The politics of reservation in Gujarat and Anandiben Patel's options

The demand for OBC reservation raised by Gujarat’s politically and economically dominant Patidar (Patel) community threatens to reduce the idea of affirmative action to a mere farce. Reservations were envisaged as a social justice mechanism to mitigate millennia-old caste-based discrimination and oppression. But with hitherto weaker sections succeeding in getting a foothold in political, bureaucratic and educational spheres, it has triggered new anxieties and fresh competition between social groups. When Madhavsinh Solanki introduced 27 per cent reservation for OBCs in Gujarat in 1985, it was the Patels who unleashed a fierce anti-reservation protest and shifted their loyalties to the BJP leading to the Hindutva party’s ascent in the state. The wheel has come full circle now with the Patidars demanding the fruits of the very same reservation they opposed. Since July, the community has leveraged its social clout and kinship networks to build a powerful movement that has unnerved the Gujarat government. The protesters have been spurred by a misplaced sense of injustice despite the top faces of the Gujarat BJP — Chief Minister Anandiben Patel, finance minister Nitin Patel, and state BJP president RC Faldu — hailing from the same community.

While it is unlikely that the Patidars will dump the BJP, the civic body polls later this year could have a bearing on Anandiben’s options. The repeated instances of influential caste groups arm-twisting state governments through street protests or state governments playing the game of votebank politics to mollify influential communities has severely dented the credibility of reservation policies. If the Gujjar and the Patidar agitations put the respective governments in Rajasthan and Gujarat in a bind, the central reservation for Jats and the Maharashtra government’s reservation for Marathas are blatant examples of executive manipulation of the reservation policy. Where specific castes like the Yadavs cornered a major share of the OBC pie, state governments have created new groupings like extremely backward, most backward, and special backward classes to appease less dominant groups. This has led to a situation where states like Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra and Rajasthan are in violation of the 1992 Supreme Court judgment in the Indira Sawhney case which capped the maximum possible reservation at 50 per cent.

One of the options before Anandiben is to accommodate Patidars as a separate group, outside the OBC pool, as has been done by Rajasthan for Gujjars (5 per cent) and Maharashtra for Marathas (16 per cent). This would ensure that the existing OBC groups do not revolt against the reservation for the dominant Patidars but it will violate the Sawhney judgment’s 50 per cent cap on reservations. However, adopting this path of political expediency represents a moral defeat for the State and its authority. Ideally, the government should refer the matter to the Gujarat Other Backward Class Commission to study the socio-economic conditions of Patidars in comparison with other OBC groups. But unless this Commission is insulated from political pressures, its credibility will be questioned. Recently, the Supreme Court and the Bombay high court quashed the flawed notification of central reservation for Jats and 16 per cent reservation for Marathas. On Jat reservation, the court faulted the Centre for acting without the consent of the National Commission for Backward Classes (NCBC), the statutory body ascertaining the claims and counter-claims for OBC category inclusion. A 1984 survey showed that 70 per cent of Patidars owned at least six acres of land per household. The community also dominates the state’s diamond and textile industry and milk cooperatives. Its grouse of under-achievement in higher education and government jobs may be true but that could also be attributed to social preferences for entrepreneurship and farming. The Patidars can have no legitimate claims to represent themselves as a disadvantaged group.