but this did not coincide with a change in their economic status (Wood 1987). The
future antagonists in communal violence during the 1990s, namely, Muslims and
Dalits, had been temporarily drawn into a political alliance with middle castes through
the KHAM alliance, but it was in the context of weak caste reform, and almost no real
redistribution of land rights, or other forms of redistributive policies. Workers’ unions
and struggles had an exceedingly weak tradition in post-colonial Gujarat; indeed,
worker-led industrial action is the least frequent in Gujarat among Indian states (Shah
1996). Congress dominance in this case rested upon a peculiar anomaly where its
electoral strategy was out of step with a hegemonic strategy among the poor or
disenfranchised, despite the attempt to form such an alliance. Electoral contests since
the late 1980s between the Congress Party and BJP were increasingly contested on the
basis of vote banks rather than any clear policy direction or hegemonic strategy.
Despite the relative weakness of lower caste and OBC assertion, there were a
few Congress Party-led attempts at reservations of seats in colleges during the early to
mid 1980s, which were met with ferocious violence, largely by the Patels from Kheda
and north Gujarat. The BJP, ABVP (student-wing), VHP and other assorted
organizations first gained their political opportunity during these riots; indeed, it was
the ABVP that spear-headed the riots against reservations (Nandy et al. 1995). As a
result, by the mid 1980s caste conflict in Ahmedabad (for long the centre of these
various conflicts) had acquired strong communal overtones. The 1981 protests took
the form of burning buses, pelting stones, small processions and demonstrations
against the government rather than the street by street rioting that characterized the
1969 riots. As the protests continued, anti-Muslim violence broke out in largely lower
middle class communities where illicit liquor and gambling is the mainstay of
economic activity (police estimate there were 2,000 unlicensed guns in the
neighbourhood). Violence became the means for several objectives – landlords used it
Convention