Modi unified Hindutva with economic aspirations

The BJP managed to successfully posit terrorism against the security of the common citizen and the Congress against Gujarati identity

By Mahesh Rangarajan

There was no serious political challenge to Narendra Modi, his party or his platform during the election campaign in Gujarat. The most striking feature of the recent political process in the state was that Modi and his team were up against an opposition that was unable to get its messages right. The unifying plank for Modi was Gujarati asmita defined in a specific way along three different strands. The first was zero tolerance of terrorism. The second was the focus on rapid development and the third related to his highly personalized style of leadership.

The third strand was most significant for it unified Hindutva and economic aspirations. Gujarat does not fit into any textbook model of development. Modi grasped this sooner and better than any of his political opponents. In India today, Gujarat can be singled out for its double-digit economic growth, its high levels of corporate investments and its relatively good infrastructure, especially power supply.

This means that in the context and in the specific features that worked in Modi’s favour, two elements stand out. The first of these pertain to the growth rates of agricultural production, particularly the spectacular revival of the production of cotton, both genetically-modified Bt cotton and indigenous varieties of cotton grown in the state. The productivity levels of cotton cultivators in Gujarat are far higher than the national levels. The groundnut, wheat and tobacco crops have also done exceedingly well, helped no doubt by several good monsoons.

The second element is the success of the state government’s jyotigram scheme that provides eight hours of guaranteed power each day to farmers. The scheme played a key role in ensuring support for the Modi government in semi-arid north Gujarat. In Saurashtra, Narmada water and the cotton boom helped the BJP limit the influence of party rebels, checked the Congress and actually helped the incumbent regime better its electoral record in comparison to 2002.

The agriculture scenario in Gujarat scenario placed Modi, his party and his government in a very different light from that of other chief ministers who have sought to make economic development central to their political campaigns. N Chandrababu Naidu of Andhra Pradesh and Amarinder Singh of Punjab, both of whom lost elections, are good instances of such chief ministers.

Moreover, the Congress managed to rebuild its links with the Scheduled Tribes and the cultivating communities of central Gujarat. But these small gains faded to nothing given the huge endorsement that voters in Gujarat gave to Modi’s jitega Gujarat (Gujarat will win) slogan, a slogan raised by a party that successfully managed to tap into the aspirations of vast sections of Gujaratis in a way that cut across convention caste divides. This explains the failure of not just poll analysts, psephologists and political observers in New Delhi and Ahmedabad but supporters of the Congress party as well, to read the writing on the wall.

To see the 2007 assembly elections as a replay of the 2002 elections would be to misread the significant shifts in the political climate in the state. It was not the riots or the open communal polarization that were at work in influencing public opinion. The BJP managed to successfully posit terrorism against the security of the common citizen and the Congress against Gujarati identity. There is no doubt that this played on the fears of the majority community of the minority.
Barring Sonia Gandhi’s campaign speeches, there was no sustained attempt on the part of the Congress to take away from Modi the right to define what being a Gujarati meant. In the past, the Congress gave expression to and a platform for precisely this identity. Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel’s campaigns cut across communities and were based among the peasantry but both he and Gandhiji also appealed to industrialists like the Sarabhais and the Lalbhais.

During the 1970s and the 1980s, the Congress under Indira Gandhi experimented with an alliance among the backward classes, the Dalits and the Adivasis in Gujarat, long before Mandal became a household word in north India. The Congress proved to be inhospitable terrain for leaders of stature in the state. Chimanbhai Patel had to leave his party in 1974 and Madhavsinh Solanki saw his Chief Minister-ship slip out of his hands in 1985 due to agitations that were fuelled by his own party colleagues.

There is indeed a continuity in jitega Gujarat with political slogans that were raised in the past, but the slogan echoes the naya Gujarat (new Gujarat) platform of Chimanbhai Patel that, in turn, was modelled along a similar platform desgined by Mahathir Mohammed in Malaysia. It is no coincidence that Modi participated actively in the pro-Narmada yatras that took place in the late-1980s. He was the key organizer of bandhs and strikes in as many as 150 towns in Gujarat after L K Advani was arrested in Bihar in October 1990. The picture in Gujarat is of enormous significance for more than just political players in the country. There was and is indeed a space for the have-nots and the marginalized to challenge the present development model. There is also remarkable evidence of self-help and civic action among the Muslims, Dalits and Adivasis in the state. That the Congress was unable to harness such resilient forces is a testament to the party’s political bankruptcy.

The intriguing dimension of the outcome of the polls in Gujarat was the rise of the Bahujan Samaj Party. Although the BSP has contested every election in the state since 1990 and although it obtained only around 3 per cent of the votes this time round, it has demonstrated a possible bid for the future.

Gujarat 2007 also showcased a new way in which the BJP can adapt its core ideological message in a new political context. The limitations of this model should not, however, be forgotten. Regional identities cannot be harnessed so easily elsewhere for the cause of Hindutva. In other parts of India, strong parties led by members of the Mandal classes or the Dalits may put up a much tougher fight against the BJP than the Congress was able to in Gujarat. But for now, the energy unleashed by Modi and the comfortable position of Advani will certainly put the Congress-led UPA to the test in the coming months.

Gujarat has often shown India the way. Whether it will do so or should do so will be a question all of India will debate and ponder on.

(As told to Paranjoy Guha Thakurta).