Blazing Gujarat: The Image of India's Future?

Radhika Desai

[ A shorter version of this article was published in Indian daily The Hindu on 6 March 2002]

Once again Gujarat will take the monstrous distinction of experiencing the
worst communal violence in a nation-wide campaign of the Sangh Parivar.
Indeed, it promises to be a lot worse this time around with a BJP
government in Gandhinagar, the structures of the state, including the
police forces, highly communalised, and with a BJP-led government in power
in New Delhi apparently unrestrained by its allies, and certainly pulled by
the bloodthirsty forces it has so long nurtured. The widely publicised
image of a young Muslim man begging mercy from his unseen assailants, his
eyes seeking a small scrap of humanity in them, possibly vainly, haunts the
mind relentlessly.

Gujarat has become a byword for casteism and communalism. Violence against
lower castes, tribals, Muslims and Christians has become routine over the
past two decades, during which an entire generation has grown to maturity,
ignorant of the civility of which Gujarat once boasted. It is, after all, a
distant memory even for one who has participated in its graces, not knowing
they were the last. Expressions of contempt for the lower castes, Muslims,
Christians, the poor and the tribals, hitherto beyond the pale of polite
conversation, have become the common currency of drawing room conversations
of the Gujarati well-to-do. Even the "I'm a liberal secularist, but..."
type of qualifiers are dispensed with. As a Gujarati, it is tempting to
just hang one's head in grief, shame and silence.

But surely it might be a little more useful, and not impertinent, to dwell
on the underlying structures out of which this savage distinction springs.
For it may well be that this is where the country as a whole is rapidly
heading. Gujarat is simply ahead in the form of capitalist development
combined with upper and middle caste and class Hindu assertion which has
become so widely accepted as the way for India. As Marx admonished the
Germans prone to feel superior about the depradations of capitalist
development in England, "The story is about you".

While the first large scale post-independence communal riots took place in
1969, it was not until the 1980s that frequently violent political
assertion of the upper castes and classes became routine in Gujarati
politics. For the 1970s had been a decade during which this assertion found
more peaceful and "respectable" outlets: Gujarat was, after all, the
western wing of the politically ambiguous JP movement and elected the
country's first Janata Morcha ministry under Babubhai Jasbhai Patel as the
apogee of the non-Congressism of the upper and middle castes and classes
which had been gathering force even before Mrs Indira Gandhi's populist
phase, which they so came to hate, properly began.

The 1980s witnessed an acute class-caste polarization as some of the worst
anti-reservation riots in the country occurred in Gujarat. The
OBC/SC/Tribal/Muslim based (the famous KHAM strategy, remember?) Congress
Government under Madhavsingh Solanki, and other Congress governments which
followed, foundered on the impossibility of a government in contradiction
with civil society: political power that did not reflect social and
economic power was unsustainable. The upper and middle castes and classes
registered their frustrations on the streets. As riots and agitations
became the stuff of Gujarati politics, the Sangh Parivar and the BJP made
accelerated gains, finally being able to form governments in the latter
part of the 1990s.
Gujarat shows few signs of looking back now. Its minorities are regularly
cowed by violence. Its urban geography, reconfigures by riots with blatant
connections with real estate transactions, now features "borders" between
communities. As I write Muslims who managed to weather 1992-3 but for whom
this has been the last straw (how much can anyone be expected to take?) Are
leaving the state, with wounds of betrayal. They leave behind property and
position, now to be grabbed by those who feel secure in current conditions.
Such are the gashes which together make up the tearing of the "social fabric".

This horrifying reality is made up of certain traits of Gujarati society
which set it apart from the rest of the country by degree, not fundamental
difference. Gujarat is highly industrialised to the extent that the
agrarian propertied have made some of the deepest inroads into urban
sectors of the economy. More than in most states, the divides between the
agrarian and industrial propertied have been blurred with the propertied
groups sporting fairly uniform, if also competing, interests. The control
of labour is chief among them and much of the worst "communal" violence
occurs in South Gujarat, a centre of hothouse agricultural as well as
industrial development in the state, the part of the Golden corridor which
northward up from Vapi to Godhra and beyond along the Bombay-Delhi railway
line via Ratlam. Among the 9% Muslims of Gujarat, there is also a
bourgeoisie and riots present their Hindu counterparts with plum
opportunities to settle business scores.

Like UP, Gujarat has a disproportionally high upper caste population,
just under 15%. Unlike UP, however, over the last century the technically
middle-caste patidars, who constitute 12% of the population, have
experienced a rise in their socio-economic position, such that in the late
20th century, no part of upper class/caste society could condescend to
them. While, until recently, an important axis of Gujarati politics
revolved around the political competition between upper castes and
Patidars, the BJP succeeded in more or less uniting them. With the high
rate of development, these upper and middle caste and class groups
represent an immense concentration of socio-economic and political power.

Gujarat is probably unique for the sheer number of castes it features -
more than 80 Brahmin and 40 Bania castes alone, e.g. It has only a weakly
developed linguistic or cultural unity, probably as a consequence of this
(though a history of political fragmentation combined with the creation of
modern Gujarat state out of three quite distinct regional societies also
played a role). Hindutva has provided the ideology with the best prospect
of unifying predominantly Hindu upper and middle caste/class formation. All
over the country, Hindutva attempts to unite upper and, if less
successfully, middle castes, to constitute a more coherent power group.
The survival of important middle caste parties in UP and Bihar which remain
opposed to Hindutva is more due to their underdevelopment than the
commitment of the Yadav leaders to secularism. There important conflicts
still divide the middle agrarian castes from the urban upper castes as they
do not in Gujarat and much of the rest of the country. There even when the
middle-caste based regional parties remain separate, they have not proved
hostile to Hindutva as was imagined in the days when the CPM managed to
constitute the United Front Government of "democratic and secular forces"
out of them.

A final factor contributing to the political dominance of Hindutva in
Gujarat is the large numbers of emigres. In many ways Gujarat has long been
something of a decapitated society - many of its most economically,
socially and culturally advanced members living in Bombay or Calcutta or
other parts of the world. Today these emigres constitute a central bulwark
of the NRI community, particularly in the US and the UK, and provide many
of the chief personnel of the overseas organizations of the Sangh Parivar.

Gujarat may be merely in the vanguard of the overall trend of the
development of the rest of the country. This is the reason why the problem
of the hegemony of Hindutva in Gujarat needs to be taken very seriously.
Pointing to yhe roots of Hindutva in our current model of development is
not to say that it is an unstoppable force. Few things in history are
inevitable, no matter how much they look like that in retrospect. Deepest
among the political tragedies in India is that lower castes and classes who
have the deepest investment in secularism as well as egalitarian economic
development have only ever been offered populist and opportunistic forms of
political mobilization. This cycle has surely run its course in Gujarat
where the Congress's lamentable record in the 1980s seems to have more or
less extinguished it as anything other than a protest vote repository. Even
as the Congress party, where it is successful today, is necessarily based
among the lower socioeconomic class/caste strata in the country, it is
evading its vocation of being their authentic party, still hankering after
being the party of the upper strata of the country. The Left too often
seems to be happier performing small but ultimately unsustainable little
feats of parliamentary political engineering rather than expanding its base
among these groups country-wide, as its own convictions require of it.  

The powerful can no longer be shamed into demonstrating a modicum of
liberalism and secularism. It is only when secularism becomes more than the
profession of one's good breeding, becomes the true property of those who
could not care less about such snobbish distinctions, who are able to
question the roots of communalism in inequality, that it can become the
political force this country now badly needs. Only then will Indians have
earned the privilege of looking back on Gujarat of the turn of the century
as a horrific but also now past, peculiarity in the van of a road which the
rest of India mercifully did not take. If this does not happen, Gujarat
could well be the image of the country's future.

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