Protests by the privileged? Gujarat has a long history

Gujarat has a vivid recent history of large, anarchic agitations. Observers are often surprised to hear this, pointing to the state's association with Gandhi and its reputation as a highly developed region with a strong entrepreneurial drive as reasons why this should not be so. Those familiar with the state's peculiarities, however, suggest that Gujarat's relationship with violence in fact stems from these particular characteristics rather than existing despite them.
It has been proposed, for instance, that Gandhi's legacy of agitation has contributed to present-day violence in the state. Historian Howard Spodek describes the "two parallel springs of mobilization and institutionalization" which he believes Gandhi successfully controlled, and speculates that the future could go either way: that new organizations could succeed Gandhi to restore a balance or that the local and the national arena could decline becoming accustomed to deepening levels of violence.
Those who expect a pragmatic, business minded society to be above turbulence are similarly mistaken because economics, far from quelling, has invariably been a key motivating feature for mass violence in the state. A survey of prominent agitations over the last 75 years suggests a common thread. The vigorous participation of Gujaratis in the Quit India movement of 1942, for instance, while it owed much to the intense nationalistic fervor prevailing at the time, was also partly enabled by fears that the British, following a scorched earth policy would destroy local mills to prevent them from falling into the hands of their World War II rivals, the Japanese.
The movement for a separate state in the 1950s was waged on the rhetoric of language and regional pride but was also underpinned by a feeling of neglect by successive Congress ministries. According to Achyut Yagnik and Suchitra Sheth's The Shaping of Modern Gujarat, the absence of any major project on the area's rivers in the First Five Year Plan coupled with the perception that resources were being diverted to Marathispeaking areas culminated in the Mahagujarat movement.
In 1974 rising mess bills in an engineering college in Ahmedabad sparked outrage among students, snowballing into a statewide stir known as the Navnirman movement, an agitation in which even housewives joined in by beating thalis at a prearranged hour. Anxiety over shrinking job opportunities due to the expansion of caste-based reservations led to ugly riots in 1981 and in 1985.
These iconic mass agitations have not involved the poor and the working class but have been led by members of the upper and middle castes and classes, with students playing a pivotal role. In the 1985 anti-reservation riots even children, encouraged by their parents, boycotted school.
Middle class leadership brought a managerial flair to mass agitations often marked by a high level of organization, a clever use of communication technology and marketing gimmicks. This is not the place to explore the links between an emerging middle class solidarity and the growing popularity of the Hindutva movement but it can be said that mass agitations tended to articulate the grievances of and sought to expand economic opportunities for those in the middle and upper reaches of society, sometimes resisting the advancement of those below. For instance, the 1981 and 1985 anti-reservation riots (a precursor one could say to the current fracas) saw attacks by assertive Patels selectively on upwardly mobile sections of the lower castes.
Mass agitations have also enabled dominant groups to bypass inconvenient politics. The unseating of chief minister Chimanbhai Patel in 1974 provided an early taste of power. Madhavsinh Solanki, a backward caste chief minister who won a resounding majority a decade later with a formula that united underprivileged sections of society including Harijans, Adivasis and Muslims, was forced out of office within months by massive protracted violence.
The latter's history of truculence is surprising more so in light of political scientist Nikita Sud's claim that Gujarat's development trajectory, which ensured the rise of agrarian capitalists and rapid urbanization after 1960, has been skewed in favour of dominant castes and classes as has the contemporary economic liberalization process.
In many ways then, the current agitation by the influential Patel community is in keeping with the state's past experience of violent protest by the privileged. But while the agitation may have its origins in the local, and Gujarat-based observers have provided various cogent explanations for the sudden discontent, there is something about the scale and deliberate theatricality of the event that points to a less definable intent. A charismatic leader, surging crowds, speeches in Hindu rather than Gujarati, the dramatic destruction of public property, seem to be elements of a spectacle aimed at creating a mood as much as or rather than stating a demand. The atmospherics need to be watched.
(Shah is the author of Ahmedabad: A City in the World)