Will the Gujarat model of communal divide and rule be replicated at the national level ?

Indian Express
December 21, 2007

Is Gujarat the New India?
Pamela Philipose

The politics of polarisation, practised so successfully in the state, cannot be replicated at the national level


In this pregnant moment — after the final vote in the Gujarat assembly has been cast and before the first vote is counted — let’s pluck out one of those compelling questions currently circulating in the ether. Can the politics of communal polarisation practised successfully in Gujarat be replicated in the country? There is the argument that Modi’s model of governance has a certain resonance in the New, Resurgent India, which is impatient with the burdens of the past, and its legacy of poverty, backwardness and encrusted Nehruvian values. Gujarat, with its ‘winning’ combination of muscular cultural nationalism and unstoppable China-like economic growth, offers the citizens of New India a passport out of Old India. There are some — for the moment confined largely to those sympathetic to the Sangh Parivar — who even argue that the country cannot do better than acquire a PM like Narendra Modi; and the BJP, if it wishes to re-capture power at the Centre, couldn’t do better than embrace hardline Hindutva.

There is, of course, no denying that the consolidation of what can be broadly termed ‘sustainable Hindutva’ has been achieved in Gujarat. The fact that the BJP has been able to account for more than 40 per cent of the votes over three consecutive elections — 1995, 1998 and 2002 — underlines this. There cannot also be any doubt about its impressive economic achievements: according to the Gujarat government, it recorded a growth rate of 12.7 per cent in 2006-07 and 26 per cent of total bank finance was in Gujarat in 2006-07, according to RBI figures. The Gujarat Model could appear compelling indeed, especially when bathed in the neon-lit effulgence provided by its spinmeisters.

But Gujarat is not, and cannot be, India and Narendra Modi’s future ascendancy to prime-ministership is a political pipe dream. First, we need to clarify that Gujarat’s ‘growth’ — on which Modi has put his personal imprimatur — actually dates back a thousand years in a region that has been at the intersection of innumerable trade routes. Gujarat’s economic history is bound to its geographical location both as a border region and a maritime one. Achyut Yagnik and Suchitra Sheth, in their book The Shaping of Modern

Gujarat, observe, “For almost a thousand years now, merchant communities — Hindus, Jains, Muslims, and later, Parsis — not only dominated the economic sphere but also wielded influence in Gujarati society and power in political affairs.” Much before they had their own state, Gujarati traders played a decisive role in creating Bombay’s share bazar. Once the state of Gujarat came into being, it saw both the Green and White revolutions. Today, Gujarat calls itself a ‘mini China’; in the early eighties, it was considered a ‘mini Japan’ — both claims of course coming at great environmental cost, but that’s another story. Between 1993 and 2000 — before Modi represented Gandhinagar — Gujarat’s manufacturing grew by 94 per cent. So we can safely assume that regardless of which party controls it, Gujarat will remain a high growth state. Those who argue that India’s future economic well-being would need a Modi are merely turning on the lights.

That apart, Gujarat itself has a social composition that does not approximate India’s. Not only does it have a higher percentage of upper caste population, it has lower Muslim representation. At the all-India level, Muslims represent 13.4 per cent of the population, while they constitute 9.1 per cent of Gujarat’s population. This combination of a higher upper caste/lower Muslim presence makes Gujarat unique (in UP, for instance a higher upper caste presence is accompanied by a significant Muslim presence), and makes it easier for Gujarati politicians across party lines to practise the politics of communal polarisation, something that is considerably more difficult to do at the national level.

Now let’s look at how the BJP had gained ascendancy in the late nineties. At least two broad phenomena helped power it to Raisina Hill. First, the historic decline of the Congress. But the 2004 General Election, which saw the Congress win 145 seats — as opposed to the 114 it had won in the 1999 polls — indicates that the Congress’s downward spiral has hit a pause. At the national level today, the Congress appears far more convincing as a political force than it had in the second half of the nineties even as the BJP has lost the potent appeal of unfulfilled promise that it seemed to embody in the 1998 general election. Some within the Sangh Parivar would argue that this is precisely why the BJP needs to return to hardline Hindutva as represented by personalities such as the Modi of today, and the L.K. Advani of the early nineties.

Which brings us to the second phenomenon that brought the party to power at the Centre: the increasingly forgotten moderation of Atal Bihari Vajpayee. The combination of Advani, with his hardline politics, and Vajpayee with his more fuzzy appeal, did the trick. Neither leader could have achieved power on his own terms. L.K. Advani knows this well. That is why as PM-in-waiting he tries to be both hardliner and moderate by turns.

Christophe Jaffrelot has argued that if the BJP wishes to remain an all-India party, it needs to do at least four things: one, stick to its moderate line, given the compulsions of its allies; two, be generous with its regional allies in terms of seat adjustments and portfolios; three, ensure the allies continue to consider the Congress as its rival to power, and not the BJP; four, rein in the political ambitions of its own cadre in these states. Modi, who having presided over the 2002 post-Godhra progrom in Gujarat and who went on to win an election on the passions it had unleashed; Modi, who has never lost an opportunity to brandish his Hindutva credentials — as he did on Wednesday at the National Development Council by attacking the PM’s plan for minorities — is not the man to achieve such a sync. Advani has at least stated publicly that the day that saw Babri Masjid demolished was the saddest day of his life; Modi has not deigned to do even this vis-à-vis the 2002 pogrom.

If Modi wins on Sunday, there will be many who will proclaim him the country’s future prime minister. Their words needs to be seen against the complex realities of a country called India.

pamela.philipose@expressindia.com