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India's grand old party, the Indian National Congress, has been courting Hardik Patel with ardour. Before it, the Bharatiya Janata Party tried to frighten him into submission, then took to placating him, and now seeks to split and weaken his organisation, the Patidar Anamat Andolan Samiti, which initiated the movement to wrest for the Patidar or Patel caste the status of Other Backward Classes (OBCs) and reservation in government jobs and educational institutes.
To think, Hardik is just 24 years old, still nine months short of the minimum age required to contest in the Assembly or Lok Sabha elections! It must feel heady for him to have powerful suitors at his age, grab media headlines, and boast 1.25 lakh Twitter followers. He’s arguably the most powerful of India’s youth icon.
Yet Hardik is also the new name of the problem dogging Indian polity. It has been festering for now nearly a decade, worsening every passing year and threatening to become incurable. Hardik's clout and popularity have risen because he symbolises the problem with all its throbbing intensity that could wrack India’s body politics as well.
The power of Hardik as a symbol arises from the challenge he represents to the Indian state’s reservation policy for the OBCs. He is a problem because he represents a solution to only his caste of Patels, who are 12 percent of Gujarat’s population and relatively more prosperous of social groups. The extension of affirmative action to Patels in the reservation pool will likely have them corner a large chunk of government jobs floating in the reservation pool. And that certainly become a problem for the OBCs.
The OBCs in Gujarat constitute 40 percent of the state’s population and enjoy 27 percent reservation. In addition, the scheduled castes have 7 percent of reservation and the scheduled tribes 15 percent. Thus, Gujarat has 49 percent of reservation, just 1 percent less than the maximum reservation the Supreme Court allows.
Hardik doesn’t want 1 percent reservation – it is too minuscule to satisfy the ambitious Patels. He simply wants them listed in the OBC list. Given the economic clout of Patels both in India and abroad, the OBCs fear that Hardik’s caste brethren will invariably corner the bulk of 27 percent reservation.![HARDIK_PATEL_AFP1.jpg]