THERE HAVE been two big strands in Modi’s political career so far: the communal consolidation of his early years and his more recent high-profile agenda of “development” and “good governance”. In a sense, both have cannily intuited and fed off different aspects of middle-class desire. Conflagrations and prejudice between community foot soldiers on ground are a phenomenon somewhat easier to understand. But one of the most dismaying aspects of the riots of 2002 was the easy-on-conscience response sections of the Gujarati Hindu middle class had to it. But for small courageous enclaves of resistance, the dominant mood at the time was “Pehli baar kisne inko sabak sikhaya; it’s great they were taught a lesson for the first time.”
Apart from all the hurdles the government put up, one of the reasons why it became so difficult to take on Modi for the riots was that, with his intuitive grasp of mass psychology, he quickly read the mood and bullet-proofed himself by conflating any moral assault on him as an assault on Gujarati pride. From then on, any arrow aimed at him became an arrow aimed at “Gujarati Asmita”, and subliminally burdened by their shared guilt, “six crore Gujaratis” came together like a phalanx around him.
In a fascinating sleight of hand, again gauging public mood, over the past few years, Modi has reinvented the shared identity of that time into the razzmatazz of “Brand Gujarat” — the front-rider of India’s development story. A land of double-digit growth, dizzying foreign investments, great roads, surplus electricity and coveted corporate destination. To emerge from the dark cellars of the first chapter onto the red carpets of the second is to transit between two worlds. Interestingly too, while the burden of the first seemed entirely shared, the achievement of the latter seems more individually Modi’s.
A corporate lobbyist who holds some of India’s most significant portfolios succinctly sums up Modi’s positives for the corporate class. “Like him or not, he is a man of vision. The fundamental principle of policymaking is that, for right or wrong, you have to be able to take decisions. Modi is a decisive, daring man. He knows what he wants and he creates single-window clearances. Gujarat’s state machinery runs because it is protected by the political structure of the state. There are no flip-flops where he’s concerned. Once he gives his word, things happen. I know you are going to pounce on this, but in a democracy, raising concerns can sometimes lead to a lot of chaos. Sometimes, you need to be stern to get ahead; you need to use a stick. He’s got the spine to do that.”
Rajeev Chandrashekhar, businessman and Rajya Sabha MP, says, “Modi is walking into a vacuum of non-performing politicians. In the past, people were mostly preoccupied with caste and religion. But over the past few years, the language of good governance has begun to acquire political equity and he’s positioning himself in that space. That is what corporates, the middle class and even ordinary people like about him.”
Yet another consultant from the telecom sector says, “Modi really knows how to get a success story out. I get about a dozen emails a week from the government putting out compelling news about Gujarat’s growth. Whether these are exaggerated or not, how do you combat the visual impact of Modi sitting on stage surrounded by some of the country’s most powerful businessmen? You can write as many words as you want about his failings, but he has already had everyone at ‘hello’.”
IN TRUTH,Modi is a master of spectacle. This is a key aspect of his reinvention as a development icon and his hold over people’s imagination. Everything his government does is marketed on a giant scale and subsumed to his personality. It is part of the process of turning Modi into an icon rather than a chief minister. Modi has replaced the ordinary business of government, for instance, with a series of melas where he positions himself as the philanthroper king. Kanya Kelavri, Krishi Mahotsav, Garib Kalyan Mela, Pashu Mela, Pravesh Utsav, to name only a few. At each of these festivals, routine Central and state government schemes that have been held up for months are handed out personally by him as special largesse. When TIME magazine put him on its cover recently, Modi strafed Gujarat with hoardings saying “Garv Che.” If he announces a project, the dream will be sold in technicolour. He is also superb at making mega announcements — investment packages that run into staggering numbers of zeros. It’s impossible to pin him down on the details because that would be like combating the communication strength of a hoarding with the dry small-print of a PhD thesis. As Congress leader Arjun Modwadia puts it, “Any communication from the government looks like a Mukesh Ambani wedding invitation.” Of course, this is a self-image both the Gujarati and Indian middle class is eager to buy.
Another key reason why Modi is feted is that by concentrating government and decision- making in his own hands — and a select few people around him — he has cut out the sort of petty and middle-level corruption that is endemic to India. But if there are two factors that have played the most symbolically significant role in the creation of “Brand Gujarat”, it’s Modi’s coup with the Tata Nano project. Having watched Rata Tata flounder in West Bengal for several months, he famously sent him a message saying “Su Swagatam Gujarat.” According to a journalist close to Modi, he then deployed a special task force of eight government departments and 16 officers and the land was ready and the deal sealed in six days. “He may have given excessive concessions to the Tatas and the Nano car may be a failure,” says the telecom consultant, “but look at what this did to ‘Brand Gujarat’.” Since the Tata project came to Sanand, Peugeot, Ford, Mitsubishi and Suzuki have also decided to set up plants there. Sunil Parekh, former Gujarat CII director and member of the Advisory Board for Vibrant Gujarat 2011, says, “That whole area is transformed. Sanand was just a sleepy little village but the government has built four-lane roads going there and beyond. That’s opened up the entire area. Now about 20 other MNCs are coming to the Sanand industrial estate. So getting the Tata branding at whatever cost was the goal.”
Modi’s other key tool has been his biannual Vibrant Gujarat meets. After each of these, he has announced staggering MoU figures for investments coming into Gujarat. Almost everyone now agrees that these figures are hopelessly inflated. Even Parekh laughs a little at it. “Undoubtedly, Gujarat’s growth statistics and investments have gone up since Modi took over,” says he. “The problem is sometimes the announcements made are so huge, it defies credibility. For example, in the last to last Vibrant Gujarat, the figures were almost equivalent to the cumulative investments in India since Independence!”
A chapter on Industry and Mining in the Modi government’s own Socio-Economic Review, issued by its Bureau of Statistics and Economics, states that while the government has announced 17,262 MoUs since the Vibrant Gujarat melas began in 2003, only 6.13 percent of these are under implementation and 9.39 percent of these have been commissioned. In fact, the truth is, for all of Modi’s hype, in 2011, Delhi, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh attracted more foreign direct investment than Gujarat; Maharashtra nine times more. As usual with Modi, however, though the devil is always in the details, his master message has gone through.
Given Modi’s carefully planned strategy of conflating his identity with the identity of the entire state, there is now as fierce a resistance to a debate on Gujarat’s development as there was to a culpability about its riots. If one steps off the glamourised world of Modi’s banner headlines though, the details of Gujarat’s growth story tell another, altogether more darker, tale. It is indisputably true that Modi’s tenures as chief minister has accelerated Gujarat’s growth. But there are many warning signals brewing that the nature and balance of this growth demands a much closer scrutiny.
On 2 June, the Times of India published a front page story that said, that according to Planning Commission reports, Bihar — once one of India’s most backward states — had topped the list of Indian states on growth rates, clocking an astounding 13.1 percent in the year 2011-12. Gujarat did not figure among the first five states. Clearly, Nitish Kumar is doing at least some of the work Modi has been doing, with much less fanfare.
However, it would be unfair to deny Gujarat or Modi its achievements. Recently, more than 10 of Gujarat’s premium institutes such as IIM-A, IRMA, CEPT, GIDR and others held a national seminar on “Understanding Gujarat’s Growth Story in the Last Ten Years”. More than 50 economists, analysts, academics and bureaucrats presented their papers. A synopsis of these has now been handed to the Planning Commission. Though this report has not been made public yet, TEHELKA has got an exclusive copy of it.
The perspectives garnered from this tell a complex story. The eminent economist, YK Alagh, who inaugurated the seminar, said that while Gujarat has indeed been doing well in economic growth over the past 10 years, that growth has resulted in widening regional disparities in the state and is increasingly showing weakening linkages with poverty reduction, nutrition and improvement in human development. Prof Indira Hirway’s paper affirmed this position.
Though Modi has consistently claimed that Gujarat’s agriculture is growing at 11 percent, Prof Alagh said the real figures hover closer to 5 percent. However, even this, he argued, is a very positive average by global standards.
Cumulatively, however, the papers presented at this seminar showed that Gujarat has had very low employment generation and amongst the lowest labour wages in the country over the past 10 years. According to Prof Hirway, the state also ranked 20th among the 20 major states in percentage of women with severe anaemia; 15th in malnourishment among children; and 16th in children’s anaemia. The state had slipped from the sixth position on the overall Human Development Index in 1990 to the eighth position in 2008.
Sunil Parekh, who was also part of the seminar, brought up several worrying signs triggered by Gujarat’s industrial policy. The industries have not had a large ancillary impact, he said. Also, the hi-tech capital-intensive growth the government had been following has not created adequate employment opportunities in the state’s economy. Significantly, the tax revenue from industries was also much less compared to other states.
Though Modi has often boasted that Gujarat contributes more to India’s GDP than any other state, according to Parekh’s paper, Gujarat’s contribution to VAT from the ASI sector industries in the state was the lowest among all competing states such as Maharashtra, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh. Pollution had emerged as a serious concern. Also, the process of industrialisation was too resource-intensive and land and water were emerging as major issues. He also affirmed that the present pattern of industrialisation was not solving the problem of inequity, poverty reduction, and poor human development in the state.
Prof Sebastian Morris argued that some of the reasons for the rapid growth of the state economy in the past 10 years had been the free immigration of workers from outside (no conflicts between locals and outsiders), no major land constraints for industry, favourable political economy, relatively better infrastructure for industries, better fiscal management and concessions in taxes and incentives to investments, particularly in Kutch district.
But Prof Ghanshyam Shah, who presented a paper on the notion of good governance in Gujarat argued that the lopsided nature of governance in the state was not very visible to outsiders because they are only exposed to the propaganda projected by the government in Vibrant Gujarat summits and in full-page advertisements in the media. According to him, the frequently organised and widely publicised festivals such as Garib Melas, Sadbhavana Utsav, Gunotsav, Kanya Kelavani rallies etc, were destroying local institutions and brainwashing the middle class in favour of the State. Socioeconomic groups adversely affected by the lack of governance, he argued, were neither visible nor vocal in the state.
There were several other papers on different aspects of Gujarat’s economy, but overall, all the participants present agreed that one major conclusion that had emerged from the seminar was that in spite of the rapid economic growth Gujarat had seen during the past decade, it had failed to satisfactorily achieve major developmental goals.
“Gujarat’s model of growth has been projected as one of the best models in the country and many states are aspiring to follow it,” says Hirway. “In fact, Gujarat’s economy has been presented as ‘a key driver to national economic growth’. But we must seriously ask ourselves, given our findings, does India really want to follow this model? Should Gujarat itself be following it?”
‘In policymaking, the fundamental principle is that you have to be able to take decisions. Modi is a decisive, daring man,’ says a corporate lobbyist
EXAGGERATED DREAM-MAKING could have been just an innocuous aspect of Modi’s development agenda in Gujarat. But the relentless positioning of Gujarat — and by extension himself — as a cut above everyone else in the country can have a dangerously hypnotic spell. Very few people in Gujarat — or indeed the middle class elsewhere in India — seem to be aware of the dark undersea on which Narendra Modi’s dream kingdom floats. When they are aware, they seem not just blind, but what’s more disturbing, impatient, to have their attention drawn to it.
In an excellent article on Modi in Caravan, published in February this year, journalist Vinod K Jose writes compellingly about GIFT City (Gujarat International Finance Tec-City), Modi’s most monumental construction project. When completed, according to Jose, it is meant to have more than 75 million sq ft of office space, more than the financial districts of Shanghai, Tokyo and London put together.
An architect working on the project told Jose that Modi wants “an estate of glass boxes”. And to build his own Shanghai, Modi had hired architects straight from his dream source: East China Architectural Design and Research Institute. “I was extremely shocked when I saw the design at one of the Vibrant Gujarat summits,” said an architect working on the project. “It seemed like an awfully alien idea to me. I felt like it was the king asking, ‘Go and build a new kingdom for me’— and someone just executing it.”
Jose writes, “Another architect who works for Modi put it even more dramatically: ‘I don’t know if I’m Albert Speer or Robert Moses. I hope it’s the latter.’ Moses did more than any one man to shape the city of New York, though he rammed through a series of mega projects that earned him the enmity of many New Yorkers. Speer, on the other hand, was Hitler’s architect.”
Stuff like this put off his defenders, but it’s no accident that references like these come up in connection with Modi. A businessman, who has projects in Gujarat, told TEHELKA, “As entrepreneurs, we wear different lenses. Yes, Modi has reined in petty bureaucracy; yes, he has made Gujarat relatively corruption-free; yes, doing business here is clear, transparent and fairly quick. Yes, there are better roads and infrastructure. But is that all there is to it? You have all that in China too. But would I want to live in China?”
Another businessman TEHELKA spoke to, similarly praised Modi. A little later into the conversation, he cautioned, “I admit there’s something worrying about the crony capitalism coming out of Gujarat. It may seem overly exaggerated to say this, but if you look back at history, Hitler came into power at a time when Germany’s economy was in decline and big business was looking for a hero who would talk nationalism and the revival of the economy. People were so grateful to get a strong leader, they all kept looking away. When Hitler spoke a fascist language, they all said, ‘Oh, set that aside’.”
The references may be too extreme but looking away is something many already seem to be doing. When you dance on red carpets, it’s difficult to imagine tripping; difficult to imagine the cellars below. But here is a quick roster of what has happened to anyone in Gujarat who has questioned or challenged the Narendra Modi government over the past 10 years.
Mallika Sarabhai had a spurious human trafficking case slapped on her in 2003 for speaking up about riot victims; her passport was taken away; she had to go into hiding. IPS officer Rahul Sharma, who had saved over 300 hundred Muslim children in the riots and submitted damning phone call records on the Naroda-Patiya massacre to the Nanavati Commission, which led to the arrest of a BJP minister and VHP leader, was slapped with an Official Secrets Act case in 2011.
IPS officer Rajnish Rai, who investigated the encounter of Sohrabuddin Sheikh, his wife Kauser Bi and a man named Tulsi Prajapati and arrested three powerful police officers very close to Modi and his home minister Amit Shah, was immediately transferred out of the case and his performance report was downgraded.
IPS officer Kuldip Sharma, who investigated Amit Shah’s role in the famous Ketan Parekh bank fraud; refused to falsely chargesheet Mallika Sarabhai; and actively did his duty on several other cases that embarrassed people close to Modi, had twenty-six-year-old cases resurrected against him. Pradeep Sharma, his brother and an IAS officer, was also slapped with several cases and jailed for 18 months.
(Pradeep testified to the SIT that he was instructed by a key Modi aide to call his brother Kuldip and tell him to go slow on rioters but the SIT disregarded his statement without even examining his call records. Pradeep asked for a lie-detector test, but it was denied.)
The same fate met IPS officer Satish Verma investigating the Ishrat Jehan false encounter case. But it does not just stop at cops. Reputed intellectual Ashis Nandy was slapped with a criminal case for a column he wrote on Modi and Gujarat in 2008. TheTimes of India was slapped with sedition cases in 2008 for publishing a story on the Modi regime. And the list just goes on.
On 7 June, as this story went to press, BJP dissidents Keshubhai Patel, Godhan Zadaphia, Vikal Radidia and Naresh Patel, who have begun to group visibly against Modi, were slapped with cases related to engendering communal disharmony in Junagadh.
The mysterious murder of former BJP leader Haren Pandya, of course, still remains one of the biggest unsolved riddles in the state.
This staccato list of real retributions — and alleged ones — does not evoke any of the wrenching distress these people and their families have gone through. Trying to tell their stories, however, is like trying to shout through a soundproof room. People outside hear nothing. Most Gujaratis — middle class or corporate professionals — would not even have heard of them. “What good will your story do?” asks one IPS officer, having recounted the tortuous circumstances that dogged his investigation. “Nothing,” I am forced to answer. “But it’s still important to put it out there.”
It may seem very thin yet to those outside it, but fear and intimidation have become the permanent lining beneath the smart coat of Brand Gujarat.
