Gujarat Elections: BJP Trying to Reduce Patidars Loss by Scaring OBC communities

After failing to regain its lost traditional vote bank of Patidars, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is working on another caste-based strategy to woo voters belonging to Other Backword Class (OBC) who constitute at least 40% of population in poll-bound Gujarat.

Patidars are angry with the saffron party for not accepting their demand of reservation in education and government jobs and using “excessive” force to disperse around 50,000 protesters of the community who had assembled at GMCD ground in Ahmedabad on August 25, 2015, under the banner of Hardik Patel led Patidar Anamat Andolan Samiti (PAAS).

The police lobbed teargas shells and fired 10 rounds on the agitators during this demonstration, dubbed Kranti Rally (Revolution Rally). Thirteen youth died in the police action causing deep anger among the community members all over the state.

After the Congress accepted their demand for quota and Hardik extended his support to the grand old party in exchange for that, the BJP is leaving no stone unturned to take into confidence the OBC community that includes 146 castes. It is trying to convince the OBCs that the reservation promised to Patidars by the Congress will eat into their reservation share. The party workers, if sources are to be believed, are telling OBC electorate that the Patidar agitation is “nothing but a game plan to scrap the reservation system”.

The OBC community had launched a movement shortly after the Patidar agitation to counter the former’s demands for quota but later their leader Alpesh Thakor pledged to support the Rahul Gandhi-led party and finally joined it.

The backward classes have so far voted equally in favour of both the BJP and the Congress. But in this election, the BJP is creating fear among them that their quota will be reduced to accommodate Patidars. This is the only way BJP can compensate for the loss of Patidars support.

“If we get more OBC votes than earlier, it would be much more than the loss that Patidars could inflict,” a source in the state BJP told Newsclick on strict condition of anonymity.

Of 146 OBC castes, the BJP is not counting 17 castes because they are from the Muslim community and vote for the Congress. The party is working “tirelessly on those OBC castes who have significant presence in terms of numbers”. These castes include Kolis, a traditional fishing community, whose concentration is high in Saurashtra and South Gujarat. This community accounts for 15 percent of the total population of the state.

In 2012 assembly polls, the BJP won 33 out of 48 seats in this region, the Congress got 13, while the Gujarat Parivartan Party led by former Chief Minister Keshubhai Patel managed to bag two seats.

If this formula works, then only the BJP can touch its target of 150 seats, as claimed by the party president Amit Shah. But this is easier said than done because Alpesh Thakore is popular among them and he is leaving no stone unturned to consolidate OBC votes in his party’s favour.

He founded the Gujarat Kshatriya-Thakor Sena with an aim of getting rid of liquor addiction problems of the community. He also founded the OBC, SC, ST Ekta Manch (OBC, SC, ST Equality Forum), a social platform to demand due reservation for people of the respective communities, around which a movement took place in Gujarat shortly after the patidar reservation movement.