The Hindu : The stakes in Gujarat

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Wednesday, Nov 13, 2002

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The stakes in Gujarat

By Harish Khare

The country will witness next month a clash of ideas and individuals that would have lasting repercussions for our very capacity to survive as a working liberal democracy.

AFTER JAMMU and Kashmir, it is now up to Gujarat to provide macro-corrections for a wayward polity. If the verdict in the Jammu and Kashmir Assembly elections attested to the essential fairness of the Indian electoral system and redeemed the Indian state's legitimacy, the vote next month for the Gujarat Assembly will test our collective sanity. In Jammu and Kashmir, the combined institutional resources of an uncompromising opposition, the exacting scrutiny of the Central Election Commission, a robust media, and, above all, a vigilant citizenry were sufficient to throw out an errant political dynasty; in Gujarat, the country will witness next month a clash of ideas and individuals that would have lasting repercussions for our very capacity to survive as a working liberal democracy. Gujarat, for better or worse, will provide a historical moment.

As invariably happens, most historical moments get defined by the personality and predilections of the dramatis personae. Gujarat is no exception; next month's battle has become organically linked with the fortunes of three individuals. Narendra Modi, Lal Krishna Advani and Atal Behari Vajpayee. All three have varying stakes, each able to hurt, help or hobble the other. Others are essentially marginal to the contest.

At the centre of the Gujarat battle, first and foremost, is Mr. Modi. He is perhaps the first to have spurned the conventional profile of a centrist, moderate, non-antagonistic leader even after becoming Chief Minister; so far, Indian politics has been familiar only with leaders who cheerfully strike an excessively partisan, parochial stance in order to garner votes but instantly abandon, equally cheerfully, their partisanship once grafted in for ministerial work. Mr. Modi has broken the mould. He has defiantly donned the mantle of abrasive partisanship. He has appropriated the Pakistan President, Pervez Musharraf, as an antagonist; he cannot resist taking a crack at Ms. Gandhi and her Italian-ness. And now he seeks the endorsement from the voters for his divisive polemics and policies since the Godhra massacre.

Mr. Modi may or may not have cast a spell on the masses in Gujarat; he has certainly enthralled the so-called "younger leadership" in the BJP, in and out of the State. Root-less leaders such as Venkaiah Naidu or Arun Jaitley remain mesmerised by Mr. Modi's capacity for venom and vehemence; the only man who has refused to be swept off his feet is the firmly-rooted Keshubhai Patel. Some of Mr. Modi's admirers even see him as a "historical figure". Mr. Modi is being deliberately marketed as a "die-hard" defender of the "Hindu samaj".

But what is pertinent, more than anything else, is that Mr. Modi himself genuinely believes that his blatantly anti-reconciliatory (read anti-Muslim) positioning has elevated him to the status of the most popular leader among Hindus. Ahead of Mr. Advani, and definitely ahead of Mr. Vajpayee. Call it hubris, call it megalomania, Mr. Modi is a driven man. Should voters give him even a majority of one seat, his managers are ready to project him as the next "natural" national leader of the BJP-RSS combine. Given half a chance, these managers would want Mr. Advani and Mr. Vajpayee to enjoy the bliss of "sanyas", sooner than later.

That brings us to the second dramatis personae: Mr. Advani. His prime ministerial ambitions have come to be inextricably linked with the electoral outcome in Gujarat. As the Union Home Minister, Mr. Advani had the opportunity — and the obligation — to ensure that the authority of the State Government was exercised fairly and firmly after Godhra; instead, he looked the other way while the Gujarat administration actively sided with the rioter. Now, his political future is hostage to Mr. Modi's prescriptions and preferences; even re-election from the Gandhinagar Lok Sabha constituency may become a dicey proposition if Narendrabhai does not feel sufficiently protected. If the BJP manages to win in Gujarat, Mr. Advani may well find himself having to play second fiddle to a Modi-fied agenda, which in turn would take him quite far away from the respectable political centrist ground, that sine qua non of prime ministerial viability.

The third relevant individual, of course, in the Gujarat battle has to be the Prime Minister. Mr. Vajpayee has gone on record that he wanted to see Mr. Modi's back after the State Government-inspired violence against the Muslims. Mr. Modi's Gujarat has transmogrified itself as the anti-thesis of everything Mr. Vajpayee stood for in his long public life. The best revenge he can take on his tormentors — in and out of the Cabinet, in and out of the BJP — is to quietly use the vast resourcefulness of his office to ensure a level playing field in Gujarat. Assuming Mr. Vajpayee is still interested in staying put for the rest of his prime ministerial innings, he may have to shed his ambivalence and for once he may have to respond to the national rather than the BJP's partisan cause. A Modi victory in Gujarat will only embolden all those, in and out of the BJP, who want to hustle him out of that nice sprawling bungalow on Race Course Road.

The overlapping interests and stakes in Gujarat of these three individuals, of course, represent the larger struggle over the future of the Indian polity. The Hindutva establishment has come to view the Gujarat contest as a modern day equivalent of the Mahabharata, a battle of epic proportions, pitting the Hindu civilisation against a combination of the "international church, Islamic world, and jehadi terrorists". All those who oppose Mr. Modi and the BJP are anti-Hindu, divisionists and have a soft corner for terrorists who would torch a train at Godhra or storm the Akshardham temple in Gandhinagar. The liturgy of hate and divisiveness is deemed to be legitimatised by the larger war cries of "war against terror" being chanted in Washington.

In a way, the Modi-fied Hindutva challenge is more fundamental — and more subversive — than the Ramjanmabhoomi movement. The Ram Mandir mobilisation succeeded because it appealed to a vague sense of historic wrong symbolised by the Masjid, but essentially it succeeded because it also promised to deliver us from the seemingly interminable excesses of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty. The Ram-Mandir movement and its concomitant promise of "ram-rajya" were the perfect antidotes to the crony capitalism and corruption of the 1980s. That promise of "su-raaj" now stands buried six feet deep in the Mayawatiland called Uttar Pradesh, the very staging arena of the Ram Mandir "movement".

Note this. The new Hindutva assertiveness of the kind being displayed in Gujarat carefully steers clear of any promise of good governance or ideology or ideals. The Modi agenda is premised on three themes. First, a cultivated intolerance of dissent. The media, Marxists, Macaulayites, mandalites are all enemies who must be put down with a heavy hand; any human rights regime is irksome, and any institutional speed-breaker such as the Election Commission or the Judiciary must be undermined. Second, the governmental authority — coercive, political and legal — must be used to show the minorities their place. The minorities have to be taught to behave according to the rules framed by the VHP goons. And, third, an extremely unhealthy and untenable invocation of xenophobia, that too in this age of globalisation.

Granted, a defeat for Mr. Modi and his BJP means a victory for the Congress; but, there necessarily has to be an instrument for a historic task. The Gujarat battle is much bigger than the Congress or the BJP. After all, the Modi agenda is nothing but a script for a permanent civil war, which would ground all those dreams of making the 21st century the Indian century.

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