It may sound a bit of a tautology but because Narendra Modi is quintessentially a Gujarat product, a proper analysis of Gujarat’s trajectory should be central to any understanding of what is happening to India. The subject can be reframed: How did Narendra Modi come about? Could Modi have shaped up in any part of India other than Gujarat? Was Gujarat set on an inexorable course it would have traversed even without a Modi? What social and economic circumstances and political context, at home and abroad, confirmed Gujarat on that journey?
Answers to these inter-related questions are strewn in the pages of this comprehensive anthology of academic meditations, spread over five decades, by two brilliant and respected social scientists who have devoted a lifetime to analysing Gujarat’s social and political transformations. Jan Breman and Ghanshyam Shah lay out in granular detail Gujarat’s evolution from the pre-colonial era to the Hindutva-drenched polity that it has become today. It is a veritable tour de force of Gujarat’s modern history. The narrative is comprehensive, the tone is detached and the research is exhaustive. Cumulatively, the volume reaffirms the authors’ reputation as Gujarat’s foremost analysts.
‘Gujarat, Cradle and Harbinger of Identity Politics: India’s Injurious Frame of Communalism,’ Jan Breman and Ghanshyam Shah, Tulika Books, 2022.
It makes depressing reading. The brilliant dissections, beginning with Ghanshyam Shah’s January 1970 piece in EPW (on the 1969 riots in Ahmedabad), bring out the ‘brick by brick’ building of the Hindutva movement machine. As Breman and Shah articulate in the introduction, their argument is “that communal Hindutva politics is invented and conceptualized as a religion-centric cultural community versus imagined others by the upper strata of society, to inculcate and legitimize their idea of social order and religion with hegemonic values to perpetuate their dominance over society.” This argument is fleshed out in painstaking detail in chapter after chapter.
Three aspects about modern Gujarat stand out from this anthology.
First: It is a sobering thought that this Hindutva project found its most engaging traction in a region that has been known as Gandhi’s Gujarat. Admittedly, there was never any direct ideological or intellectual stand-off between the Gandhians and the Hindutva crowd; revered as the Mahatma, Gandhi was painting on a much larger scale, while the Hindutva forces in Gujarat were yet to acquire any kind of organizational coherence and, consequently, were content to tactically “hide their claws”, to use a Deng Xiaoping maxim. Gandhi’s last visit to Gujarat was on January 8, 1942 (Bardoli). His last visit to Ahmedabad was in November 1936 and he did not go back to the city even after the first ‘modern’ communal riot in 1946.
Although he was serenaded in popular culture as “Sabarmati ka Sant”, Gujarat never comprehensively or wholeheartedly accepted Gandhi’s ideological hegemony or his political charm. Indeed, as Gandhian scholar Tridip Suhurd noted, it was right-wing leader K.M. Munshi who was to dethrone Gandhi and an earlier literary icon, Govardhanram Tripathi, from Gujarat’s cultural self-image. As Suhrud observes, Munshi manufactured a cultural vision “which Gujarat made its own. It is based on an imaginary past and seeks to create a cultural identity based on the imaginary notions of past glory, signified by the word ‘Asmita,’ a word that captured the political imagination of Gujarat in the late 1980s.”
If the Hindutva message could seep through the educated, upper classes of Gujarati society, it was because this strata had quietly subscribed to the Munshi-crafted notion of a glorious past. The Gujarati upper classes and upper castes could find nothing in this invocation of Asmita that would be at odds with nationalistic passions. In the introduction to Munshi’s Patan Trilogy, the translators, Rita and Abhijit Kothari note that “in trying to create an awareness of Gujarat’s asmita, Munshi takes pains to clarify that it is not a parochial notion that is antithetical to the notion of nationalism.”
Munshi himself has addressed the issue of appearance of contradiction: “Some people, revelling in their scepticism, ignore the concept of regional Ashmita. They believe that this Ashmita comes in the way of developing a sense of Indian Nationalism. But these people, so quick to apply Western standards to our country, forget certain truths evident from our history, situation and circumstances. For centuries, India has had regional cultural values. The characteristic culture of each region has given rise to its unique Ashmita. And yet the dominant soul of the Aryans has wrought such a unity in the life and cultural values among these regions that a clear idea of Indian Nationalism has encompassed these apparently distinct regions. Thus, strengthening regional Asmita will not weaken the growth of Nationalism. On the contrary as regional Ashmita grows, Nationalism will grow in tandem all over Aryavarta.’’ [Munshi, 1933, introduction to Volume 3, The King of Kings]
The second aspect that stands out in this deeply researched work is that the onward march of Hindutva politics took place at a time when the presumably “progressive” forces had a lock on electoral politics, especially after the formation of Gujarat as a separate state in 1960. The gradual gestation of the Hindutva project has to be seen—and understood– in the context of the collapse of the Old Economy and with it, its familiar social and cultural certainties, and the unmentored rise of the New Economy with its untamed roughness and rawness.
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Breman is remarkably insightful in detailing the dislocations and disruption caused by economic forces in the otherwise ‘peaceful Gujarat’ of popular narrative. His two chapters on “Ghettoization in Ahmedabad” and “Clearing the City of the Undeserving Underclass” bring out how urbanization in Gujarat, as elsewhere, created raw impulses and carved out rough terrains, eminently amenable to the Hindutva manipulators and entrepreneurs. This analysis perhaps explains the BJP’s electoral dominance in the four major urban centres– Ahmedabad, Baroda, Surat, Rajkot – and this dominance in turn undergirds the Hindutva ideological hegemony.
For example, Breman, in the chapter “An Anti-Muslim Pogrom in Surat,” recalls how that city became “fertile soil for such a disaster because the political climate had accepted no restrictions to the informalization of a rapidly expanding economy” as well as on capitalism in its “nakedness and rawness”. Rapid urbanization overwhelmed Surat; nobody was in charge or could be in charge of shepherding the change as raw and rough forces mushroomed and, as Breman says, the ancient city was teeming with “footloose proletarians “— all susceptible to repression and exploitation and who constituted the recruiting pool for the Hindutva brigade.
Urbanization took its most disruptive toll in Ahmedabad. Once known as the “Manchester of the East,” the city witnessed the collapse of the textile mills. That collapse had a cascading impact. Once, these mills were the very embodiment of a harmonious city, overseen by civic-minded ‘nagar sethias’ who also ran and owned these industrial units, which in turn represented a certain kind of social integration, generating civic and social capital. Once the great names—the Kasturbhai, the Sarabhais, etc. — retreated in the face of new technology and new social and political forces, the city became the staging ground for the clash of low-level political operatives, communal groups and criminal gangs-. Each of these was catering to the demands of an expanding economy and its concomitant rapid urbanization.
Much before Narendra Modi made a fetish of “vikas,” industrial development and its patrons were easily and comfortably acceptable in popular discourse as wealth creators. Soon after he became chief minister in 1980, Madhavsinh Solanki held out a vision to turn Gujarat into a “second Japan.” The widespread drought in the years 1985/86/87 brought collective misery and discontent; it was in this context that the Narmada Project, as the very embodiment of development, got revived. Because the Narmada Project was being opposed by a coalition of environmentalists and human rights activists who were mostly non-Gujaratis, led by the Baba Amte- Medha Patkar duo of the Narmada Bachao Andolan, the Gujarat political class discovered the potency of the “Gujarati pride” slogan.
In fact, as chief minister, Chiman Patel, who fancied himself as “chhota sardar,” expediently sent his wife at the head of a counter-march to confront Medha Patkar at the Gujarat-Maharashtra border. A kind of Narmada nationalism was instigated and mobilized by a beleaguered chief minister to survive another day; what is more, this Narmada nationalism so overwhelmingly prioritized ‘development’ that all other concerns—environment, Adivasis rights and habitat and livelihood issues, human rights—were frowned upon. Vikas had a free run of the place. Gujarat had irrevocably turned right in the conduct and thinking of its economic institutions and practices. No progressive or left voice would be allowed any political space or intellectual respect.
Third. A significant theme running through these essays is of complications in introducing and sustaining the politics of social engineering. In 1980, the Congress leaders had brilliantly put together a new social coalition –KHAM (Kshatriya, Harijan, Adivasi, and Muslim.) The Congress was to reap a huge electoral harvest as this social bloc, constituting a majority, voted overwhelmingly for the party, both for the Lok Sabha and the State Assembly elections. The strategy needed conviction, clarity and consistency and a deft touch, as consequences required to be tackled imaginatively. Those social forces and interests that felt displaced from their social status or robbed of political power were naturally resentful, and smart politics required that the beneficiaries of the ancient regime be mollycoddled; just as those who felt newly “empowered” needed to be gentrified.
There is no evidence that the Congress leadership was ever cognizant of the emerging imperatives of political economy. As Shah notes: “Solanki’s commitment to empowering the poor was as shallow as that of Mrs. Indira Gandhi.” Worse, the Congress did not address itself to the churning its electoral politics had unleashed; consequently, the old Patel-dominated political order stood dismantled but no purposeful arrangement was made to replace it.
A recurring theme that emerges from these excellent essays is the ability of the Hindu right-wing forces to instigate violence and bloodbath between the Dalits and the Muslims. “The former underdogs, however, had to pay a price for being allowed to join the mainstream society. On behalf of the Hindu bourgeoisie, they were made to do the dirty handiwork of exorcising the enemy within. Reports from Mumbai and Surat spoke of significant Dalit participation in the riots.”
The Hindutva forces were applying themselves; but, the Congress, as the principal and primary political force in Gujarat, could not gather its wits to take any corrective action. Why? Was it that the Nehruvian elite was developing doubts about its secular mantra? It certainly did not have the appetite to impose any kind of cost — political, moral or social, economic– on those who challenged its political dominance. Even the media was allowed to continue to poison the middle classes and help the Hindutva forces to deepen their false consciousness. On the other hand, as Ghanshyam Shah dissects, the RSS/VHP was continuously innovative enough to go out of its way to make the Dalits feel welcome and respected—without of course in any way wanting to dismantle the ancient hierarchical social arrangements.
Cumulatively, these brilliantly insightful essays confirm that Gujarat was well-versed with the grammar of communal violence and polarization well before Narendra Modi was named the playing captain of the Hindutva XI. Breman quotes S. Chandra (Of Communal Conscience and Communal Violence: Impressions from Post-riot Surat, EPW, 1993) to say Gujarat had already anticipated the future choices India would be called upon to make: “At stake in the present turmoil is the very conception of the Indian nation-state. A federal, plural and secular polity is sought to be converted into a regimented Hindu monolith.”
Also read: As the Gujarat Model Goes National, Hindutva Hunts for the ‘Enemy in Our Midst’
As it happens, this reviewer was active as a professional journalist in Gujarat, with The Times of India (1985 to 1992), and had a reporter’s feel for many of the developments covered in this anthology. Admittedly, a reporter’s craft differs from that of a social scientist and the two operate by different standards of observation and analysis; notwithstanding this caveat, it is possible to suggest four areas of focus that do not get sufficient attention or remain under-appreciated:
First: it is an accident of history that it was Indira Gandhi who, unwittingly, gave the Hindutva forces the first break in Gujarat. When she returned to power in 1980, Indira Gandhi was nursing a silent resentment against the Gandhians and Gandhian organizations. She was convinced that the whole “JP movement” was sustained and supported by the Gandhians; indeed, JP had made the Gandhi Peace Foundation on Rouse Avenue (now renamed as Deen Dayal Upadhaya Marg) his staging headquarters. She felt a lesson had to be taught: there was a cost to be paid by those who chose to oppose her. The most primitive and the most debilitating instrument – a judicial commission of inquiry — was preferred. A retired high court judge, Justice P.D. Kudal, was entrusted with the task. The Kudal Commission, in a way, was the Congress answer to the Shah Commission of the Janata Party rule.
Although the Indira Gandhi establishment had many other fish to fry and soon its attention got diverted to more pressing concerns, once set up, the commission acquired an institutional life of its own. It set in motion the protocol of inquiry, which eventually translated into harassment and incapacitation for numerous Gandhian organizations across the country. Its presence was felt most acutely in Gujarat and Bihar. In Gujarat particularly, the Gandhians had quite a presence; they were in control of the ashrams and other Gandhian institutions which were a site of moral respectability and of a certain kind of ideological assertion. In the rural areas, especially in the Adivasi regions, the ashrams articulated the voice of the civil society and of Gandhian sanity. As Ghansyam Shah notes, many of these organizations were “hotbeds of faction fights and corruption,” nonetheless the presence of these Gandhians provided a kind of bulwark against the merchants of Hindutva virus.
Once the Kudal Commission’s heavy hand made itself felt, these Gandhian institutions in rural Gujarat ceased to be outposts of harmony and togetherness. Demoralized and de-funded, the men and women manning these institutions were made to feel redundant and unwanted. The vacuum was slowly but surely filled by the Hindutva organizations. The entire rural Gujarat was an open territory to be conquered by the communal groups and forces. This structural fault-line remains most under-appreciated and therefore there is little counter-mobilization to win back the rural Gujarati mind.
In the larger context, if the Gandhians were the bad boys, then Gandhi and Gandhism were left undefended. The Congress leadership felt content to “own” Gandhi without having to live up to the Mahatma’s high standards. It did not realize the ideological significance of Gandhi. As Ghanshyam Shah notes: “For Gandhi, all religions were ‘fundamentally equal.’ He emphasized that ‘we must have innate respect for other religions as we have for our own. Mind you, not mutual toleration, but equal respect.” This Gandhian position, as Shah argues, was in contrast with the Sangh: “For the champions of the Hindutva ideology, superiority of Hinduism over other religions is overt and aggressive.” By the time the Hindutva forces got a second wind, the Congress leadership, on its part, was no longer enamoured of the Mahatma.
Second: The role of the Muslim underworld is vastly under-analysed (perhaps it is unanalysable in a social science format). The turning point came in 1987 when a new Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation had to be elected; the city was reeling under repeated cycles of bouts of communal clashes and long spells of mindless curfew in the walled areas. The BJP effortlessly won a majority in a city that had become deeply polarised; but more significant than the BJP’s electoral success was the victory of a Muslim gangster, Abdul Latif, from five out of eight municipal wards he contested, that too from behind the bars. His astounding performance cemented in the Hindu public perception an association between criminals and the Muslim community.
The vote for Latif was an expression of utter desperation at the Congress’s politics of cynicism and its failure to perform its raj dharma, or even to provide a modicum of fairness in police administration. That Latif was able to acquire a reputation for having the Gujarat police in his pocket – he was seen as a walking advertisement for the criminal-politician nexus — produced resentment and anger among a section of honest police officers who came to scoff and scorn the elected ‘secular’ political leaders. It was this ‘Latif Effect’ that contaminated many police officers and men with the communal virus.
Though Latif was primarily an Ahmedabad phenomenon and a run-of- the-mill criminal, his victory in the Ahmedabad civic polls brought him state-wide attention and deepened the majority community’s animosities and prejudices. The BJP was shrewd enough to offer Gujarat’s voters a stark choice between “Ram Rajya” and “Latif Raj”.
No less momentous an event was the kidnapping of industrialist Gautam Adani in December 1997. A Congress-supported minority government was in power in Gandhinagar. The kidnapping was executed by a gang headed by Fazllu Rahaman, a criminal originally from Bihar who was operating in Gujarat under protection of the Latif network. Ransom was paid and the industrialist was released unharmed. It was the worst possible example of very bad politics producing extremely bad governance. A few months later, the same Fazllu Rahaman was reported to have threatened another big Gujarati industrialist, Karsaranbhai Patel (of Nirma fame). Gujarati industrialists drifted towards a conclusion that Congress-dominated politics would not be able to provide political stability or requisite security; they began the search for a new politics that would ensure protection from the criminals and chaos. An extremely crucial segment had switched over to the saffron column—without the Congress leaders in Gujarat showing any concern or even appreciation of the consequences of these shifting loyalties and allegiances.
Third: The 1980s was a period of utter and absolute Congress supremacy. The Congress won 144 and 149 seats out of 180, respectively, in the 1980 and 1985 assembly elections. In 1980 Lok Sabha elections, the Congress had 25 out of 26 seats, and in 1984, 26 out of 26. This was a period of intense factionalism in the party; the Congress had an embarrassment of riches in terms of leaders – Madhavsinh Solanki, Jeenabhai Darji, Sanat Mehta, Pradeepsinh Jadeja, M.M. Mehta, Ratubhai Adani, Harivallabh Parikh — all grounded, connected and involved, all having an all-Gujarat name recognition. Compared to this roster, the BJP had only district level leaders – Keshubhai Patel, Shankarsinh Vagehla, Ashok Bhat, Kashi Ram Rana. Yet neither Indira Gandhi nor Rajiv Gandhi, as wielders of the high command authority, could impose a sense of discipline, common purpose or esprit de corps.
Gujarat became a classic example of “Congress culture” — immediate, expedient and amoral pursuit of power at the expense of public good and welfare; bad politics producing bad governance which blunted any and all instruments that could help roll back the incipient challenge from the Hindutva corner.
When in October 1990 the Congress Party joined hands with Chimanbhai Patel’s Janata Party faction (after the BJP had walked out of the coalition following L.K. Advani’s arrest in Bihar), the Congress unwittingly ended up buying into Chimanbhai’s heavy baggage. Worse, the chief minister and his chief secretary, the redoubtable H.K. Khan, were widely suspected to be master manipulators who had little regard to public good or political ethics. The daylight murder of a general secretary of the Gujarat Congress, Rauf Valliulah, was a turning point; Gujarat had become an undeclared rogue state. It was widely perceived that intra-party rivals could be eliminated by the officially patronized criminals, who were almost entirely Muslim.
There was no way to quantify the damage incurred by the secular cause on account of the Congress and its shabby governance. Breman does talk of an unholy collusion: “The criminalisation of public life has assumed previously unknown proportions with an alliance emerging between economic interests, political power-mongers and underworld figures.” All this was deemed to be intrinsic to Congress-style politics and no one wanted to be reminded that bad politics was driving good governance out.
On this theme, Jan Breman quotes this reviewer’s take on the 1992 Surat riots: “The overall picture that emerged in Surat in the last decade was one of total legal lawlessness. The state and its agencies commanded neither respect nor induced any fear. In public perception the Indian state in Surat was denuded of its legitimacy. Therefore, when the crunch came after the Ayodhya denouement, the state did not inspire any awe.” [The Surat Explosion: Wages of Lumpen Capitalism,’ The Times of India, January 12, 1993]
Preoccupied as the Narashima Rao establishment was with management of the 1991 economic paradigm shift, it had little inclination to apply itself to the gathering of Hindutva forces in Gujarat. Its association with Chiman Patel did keep the BJP away from the seats of authority in Gandhinagar, but in the long term the Congress lost its historical political capital and squandered away its reputation for legitimacy, governance and serious commitment to public good and political stability. It did not help that Chimanbhai Patel had a reputation for utter lack of principles.
Fourth: Like most Indian social scientists Breman and Shah also underestimated the impact of 9/11 on the Indian middle classes. In particular, the Gujaratis, with their entrenched and extended North American connections – like most other middle-class Indians — had mentally crossed over to the anti-Islam column; that prejudice was to get reinforced more and more as the United States bought into a kind of Islamophobia.
Ghanshyam Shah does allude, almost in passing, to the post-9/11 prejudices: “If the Parliament and the Kashmir Assembly can be attacked, people were told, then what safety was there for the citizens of the country.” A few pages later, he observes: “Additionally, Muslims are painted not only as anti- national but also terrorists with dangerous weapons and an international network. The testing of nuclear bombs by India and Pakistan, the Kargil war between the two countries, the September 11 attacks in the USA, the attack on the Indian Parliament, frequent terrorist acts in Jammu and Kashmir…. all these facilitated an orchestrated campaign that ‘Hindus are not safe’…”
The post-9/11 days had found Gujarat and India in convulsions. The Indian middle classes, which have always looked upon the United States as the port of last refuge as well as an escape route to a life of reasonable prosperity, stood jolted. If that was not enough, the Indian Parliament was attacked by two Pakistan-protected terror groups—Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Taiba. Prime Minister Vajpayee promised an ‘aar-paar ki ladai’; the country got whipped into a militant mood as the government put in place a supposedly coercive military strategy called Operation Parakram.
Undeterred, the militants were able to mount another daring attack, at Kaluchak on May 14, 2002. Then came the terror attack on the Akashardham Temple in Gandhinagar on September 24, 2002. Gujarat was just a few weeks away from the polls. By the time the temple was cleared of the terrorists, 33 ‘devotees’ were dead. The post-9/11 crossfire had now reached Gujarat. An extremely important sect, the Swaminarayn sampradayaith, with a vast following, scurried to seek protection and comfort from chief minister Modi. The Congress, as it were, had traditionally been ill-equipped and disinclined to engage with the various saints/cult gurus who wielded enormous influence and a blind following among the lower strata of the social order.
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By the time Gujarat went to polls in December 2002, a combination of global, national and local events had ratcheted anti-Pakistan rhetoric up; Vajpayee had not only failed to dislodge Modi (after faulting him for not performing his raj dharma) but had felt obliged to join the chorus of “bad Muslims” at the BJP conference in Goa, thereby lending his silent endorsement for Modi’s anti-Muslim politics; the Congress party, under Sonia Gandhi, had offered its total support to the Vajpayee government after the December 13 attack and could not summon the imagination and flexibility to navigate between its officially hard secularism and hard nationalism, in the face of Modi’s rhetoric against Muslims.
Modi’s creative contribution was to help the Gujarat voter posit a connection between Pakistan and Indian Muslims and terrorism; once that cocktail of fears, anxieties and prejudices got brewed, Gujarat had a developed an appetite for hard Hindutva, “righteous” in its tactics and “virtuous” in its self-justifications and violent in its expression.
Ironically, perhaps the most prescient observation came from the Sangh corner; RSS ideologue Ram Bahadur Rai had noted, in a column in Jansatta in December 2002, that it was the Vajpayee government’s failed Operation Parakaram that created the milieu for Modi’s emergence: “Had the Centre dared to strike at the terrorists’ camps in Pakistan, Narendra Modi would not have become Gujarat’s hero. The Centre’s pusillanimity has made Narendra Modi a tall figure.”
And, of course, before the Muslims, there were the Christian missionaries as the chosen villains. As Ghanshyam Shah in his EPW piece “Conversion, Reconversion and State” reminds us, the Hindutva groups were no less vehement and no less vicious in working up the Hindus vs Christians binary, invoking and instigating violence in the Dangs, than they were against the Muslims.
The Modi puzzle remains unaddressed. He was neither the natural nor the tallest leader of the BJP in Gujarat. The likes of Keshubhai Patel, Shankersinh Vaghela and Suresh Mehta had greater visibility than Modi. In fact, the BJP in Gujarat had the same problem as the Congress: too many leaders, all important and useful to the party yet none so dominant as to naturally command respect and consensus. Modi was the least “grounded” of them. There was no sub-region of Gujarat where he could set up his tent. He was not a Patel and therefore could not be presumed to be the logical beneficiary of that influential community’s social dominance and economic clout. At best, he only had a rebellious presence in the BJP; other than Anandiben Patel and Amit Shah, no party leader could be identified as his comrade-in-arms though he had a resourceful ally in Praveen Togadia of the VHP. He had never tested himself in an electoral arena, and had no legislative or parliamentary experience before he intrigued his way to the chief minister’s office. That gift for intrigue had helped Modi make his way into Advani’s confidence.
It is perhaps one of those accidents of history that end up producing entirely unintended consequences: the Congress Party had decided to pit the popular Bollywood superstar Rajesh Khanna against L.K. Advani in the New Delhi Lok Sabha constituency in 1991. The idea was to call the bluff of Advani, who was strutting around as a great national leader after his Rathyatra. The so-called hero of the Ayodhya movement panicked. He scrambled to find a safe seat. Modi, ever the perfect intriguer, nudged him to contest from Gandhinagar, a seat held by his bete noire, Shankersinh Vaghela. Advani’s arrival and involvement in Gandhinagar’s electoral akhada injected a new energy into the Hindutva ranks in Gujarat. Advani, of course, had all-India dreams but he still needed a political manager to shepherd his constituency. Modi became the chosen impresario. Yet Modi never occupied or commanded the central stage in the Gujarat BJP. Rather, he had the dubious honour of having been “exiled” out of Gujarat by his own national leadership.
But as Breman and Shah so graphically paint, Gujarat was ready for a Modi even before he manoeuvred his way to the chief ministerial gaddi. Arguably, Modi was not out of sync with Gujarat’s cultural tapestry, drenched in the K.M. Munshi variety of romantic feudal glorious heritage; by the time Modi appears on the scene, Gujarat was prone to what Ashish Nandy once called “secondary authoritarianism,” often “triggered by the anxieties and insecurities of a post-traditional society” and “the normlessness of sectors alienated by the processes of social change.”
The old Gujarat order was in tatters as all its known institutions had become dysfunctional. Gujarat needed to be ministered and administered in a new idiom. Modi’s detractors often fail to acknowledge that with him began a period of political stability; it is easy to overlook that Gujarat had had eight chief ministers in ten years. Gujarat was in chaos, and there was social and political turmoil. Modi managed to imposed a kind of normalcy.
A more fundamental issue can be raised. What is use of good social science if what the social scientists tell us is not heeded by political leaders and civil society? The earliest and the most penetrating piece in this collection was published in 1970; and, yet there was no corrective policy or political initiative against the creeping communal menace. Lament we can endlessly about the Hindutva project; Breman and Shah have done a good job of decoding its messages and marketing; but it can be argued that these two brilliant chroniclers do not quite help dissolve the reader’s curiosity as to why those who positioned themselves in opposition to the communal polarization project failed to mount a counter-mobilization? Or, why the “secular” camp lacked clarity and conviction to defend its positions and policies?
Harish Khare was editor of The Tribune.
