Images Courtesy: Hindustan Times
UPDATE:
UPDATE
By Friday, September 9, all newspapers had carried reports of the fiasco at the meet. "Iron mesh & arrests can't save Shah meet" read the headline of The Telegraph.
The report further said that the BJP president Amit Shah cut his speech to four minutes and hurried out as Hardik Patel's supporters disrupted a felicitation by Patidar businessmen in Surat today, undeterred by a 5,000-strong police deployment or the preventive arrests of their leaders. About 1,000 quota agitators fought off the police's tear gas with stones and stormed the ground where Shah, chief minister Vijay Rupani, two central ministers and 38-odd Patidar (Patel) BJP MLAs were to be feted under a canopy.
As they smashed and threw about chairs, successive speakers uttered a few cursory words from behind a protective metal mesh – placed around the dais to prevent shoe attacks – before they were evacuated.
The supporters of Hardik, leader of the Patidars' OBC quota agitation who is in six months' exile from Gujarat under his bail conditions, had thrown the government a dare by publicly threatening to disrupt the event.
A jittery BJP had deployed its entire state machinery -from sending 100-odd MLAs to Surat to erecting the iron mesh before the stage – to protect the function, held in the city's Patel-dominated diamond hub of Varachha.
Surat police had detained 10 key aides of Hardik who had been camping in Surat, holding meetings in Patel neighbourhoods and asking people to disrupt the event.
That the ruling party still failed to prevent the fiasco underscores the challenge it faces in winning back the Patels, whose desertion had routed the party in last year's local polls.
Trouble began as the organisers delivered the welcome speech after the event started around 7pm. State BJP chief Jitu Vaghani and Rupani spoke for less then three minutes each after Union minister Purushottam Rupala's appeals failed to pacify the agitators. By the time Shah, the last speaker, got up to address the audience, the gathering had thinned from 25,000 to about 2,000.Within 20 minutes, it was all over.
The Hindustan Times reports that (Hiral Dave, Hindustan Times, Ahmedabad) posters saying ‘General Dyer Go Back’ have come up in Surat’s Patidar-dominated areas like Varachha on Thursday, hours before BJP chief Amit Shah is to be felicitated by the community’s business lobby.
The report can be read here.
In other posters, Shah has been accused of abusing Patidar ‘mothers and sisters’ and the 44 Patidar MLAs in the state dubbed as good for nothing.
Hardik Patel, the founder of Patidar Anamat Andolan Samiti (PAAS) who is leading an agitation to demand reservation in education and government jobs for his community for over a year now, has been addressing Shah as General Dyer after Patidars were charged with batons at the end of a massive rally in Ahmedabad in August 2015.
Colonel Reginald Edward Harry Dyer was a British army official responsible for the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in which hundreds of unarmed men, women and children were killed in Amritsar in 1919. Several men were severely injured in the lathi charge, triggering state-wide riots, killing nine youths and causing damage worth Rs 44 crore to public property.
Patidar protesters are believed to have pasted these posters against Amit Shah
This embarrassment to Shah comes at a time when the Patidar Abhivadan Samaroh Samiti (PASS) let by Patidar businessmen, including diamond traders and textile mill owners, will felicitate Shah, Gujarat chief minister Vijay Rupani and 43 Bharatiya Janata Party MLAs later in the evening.
On September 8, the police registered four complaints against the PAAS members for violating the police commissioner’s notification by holding public meetings in residential societies in Surat to plan the boycott of the felicitation function.In the backdrop of the agitation, the BJP has been struggling to retain its key vote bank of the financially powerful Patidar community a year before the state is set to go for the assembly polls.
Images Courtesy:Hindustan Times