The ’70s witnessed the Navnirman student’s movement, essentially an urban upsurge against those who were repeating ad nauseum the slogans of green and white revolutions. To recover from the setback caused by the Navnirman movement, the Congress formulated an election strategy around a combination of caste and community known as KHAM (Kshatriya-Harijan-Adivasi-Muslim combine). After the great success of this formula in the Assembly elections of 1980, the upper castes for the first time sensed a political and economic threat to their domination. To them it appeared that their political power was slipping away and being transferred to the ‘backward castes and communities’. The educated middle class, mainly the Brahmins, Banias and Patidars, reacted sharply by starting an agitation against the reservation system in 1981. Probably for the first time in independent India, a modern industrial metropolis experienced such extreme forms of caste violence. The clashes between the savarnas and the Dalits in the industrial periphery of Ahmedabad gradually evolved into a caste war that spread to the towns in 18 out of the then 19 districts. In many villages dominated by land owning Patidars in North and Central Gujarat, Dalit bastis were burnt. Caste tension resurfaced in 1985 in the second anti-reservation agitation. The issue this time was the increase in job quotas of the non-Dalit socially and educationally backward castes; yet the victims were all Dalits. As a result of these two agitations, the Brahmin-Bania-Patidar combine acquired a savarna unity.
Achyut Yagnik, ‘The pathology of Gujarat’ (2002)
