The Gujarat Battle

ON Monday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi was at his vitriolic best in Gandhinagar. It was a revealing performance. For a man who for more than three years has been the Prime Minister of India and is, ipso facto, credited with a pan-Indian thought process, Modi revealed himself to be an unreconstructed Gujarati sub-nationalist. As Chief Minister, from 2001 to 2014, he positioned himself as the vigilant guardian of Gujarat’s interests; this mobilisation of Gujarati sub-nationalism helped him defy his own party’s national leadership then and manufacture the “Congress-is-anti-Gujarat” narrative. But for the Prime Minister to now dip into that pool of lingering resentment is an affront to the office he holds and the obligation he has to work for the welfare of the entire nation. 

The amount of attention that Modi and other senior BJP leaders are paying to Rahul Gandhi, as mascot of what the Prime Minister called vanshvaad (as juxtaposed to the BJP’s vikasvaad), betrays a strange obsession and, perhaps, a bit of nervousness. The Congress campaign in Gujarat has, in fact, zeroed in on Modi’s model of development. If Gujarat has the reputation of a prosperous state, it is primarily because of all the industrialisation, cooperative movements and farming innovations that took place during Congress rule, much before the BJP could storm the Gandhinagar secretariat on the politics of communal mobilisation; indeed, “development” has always been part of Gujarat’s political culture. The Prime Minister is injecting a false dichotomy. 

Be that as it may, it is the tone that the Prime Minister has sought to set on Monday that should be a matter of concern. The BJP has now been in power for nearly two decades in Gujarat. Inevitably, its stewardship has produced its own share of grievances and aberrations; the so-called Gujarat model is more a hype than reality; political emotions can easily be manipulated in a Hindu-Muslim binary. It is natural for the BJP to have accumulated an “anti-incumbency” baggage and it is quite natural for the anti-BJP forces to create an alternative narrative. The Modi crowd may feel it is entitled to a walkover in Gujarat, but the Opposition cannot be faulted if it demurs.