Congress remembers Ahmed Patel: The backroom operator and crisis manager who steered embattled Gujarat party unit

At the time of Patel’s passing, senior party leader Sonia Gandhi described him as an “irreplaceable companion”. Her son and former Congress president Rahul Gandhi called Patel “one of the pillars of the Congress”.

Over the years, Patel came to be regarded as a backroom operator, a soft spoken Congressman who could be called on at the time of a crisis.

And Patel played a major role in all of many problems plaguing the Congress over the years: Whether it was the modalities of tying up with the (undivided) Shiv Sena for a grand alliance in Maharashtra or tamping down Sachin Pilot’s anger against Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot in Rajasthan or allying with Pranab Mukherjee to ensure that Sonia was installed party president in 1997 despite Sitaram Kesri’s refusal to step down.

Ramesh had once called Patel a 24 X 7 politician who had more than once come to the rescue of the Congress. He recalled how once, at well past midnight, he put a call through to a Chief Minister who was bent on quitting the party the next morning along with his supporters. After a good 50 minutes of humoring, cajoling, mollycoddling the veteran party leader, he saved the party’s government in a north Indian state. As Ramesh noted, not many in the Congress were capable of pulling off such feats, mixing power with persuasion to good effect.

Last remaining Gujarat Congress leaders

The son of a wealthy farmer from Bharuch, Gujarat, he ventured into politics as a Youth Congress leader and won a Parliamentary seat from his home district in 1977, when his party received a drubbing in most of north India. He was an eight-time Parliamentarian, thrice from the Lok Sabha.

He would go on to work loyally for three generations of the Gandhi family. He became the Parliamentary Secretary to then prime minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1985 and then worked closely with Sonia. In fact, it was only after Sonia took charge of the party, which coincided with the period after the Babri demolition and the BJP’s rise, that Patel rose within the Gujarat Congress ranks.

After the Congress lost its hold in Gujarat, the BJP tried its best to whittle down Patel’s clout. So much so in his 1980 Lok Sabha campaign, BJP workers struck off the name Babubhai, the name by which he then called himself, and inserted Ahmed on his election posters to give the campaign a communal twist.

One of the biggest examples of Patel’s backroom skills was his August 2017 Rajya Sabha win. Seeking a fifth term as MP from Gujarat, Patel’s chances looked wobbly after then Congress Legislature Party leader Shankersinh Vaghela quit with at least a dozen MLAs. One of them, Balwantsinh Rajput, joined the BJP, which immediately fielded him as the third RS candidate. The BJP could win two seats comfortably on the strength of its numbers, and those were to go to Amit Shah and Smriti Irani. Rajput’s nomination was seen as a tactic to draw extra votes and defeat Patel. However, Patel out-tricked the BJP by flying Congress MLAs out to Karnataka, and won.

He also had several run-ins with Prime Minister Narendra Modi during the latter’s tenure as Gujarat CM. A Gujarat Congress leader had earlier told The Indian Express that there has not been a single election after 2002 “when Modi and the BJP have not dragged Ahmed Patel into a controversy.”