Congress to focus on wooing OBCs back into its fold in Gujarat

Rahul Gandhi in his speech at the extended Congress Working Committee (CWC) meeting in Ahmedabad, Gujarat said that the future strategy for the Congress to take on the BJP and the Modi government lies in an all-out party outreach to rally the Other Backward Castes (OBCs) who account for more than 50 per cent of the population.

In Gujarat, where the Congress has been out of power for over 30 years, OBCs account for about 38 per cent of the electoral population and dominate 146 out of the total 182 assembly seats.

Until 2012, the OBC communities, particularly the Thakors, Koli Patels, and Darbars (Kshatriyas) who together form 20 per cent of the OBC population were a loyal vote bank of the Congress.

OBCs shifted to BJP in 2012

However, the party lost the support of the community in the 2012 assembly polls when the OBCs largely voted for the BJP for the first time in Gujarat.

As per research done by French scholar Christophe Jaffrelot, “Between 2008 and 2012, there has been an OBC-isation of BJP that emerged as a new political trend in the 2012 state polls.”

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“BJP traditionally has had a stronghold amongst the upper castes (Jain and Brahmins) and Patels, but things changed in the 2012 assembly elections. The main achievement of the BJP in the 2012 assembly polls was to make inroads in the Congress’s traditional OBC vote-bank. Kshatriya and Koli Patels votes were divided between the Congress and the BJP with both sub-communities mostly favouring the BJP. Congress lost 13 per cent of its Koli votes and BJP gained 11 per cent as the sub-community massively abandoned the Congress in the 2012 assembly polls,” writes Jaffrelot.

In 2012, the Congress fielded 62 OBC candidates out of which only 13 candidates won. While the BJP, that is dominated by leaders from the Patidar community, fielded 58 OBC candidates out which 46 won, giving the saffron party its highest number of OBC MLAs since it came to power.

Major reason for shift

“One major reason for OBCs, especially the Koli and Darbars’ votes tilting towards the BJP, is that there is a shift amongst the communities towards urban areas. Post the acute agrarian crisis of 2016-2017, these two agrarian communities began to shift towards private sector and government jobs in urban areas. These urban OBCs, mostly former agrarian labourers or small land-owners, migrated to the city and became incorporated into the urban middle class. Now they work in factories, sweatshops, or are self-employed like auto drivers or sell tea or snacks in the city,” Ahmedabad-based political analyst Ghanshyaam Shah tells The Federal.

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“There was an influx in Darbar youths joining the police force as well. As they became a part of the urban middle class, they began to tilt towards the BJP that always had the urban votes in its favour. The Congress, which completely ignored the rise of this neo-OBC urban middle class, lost the support base of the communities,” continued Shah.

Lack of leadership in Congress

“Another reason is the lack of leadership within the Congress in Gujarat. I don’t think Shaktisinh Gohil, who is currently the senior-most OBC leader and party chief, has a mass appeal beyond his constituency. There was a time when the party had stalwart OBC leaders like Madhavsinh Solanki who had an appeal in the OBC communities and across the caste lines. The Congress has not seen any strong OBC leader since Solanki. In fact, the party has lost OBC leaders to the BJP in the last three years. Losing OBC support is the reason for Congress’s decimation in Gujarat,” adds Shah.

Noticeably, with the loss of the OBC vote bank, the Congress began to lose its hold over the bastions dominated by the community like the rural cooperatives, APMCs, and the Saurashtra region.

Saurashtra region

The Saurashtra region comprising of Kutch, Morbi, Surendranagar, Rajkot, Bhavnagar, Jamnagar, Junagadh, Dwarka, Gir Somnath, Amreli, and Porbandar districts, account for 54 of the total 182 assembly seats and seven of the total 26 parliamentary seats in the state.

In the 2012 state polls, the BJP won 38 seats in the region while the Congress managed to bag 14. However, in 2017, the BJP lost the OBC seats it had gained in 2012 primarily owing to the acute agrarian crisis and drought in the region.

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The BJP did not get the support of the OBCs and lost its loyal Patel vote bank, and were reduced to 99 seats in the assembly, its lowest so far. However, the party quickly went back to woo both the Patidar and the OBC communities.

BJP wins back OBCs in Saurashtra

Between 2017 and 2020, the BJP brought in a slew of developmental works and rebates for the OBC-dominated Saurashtra that was grappling with drought.

The BJP government waived electricity bills of over ₹600 crore to woo back the OBC farmers. 100 Narmada sub-canals in Saurashtra that were defunct for years were made operational with drought-prone regions getting irrigation water.

As a result, in 2022 and in 2023, the BJP won a majority of the seats in the APMC polls that have traditionally been a forte of Koli Patels and Rabaris. The Congress was ousted from its bastion that it had dominated for over two decades.

Defections to BJP

Soon after, the defections from the Congress began in 2019 with just months to go for the Lok Sabha polls. The first to leave the Congress was the party’s four-time MLA Jawahar Chawda, an Ahir leader who like his father the late Congress leader Pethalji Chawda was known to have sway over rural OBC voters. Chawda eventually joined the BJP cabinet following a reshuffle in the government.

After Chawda, another OBC leader and five-term MLA Kunvarji Bawalia left the Congress to join the BJP. Within the next few days, nearly 800 Congress members from the Saurashtra region quit the party to join the BJP.

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After that, the BJP won all the taluka panchayat seats of the Saurashtra region in 2020. Congress’s sitting OBC candidates defected to the saffron party and won as BJP candidates.

By 2024, the party lost more OBC leaders to the BJP with the most prominent ones being Arjun Modhwadia and his protégé Ambrish Der.

“As the Congress became weaker, the BJP grew from strength to strength with each election in the region - local polls in 2020, civic polls in 2021, and then state polls in 2022. The OBC vote bank that used to be a Congress stronghold kept going to the BJP with each OBC leader defecting to the saffron party,” says Manishi Jaani, Ahmedabad-based political analyst.

Loss of rural cooperatives

In December 2022, just after the historical win of bagging 156 seats in the Gujarat Assembly polls, the BJP won the election of the Amul cooperative.

For the first time in the history of milk cooperative elections, the BJP swept the poll to be at the helm of the Kaira District Cooperative Milk Producers’ Union Limited, popularly called Amul Dairy (Anand Milk Union Limited).

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By winning Amul that comprises of 18 milk cooperatives, the BJP dislodged the Congress from yet another bastion.

“The milk business gave the BJP its inroad into the rural politics in Central and North Gujarat. This was made possible due to the support of the Thakors, who have dominated the milk cooperatives,” says Balubhai Thakor, a former Congress milk cooperative leader of Banaskantha.

BJP’s tactics

“The BJP had first attempted to win the Amul dairy cooperative polls in the year 2015 but did not succeed. Following its loss, the BJP government passed an amendment to the Gujarat Cooperative Societies Act and reduced the term of elected office bearers from 5 years to 2.5 years. The government then prepared a list of 100 big and small cooperative societies where government custodians were appointed, dissolving the elected body as they had exceeded the 2.5 years limit. But even with this move, only a few of these rural milk cooperatives had BJP supporters,” continued Balubhai Thakor.

“To add further pressure on the Congress cooperative leaders, the government did not hold elections for the cooperatives between 2017 and 2019, and once again replaced elected members with appointed custodians. In 2020, Congress candidates of the two most powerful cooperative societies - Mehsana Dudh Utpadak Sahkari Mandali (MDUSM) and Mehsana District Cooperative Banks - joined the BJP. Following which, Congress’s Natu Thakor, one of the influential milk cooperative leaders who had been winning in MDUSM, joined the BJP. By 2021, the BJP had bagged all the cooperatives except Amul in Anand,” adds Thakor.

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In February 2022, the BJP won the elections to the Kheda District Cooperative Bank winning nine of the 17 contested seats. The BJP won the cooperative for the first time, wresting another OBC stronghold of the Congress into its account.

By losing Kheda and Amul in 2022, the Congress lost its last seats in rural cooperatives.

“The cooperatives, traditionally dominated by various OBC communities, were the backbone of the Congress party in Gujarat and one of the reasons of its stronghold in rural districts. By 2022, the BJP had established itself within the OBC vote bank across the state. In the 2022 state assembly polls, 70 per cent of the new seats that the BJP won were OBC-dominated constituencies,” says Sagar Rabari, a farmers’ rights and AAP leader from Gujarat.