Raja Narendra of Gujarat On the Wings of Intolerance

MARCH 11, 2013
Raja Narendra of Gujarat
On the Wings of Intolerance
by VIJAY PRASHAD
Narendra Modi is a big man. He does not seem his 62 years – energetic
and brash, larger than life. There is something in him of
Bhima-parakrama, of terrible prowess. It is this edge that makes many
uneasy with him. It also earns him the enthusiasm of those who favor
Discipline above democracy.

The BJP, the party of the Right, sees the Indian parliamentary
elections on the horizon and prepares to put forward its leading
candidate for the polls. The old guard is now exhausted – Atal Bihari
Vajpayee (born 1924) has lapsed into the fog of senility and L. K.
Advani's (born 1927) pasted smile no longer inspires the young. Those
who are in Modi's generation, born after Indian independence (1947),
Arun Jaitley (born 1952) and Sushma Swaraj (born 1953) do not have the
dynamism of Modi (born 1950). Jaitley, a student leader of the Right,
has spent his career at the Bar and as the preeminent bureaucrat of
the BJP. Swaraj began her political life as a socialist, having been
raised in a hard Right family, but soon drifted toward her family's
political commitments. Often mentioned in the same breathe as Modi,
neither Jaitley nor Swaraj have his mass capacity nor the machismo
that is so essential for a party whose natural inclination is toward
fascism.

The ruling coalition, the United Progressive Alliance (UPA), is
directed by the Congress Party, the historic vehicle for India's
freedom movement that has now devolved into the main engine to deliver
India to neo-liberal policies. In power since 2004, the UPA (now in
its second term) is fixated on increasing India's growth rate. Between
2004 and 2011, India's growth rate averaged 8.3 percent, but it has
fallen considerably since then (to 6.5 percent in 2011-12, and
expected to drop to 5.4 percent in 2012-13). There is little actual
expectation that the GDP will pick up. The IMF's Article IV
Consultation report for India (February 2013) argues that growth will
not pick up unless the government tackles supply bottlenecks
(particularly in mining and power), uncertainty about policies and
lengthy delays in investment project approvals and implementation. On
the question of delays, the IMF executives point to the coal sector
(India has the fifth largest coal reserves in the world). Energy needs
might be satisfied more efficiently if there were no "widening gap
between coal production and demand," but this gap is wide because of
"regulatory delays (mainly environmental clearances)." Get rid of the
environmental regulations, the IMF implies, and India will grow like
gangbusters.

Nothing divides the UPA from the BJP on the question of reforms. The
IMF's Laura Papi and Rahul Anand recently wrote, "Stamina to carry out
the reforms is required." At the next election, it is either the UPA
or the BJP that will come to power (the Left is too weak and the
regional parties are all happy to line up behind one or the other of
the bourgeois blocs). Neither will buck the IMF's policy suggestions –
they are only hampered by the demon of elections, where vote banks
have to be guaranteed certain state benefits to cajole them to abandon
one of the bourgeois blocs for the other. This is of course an
irritant to the IMF wizards.

Modi has put himself forward as a better reformer for Indian
capitalism than the current Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh. As Chief
Minister of Gujarat, Modi claims to have created a miracle in his home
state and wants this to be his resume for the PMship. Unfortunately
for Modi, his history does not allow such subterfuge. Not only is Modi
the putative leader of the BJP, but also he has been since his
childhood a member of the RSS, the moral center of Indian fascism. His
rise to the top of the BJP came from both his loyal service to the RSS
and his organizational work during the Ram Janambhoomi movement in the
1980s and 1990s, which culminated in the destruction of the 16th
century Babri Masjid in Ayodhya and the anti-Muslim riots that came in
its wake. Modi then returned to Gujarat as Chief Minister, where he
oversaw the mass murder of over three thousand Muslims and the
systematic disenfranchisement of Muslims and Christian tribals (in the
Dangs district). Human Rights Watch's April 2002 report, "We Have No
Orders to Save You": State Participation and Complicity in Communal
Violence in Gujarat, should be compulsory reading for the Indian
electorate.

Mention of the Gujarat killings rattles Modi's supporters. They like
to turn to the record of the Congress, which is no better. When you
scratch a Modi supporter, out pours all manner of drivel about
"Muslims" – birth rates are too high, they get all the advantages,
damaged mosques are repaired with state funds, not damaged temples and
onward. The BJP high command would like to bury this seam of
anti-minority sentiment in the party. It excites the fanatics, but it
terrifies the liberals. There is something indecent in this kind of
talk. The high command would like to concentrate on two elements:

* The Corrupt UPA government with its chair, Sonia Gandhi, as the
principle target. There is no doubt that the Gandhi family has
vacuumed more than its fair share of the social wealth into its bank
accounts and its several properties. Her son, the dauphin of the
Congress, Rahul Gandhi makes periodic trips to Dubai, they say, to
make sure that the vaults are intact. No question that the Congress is
vulnerable, as scam after scam unfolds. Little birds in Delhi tweet
that Rahul Gandhi's task is to maintain his family's hold on power so
that investigations of their personal corruption are not opened.

* The torrent of social ills in the country, with the rapes and
violence on the rise. The BJP's sentimentality for Tradition leads it
to make the case that far too much social laxity has enveloped India
in a social crisis. From here come all manner of misogynistic and
feudal statements about Indian Womanhood. It asserts, as most
fascistic organizations do, that its brand of Discipline is the
antidote to what has befallen India. There is no concern for the
widening inequalities, a contributing factor to the social mayhem.

Against this record, the BJP would like to champion Modi as the Vikas
Purush, the Development Leader. Modi would like this own Rath Yatra to
travel directly from the industrial belt of Gujarat to Delhi with no
detour through Ayodhya. Modi's attempt to remake his image as a
secular leader is threatened by the memory of the 2002 Gujarat pogrom
and Modi's own muscular commitments to the RSS. A weakened Congress
would prefer Modi as its adversary than a more moderate BJP leader –
as a caricature, Modi is easy to tackle.

Modi's supposed probity is compromised by rumors of his own corrupt
practices. When Wharton rescinded a speaking invitation to Modi, his
prime backer Gautam Adani of the Adani Group withdrew his support to
the Wharton India Economic Forum. Anti-corruption campaigner Arvind
Kejriwal has accused Modi of corrupt deals with Adani, facilitating
his access to easy licenses for his power plant, cheap land and cheap
coal blocks. Modi and Adani deny the allegations. Once the flurry of
the election season will open, more firm claims will emerge.

The bromides about the Gujarat miracle dissolve in the ether of the
facts. My Frontline colleague, Lyla Bavadam, shows that in Gujarat the
rate of growth of employment over the past twelve years has been zero,
that between 40 and 50 percent of children are underweight and half of
its children are malnourished, and that basic goods (fuel, food,
clothing and housing) are among the more expensive in India. "Low
employment, low wages, and high prices," writes Bavadam, "the formula
is one of despair." To this "model" must be added Modi's reactionary
ideas about caste. In his Karamyog (2007), Modi writes that those
castes fated to do sanitation work (clean gutters, sweep houses and
cart away refuse), such as the Balmikis, do so as an "experience in
spirituality." "I do not believe that they have been doing this job
just to sustain their livelihood," says Modi, who anoints them to this
despicable work because it is their "duty to work for the happiness of
the entire society." Subhash Gatade, who edits Sandhan, points out
that when confronted by Modi's logic a leading Dalit poet asked, "Why
didn't it occur to Modi that the spirituality involved in doing menial
jobs hasn't ever been experienced by the upper castes?" Old ideas of
caste hierarchy mollified by spiritual balm, old ideas of growth
corroded by social distress. Modi's Gujarat models anomie, not hope.
This is Gujarat as the world of voluptuousness and the world of woes.

Fortunately, Modi's road to Delhi must go through 543 parliamentary
seats. The BJP would have to win a majority of these seats before it
can turn to its parliamentary leader to stake a case for the PMship.
In the 2009 election, the BJP won 116 seats, with its coalition
bringing in 159. The Congress won 206, with its UPA bloc winning 262.
It would be a remarkable turn of events for the BJP to double its seat
count, which is why it has to rely on regional parties; apart from one
in the South (AIADMK) and one in the North (Akali Dal), the other
regional parties are not comfortable with Modi's corrosive history.
The Congress is not an adversary and the corporate media has already
begun to sing Modi's praises. It is only this regional factor that
might block Modi's Juggernaut ride to Delhi.

Vijay Prashad's new book, The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of
the Global South, is out this month from Verso Books.