tenure of the BJP — was considered the ‘most significant’ step in a slew of please-the-Patels decisions. The CM is a Kadva and his Cabinet, a Patel-heavy one, has six other Patels representing every region.

Modi never passed up a chance to reach out to the community. In April this year, he described the Patidars as “panidar” (gallant) while speaking at a function in the Umiya Mata Dham temple, venerated by the Kadvas, in Saurashtra. The same month, he virtually inaugurated the Global Patidar Business Summit at Surat and called upon the community elders to check youths from protesting on the streets.