The Times of India
2 Jan 2008
Why Gujarat Is Special
by Praful Bidwai
It's impossible to understand the reasons for or the magnitude and quality of the BJP's stunning victory in Gujarat without moving beyond 'normal' electoral arithmetic and campaign strategies, and looking at some factors which have shaped Gujarati society and politics over the decades. Three of these are pivotal: a deep-rooted social conservatism laced with rabid Hindutva; aggressive, intensely chauvinist subnationalism; and growing receptivity to an authoritarian personality cult.
Although 'Hindutva laboratory' Gujarat has been under full or partial BJP rule since 1990, its communalisation goes back a long way. Modern India's first recorded communal riot occurred in Gujarat, in 1713. No less important was the Hindu-Muslim violence of 1893 at Somnath, whose effects were felt nationally and debated in London, leading to the famous Hunter inquiry. The politics of revenge for perceived past injustices struck deep roots in Gujarat under the influence of Dayanand Saraswati's Arya Samaj and the 'shuddhi' (reconversion from Islam) movement active in the 1920s, led by Swami Shraddhanand.
The ground had been prepared in the late 19th century by the invention of an 'Aryan' identity, towards which the emerging Brahmin-bania middle class gravitated. Cow protection societies and Ganesh festivals became sites of communal association and action. Under competitive politics, religious identity-based contestations only sharpened further. So powerful and recurrent was the violence that formed the backdrop to politics that even the Bardoli satyagraha and Dandi March took place amidst Hindu-Muslim clashes. From the landmark riots of 1969 to the pogrom of 2002, Gujarat saw increasing Muslim ghettoisation and disenfranchisement.
Gujarat also witnessed the early consolidation of an alliance between patidar land-owning farmers, and urban Brahmins and banias. This divided it between 'Bhadra Gujarat' and 'Aam Gujarat', say social scientists Achyut Yagnik and Suchitra Sheth. "The expanding and modernising middle class of Gujarat has been looking for a new identity to validate its present and protect its future". Hindutva furnished it.
Gujarat's social conservatism is thus an amalgam of Hindutva and near-complete upper-caste domination untempered by social reform, especially after Mahatma Gandhi's withdrawal in 1930 from Gujarat. Gujarat is India's only major state where there's no power-sharing between 'savarnas' and plebeians and no successful Dalit or OBC self-assertion. The first attempt at this was the Kshatriya-Harijan-Adivasi-Muslim coalition under the Congress, which swept the 1980 elections.
The savarna reaction was a violent agitation against Dalit reservations and dilution of bhadralok power. The second factor at work is best understood through the Gujarati middle class's sense of hurt over the perceived "loss" of Mumbai when the old Bombay state was reorganised, and even more, over long delays in clearance for the Narmada dam projects. Parties across the spectrum turned the dams into an issue of supreme iconic significance — the key to unbounded progress and prosperity, despite their high economic, human and ecological costs.
Elite resentment rose sharply after the World Bank withdrew from the Sardar Sarovar Project following the Morse report, and the Narmada Bachao Andolan launched an agitation against displacement-without-rehabilitation of highly vulnerable people. Medha Patkar was vilified as Gujarat's 'enemy'. 'Human rights' became a term of abuse. Defence of the underprivileged was demonised as effete and machismo about 'Gujarat's glory' and 'avenging' insults to the state replaced rational discourse. Modi cynically fashioned these misanthropic sentiments into the 'Gujarat Gaurav' ideology, lacing it with chauvinist venom and maligning any reference to justice for the victims of 2002 as an injustice and insult to Gujarat itself.
Of a piece with the total absence of middle-class remorse for the 2002 massacre is the spread of intolerant and authoritarian ideas and respect for despotic 'decisiveness'. Modi is the man who 'gets things done' by means fair or foul. If Bt-cotton is to be promoted to please big business, it'll be rammed down the throats of peasants, no matter that 500 farmers have committed suicide. If fertile land is to be procured for a toxic chemicals plant in Ankleshwar or Baroda, it will be acquired no matter how reluctant the owner is to sell. If labour unions demand the minimum wage, they must be smashed.
The admiration this ruthless decisiveness evokes among the middle classes is similar to the spell that Hitler and Mussolini cast by ensuring that 'the trains run on time'. This speaks to an unprecedented cult of personality, and a quasi-fascist personality at that. Why else would thousands of Modi supporters choose to suppress their own individual identities by wearing masks moulded after his face?
The tragedy of Gujarat is magnified by the strong likelihood that Modi will acquire a high-profile national role within the BJP, relentlessly pushing it further to the right; and that mal-developed Gujarat will be lauded and promoted as a model-state by the captains of Indian industry. In 2002, the CII at least registered a mild, soon-to-be-withdrawn protest against the collapse of law and order. Today, even supposedly 'enlightened' industrialists lavish praise upon Modi.
The writer is a political commentator.
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