I was requested by a major media outlet to do a piece on the political ferment in Gujarat caused by the 22-year-old Hardik Patel and the agitation of the Patel community he has whipped up. I chose not to do it for several reasons, one of which is that I do not know what to make of it. Of course, having been a hack seasoned and marinated for over three decades by journalistic juices I could have written a cogent enough piece that would have been read by a few people.
I need to clarify what I mean when I say I do not know what to make of it. I fully understand the forces that create a sudden outburst of socio-political disquiet that one is witnessing in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s home state of Gujarat unleashed by a youthful braggart. The reason I hesitate is because I am not on the ground experiencing the phenomenon of a communal uprising led by a young man of uncertain ideas.
I recently spent three months in Gujarat. often in the very areas from where Hardik Patel hails. Among people of the Saurashtra region I did encounter a considerable feeling of having been let down by the powers that be. The anger did not seem to be yet directed at Modi specifically but there was an allusion to him. It was still a stage where those disillusioned were wondering whether it was a result of their own personal failure or something broader and larger.
My first reaction on reading and watching the news reports about the massive rally that Patel organized in my hometown of Ahmedabad was that after a long time the state was witnessing the rise of a voice other than Narendra Modi’s. Over the past 15 years or so Gujarat has pretty much lapped up Modi as he thundered, lambasted, lampooned, mocked, satirized and insulted to the exclusion of any other voice. In a sense—and this is whether or not Hardik Patel remains a long-term political force—we are looking at significant erosion of Modi as an unassailable political presence in Gujarat. This is quite apart from the fact that Modi had outgrown Gujarat by the time he set out for Delhi.
In the emergence of Hardik Patel the much feared Narendra Modi-Amit Shah combine (the latter being Modi’s confidant and powerful president of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party) is discovering the limits of their raw street clout. It is still entirely possible for the two men to remote-manage the affairs of the state but the ground has clearly shifted since the two shifted to the capital. Gujarat has a history of agitators such as Hardik Patel suddenly rising and then getting co-opted into the unique complacency that comes with being part of the very establishment they were agitating against. The kind of instant revolution that Patel appears to be embarked on, in no small measure fueled by an impulse for violence, is by its very nature short-lived.
One can see that the young man is out of his depth just as soon as he begins to speak. Bombast is useful only up to a point. It may work at rallies but after a while revolution of any kind, even a fake one, demands detail and thinking. At this point his entire strategy seems to be to let the prime minister know that he should either humor them for his own political good or earn their wrath because the Patel community was the one that built him up when he was in Gujarat. It is like small investors in a megacorporation now demanding a high dividend. That calculation is flawed simply because Modi is no longer just ruling a captive state that was Gujarat but a deeply diverse and politically fragmented country. In his mind he knows that only about 31 percent of the Indian electorate voted for him and his party in 2014.
More than anything else what the Patel agitation does is seriously threaten to undermine the success of the much touted “Gujarat model” of economic growth, which has been about industry-intensive policies. If nearly 18 million Patels out of Gujarat’s 63 million population can be made to think they have got a raw deal under this model, it could be seriously problematic both for the model and those who propagate it. It would be extravagant for Hardik Patel to claim that he speaks for the entire Patel community of Gujarat but he can certainly create that perception with some generous help from the broadcast media. We live in the time of optics and the optics as presented by the current agitation do not look good at all for anyone, the least of all the prime minister.
Much consternation has been expressed about the “mysterious” rise of a 22-year-old underachiever who now appears to set the political discourse. I couldn’t possibly tell you what explains that but that is not as important as the fact that he now exists on the periphery of realpolitik and could disrupt a few calculations.
At the same time, there is every possibility that the agitation would loose its edge like many such agitations before it and merge indistinguishably into the larger national disquiet. For now it is enjoying a news cycle, something that all agitators do for a while. Show me a revolutionary and I will show you a jaded, disillusioned old person some years later. Revolution wears off like everything else.