New Delhi, Sept. 15 (The Telegraph): Pro-reservation activist Hardik Patel's agitation in Gujarat has cast a shadow over Narendra Modi's US trip later this month and his visit to the UK in November.
Political sources involved in organising community receptions for the Prime Minister at California's San Jose and later at London's Wembley Stadium admitted they were "slightly apprehensive" about reports of protests by the diaspora's Patel community over the alleged police crackdown on Hardik's pro-reservation agitators in Gujarat last month.
While the Patels in the UK have swung in to take pre-emptive steps and eliminate the possibility of a showdown, those in the US are proving tougher to handle.
Sources said political back channels have been pressed into service between India and the West Coast to snuff out the "smallest" show of dissent at the San Jose event, to be organised by the Indo-American community of the West Coast on September 27.
The sources, however, said Patel representatives on the San Jose reception committee, who had been active during Modi's last US visit, have expressed a wish to keep a low profile this time.
Modi's UK community reception is scheduled to be held on November 13.
On September 13, the London-based Federation of Patidar (a synonym for Patels) Association adopted a resolution, condemning the alleged police excesses against the Gujarat protesters.
However, the resolution also urged the agitators and the government to "calmly and constructively" deliberate over the reservation policy that it felt had become "untenable in the present day".
The resolution "overwhelmingly" decided the Prime Minister must be accorded a "grand" welcome.
"There is a general consensus among the UK's Patidars that Modiji's visit should pass off peacefully," the federation's chairman, Dinesh Patel, told The Telegraph.
Asked about the reported restiveness among the US Patels, Dinesh said: "The Patels who have gone to the US are recent migrants and perhaps identify themselves more closely with issues back home. We came to the UK decades ago from East Africa and have been assimilated into the British way of thinking."
Hardik, spearheading the movement for OBC status for Gujarat's Patel community, today said his organisation would "continue" its agitation till its demands were met, setting the stage for a bruising fight after an inconclusive meeting with the state government last night. Hardik has renamed his aborted "Reverse Dandi Yatra" as "Ekta Yatra", now to be launched on September 19.
Modi is up against another problem, one that he has faced before.
Last month several US academics, including Indians and white Americans, shot off a letter to Silicon Valley's top-flight tech companies like Google, Microsoft and Adobe asking them not to engage with Modi.
Modi's schedule includes meetings with the Indian-origin CEOs of Adobe and Google, Shantanu Narayen and Sundar Pichai, and a townhall interaction with Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg at the social networking company's headquarters.
The 130-odd signatories - including Suvir Kaul and Ania Loomba who had forced the Wharton Economic Forum to drop Modi from a video-conferencing event in 2013 - urged the Silicon Valley tech leaders to be "mindful of not violating their own codes of corporate responsibility when conducting business with a government which has, on several occasions already, demonstrated its disregard for human rights and civil liberties as well as the autonomy of educational and cultural institutions".
Today, a counter-campaign in the form of another signed missive took shape. The letter - signed by a cross-section of people that had Indian Council of Historical Research members, dancers Pratibha Prahalad and Sonal Mansingh and former ambassadors Bhaswati Mukherjee and V.K. Grover - condemned the "attempt to instigate a boycott of India by Silicon Valley".
