There is a particular kind of evening that only a birth can produce where old grudges are forgotten. People who have said unkind things about each other in public find themselves laughing at the same table. We are not talking about Holi here. Several Congress leaders attended the function.
Hardik Patel had one of those evenings recently. His son is barely two months old, yet he has achieved what his father couldn’t in politics.
A hotel in central Gandhinagar hosted what can only be described as an unlikely gathering last week. BJP leaders and Opposition faces — many of them have publicly sparred with Hardik or been at the receiving end of his sharp tongue — turned up to celebrate the birth of Prajwal.
Hardik, the BJP MLA from Viramgam, had married childhood friend Kinjal in a simple village ceremony in Surendranagar in 2019. Their son was born on January 9 this year.
For the dinner, Hardik said he kept it straightforward. He invited all MLAs of the current 15th Gujarat Assembly and friends he had worked with over the years. It was joy, he said, and they all had fun together. However, Congress leaders’ presence at Hardik Patel’s dinner party has become a sore point with some party leaders.
Hardik Patel resigned from the Congress in 2022, just months before the Gujarat Assembly elections. In his resignation letter addressed to Sonia Gandhi, he accused the party leadership of ignoring Gujarat and not taking local issues seriously. He wrote that when he met senior leaders, they were “”” distracted by mobile phones and other issues instead of listening to Gujarat’s problems”.He also said the party lacked a clear roadmap and had been rejected in many states because of weak leadership.
Hardik Patel wrote that some Congress leaders in Gujarat were more concerned about arranging “chicken sandwiches” for visiting leaders than engaging with people during political yatras.
The remark was widely interpreted as a dig at Rahul Gandhi and the party’s elite leadership, implying they were out of touch with grassroots issues in Gujarat. He had said Rahul Gandhi was also more interested in eating non vegetarian food rather than doing any concrete work whenever he visited Gujarat.
In the same resignation letter and interviews, Hardik Patel also said:
- The Congress leadership had “no interest in Gujarat.”
- Key issues such as Article 370, GST, the Ram temple issue and the Citizenship Amendment Act were handled poorly by the party.
- He complained that despite being Working President of the Gujarat Congress, he was not involved in decision-making.
He also hinted that Rahul Gandhi was absent or abroad during important political moments, echoing criticism often made by the BJP.
However all this appeared to have taken a back seat at Hardik Patel’s son’s birthday bash. Congress leaders led by State party president Amit Chavda posed happily for pictures. Chavda was accompanied by party MLA Jignesh Mewani. Congress MLAs Amratji Thakor and Kanti Kharad also attended the dinner. However, Congress MLA Shailesh Parmar did not attend it. Congress MLAs presence at Hardik’s party raised eye brows. AAP’s Hemant Ahir, MLA from Jam Jodhpur, also made it. Chief Minister Bhupendra Patel reportedly turned up. So did state BJP president Jagdish Panchal, general secretary Prashant Korat, ministers Jitu Vaghani and Kanubhai Desai, chief whip Balkrishna Shukla, Assembly Speaker Shankar Chaudhary, and Deputy Speaker Purnesh Modi.
In short, there was enough political history in the room to fill a book.
The history here matters. Hardik burst onto Gujarat’s political scene in 2015 as a fiery 22-year-old spearheading the Patidar quota agitation against the BJP. Rahul Gandhi pulled him into the Congress in 2019 and made him GPCC working president soon after. Jignesh and he were considered close during those years.
Then came May 2022. Hardik walked out of the Congress with a scorching attack on Rahul Gandhi, joined the BJP, and the rest followed: a BJP landslide in the November elections, and Hardik winning from Viramgam.
So his presence at a dinner table with Jignesh and Chavda — however briefly — was hard to miss.
Jignesh was matter-of-fact about it. He said it was a personal function, nothing political, and that Chavda, Kharadi, Thakor and others from the Congress were also present. He did admit, though, that this was the first time he and Hardik had been at the same social event since the split. They stayed 10-15 minutes (another engagement was waiting) but found time to crack jokes at each other’s expense.
Ahir’s connection to Hardik also runs through the Congress years. When Hardik was with the party, Ahir headed the Youth Congress unit in Jamnagar. They were in regular touch then.
He was blunt about why he showed up. When someone invites you with courtesy, you go, he said. His differences with Hardik are ideological, but a celebration for a newborn is something else entirely. He put it simply: extreme politics has its limits. Dialogue, he said, must stay alive. This is India, not Afghanistan, he told a section of the media.
Hardik posted pictures from the evening on social media.
