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Stake-holders and their opportunities

Beginning next week, the Gujarat electorate will have a chance to decide what to do with Chief Minister Narendra Modi. Without anyone wanting it, the 2007 Assembly election has got reduced to a vote for or against Mr. Modi and his brand of politics and leadership style. Since 2002, he has managed to graft on the Gujarat citizens impulses and attitudes that are very much at odds with India’s liberal political culture — as also against Gujarat’s own history and Gandhian legacy. Five more years with Mr. Modi at the helm will set Gujarat apart from the rest of India. Precisely because of these stakes the rest of India will watch keenly how the Gujarat voter discharges his historic opportunity.

The most crucial choice — and opportunity — is for the middle classes in Gujarat to make. For better or worse, Mr. Modi contrived to make most of the Gujarat Hindus co-conspirators in the ugly riots of 2002. Though a rather tiny slice of the community actually participated in the riots, most were made to feel a complicit part of the mob. He has variously invoked Gujarati pride, Hindu honour, and the alleged Muslim fifth-columnism to keep the Gujarati Hindu from revisiting the Chief Minister’s failure to perform his ‘rajdharma’; by keeping the Hindus locked in the mob psychology, Mr. Modi has extended to them protection — from law and, more importantly, from guilt — that anonymity of the crowd provides to each participant in a collective insanity.

The Gujarat 2002 narrative, as formulated by Mr. Modi, has a familiar ring to it: struggle over the meaning and blame for the violence. After every outbreak of mass violence, there is a struggle to apportion blame and fix (and evade) responsibility. Because the electorate anointed Mr. Modi the victor, he got to write the history of the 2002 mayhem. In that narrative, Muslims deserved what they got. He has managed to keep Hindus frozen in that moment of triumphalism, complicity, non-remorse, and non-reconciliation. Now, 2007 presents an opportunity for Hindus to break out of this five-year long psychological blackmail.

The BJP is the second key stake-holder. Ironically, it is the BJP that should be looking creatively at using the 2007 election as an opportunity to exorcise what is fast becoming the Modi albatross. As a political party, the BJP takes considerable organisational pride in not giving in to the personality cult. The Gujarat Chief Minister has redefined and challenged this ethos. Mr. Modi has become the Sanjay Gandhi of the BJP, relying on a clever mix of intimidation, coercion and individualism to manufacture a constituency for himself, over and above the party and its national leadership. The 2002 verdict has been used to justify arrogance and stubbornness. He has acquired an autonomy that cannot be curbed by the normal disciplinary tools available to the party leadership. The only way open to the party leadership is to enlist the electorate in excising the Modi virus.

The vast crowds he is able to attract and the paltry attendance at the meetings addressed by L.K. Advani and other “mass leaders” is a pointer. He has made others — especially those who strut in New Delhi as wholesome practitioners of the politics of decency — hostage to his brand of ugly politics. These national leaders have succumbed to his insistence on doing things his way, so much so that even leaders such as Keshubhai Patel, a founder-member of the BJP, has joined the ranks of dissidents. Mr. Patel’s dissent is proof, if any were needed, that Mr. Modi has taken a toll of the party’s time-tested capacity for internal conflict resolution.

It needs repetition that had Atal Bihari Vajpayee summoned the courage to send Mr. Modi packing before the 2004 elections, he would still have been presiding over the government in New Delhi. Mr. Modi’s extremism may endear him to some sections of the Gujarat electorate, but by the same reckoning he becomes untouchable outside the State, and any leader who has national ambitions will have to pay a price for cuddling up to him on his terms.

The third important stake-holder is Gujarat’s corporate crowd. The industrial and business classes have allowed themselves to be lured in by the Modi brand of leadership. It is this small section of society that has bestowed the maximum respectability on the Chief Minister. The industrialists’ argument is that unlike other Chief Ministers, Mr. Modi has not made unreasonable demands on them, has been kind and receptive to the entrepreneur’s needs for incentive; in return, they have not seen anything amiss or amoral in extending support to him.

In the businessman’s calculus, an alliance, however reluctant, with Mr. Modi is not a losing proposition. The economy remains 99 per cent outside the reach of the Muslim consumer, and there is very little that the alienated Muslims can do to them. Nonetheless, the business leaders have also had a taste of high-handedness of a capricious Chief Minister, answerable to none, accountable only to himself. All industrial tycoons who pretend in private to have been humiliated now have an opportunity to rectify the state of affairs.

More than personal considerations, these business leaders have an excellent chance to opt for Gujarat other than the one preferred by the Chief Minister. Mr. Modi can thrive only on a state of permanent hostility between Hindus and Muslims, and this would not be in the long term interests of social peace and harmony. Five more years of Mr. Modi can only perpetuate this state of instigated civil war. These corporate leaders owe it to themselves to look at their larger responsibility, cast as they are in the role of community leaders entitled to exercising a kind of moral appeal denied to their counterparts in other parts of India.

Of all the stake-holders, the Muslims have the most painful opportunity. They desperately need reassurance that the Indian constitutional arrangement retains its fairness, its inclusive representativeness, and that they have not been disfranchised. The BJP has chosen not to field a single Muslim candidate; this deliberate decision — “they don’t vote for us” — is a concession to Mr. Modi’s categories of friends and foes.

The Muslim leadership in and outside Gujarat owe it to themselves to make every vote count, and not to be taken in by the splinters, some genuinely angry, some inspired by a clever ruling establishment. The challenge before Muslims is to organise themselves intelligently as citizens, without recourse to fake fatwas which could be used to put in place a counter-mobilisation.

Above all, 2007 represents an opportunity to rescue Gujarat from the professional secularist — fundamentalist, unreasonable and unaccommodating in the defence of “secularism.” These last five years, because of their unreasonable and unaccommodating definition of “secularism,” many of these professional secularists have ended up validating the Modi appeal in Gujarat. As it is, the reputations and pretensions of so many secular voices in the country have, of late, come into question. Gujarat can do without these screaming professional crusaders, and there is no need for the non-Modi forces to be dictated by these self-appointed custodians of the secular creed.

No less a responsibility rests with the so-called secular political parties and leaders — the Mayawatis, the Paswans, and the Sharad Pawars — who are out to play the spoiler.

The Nationalist Congress Party, in particular, has settled for some very questionable candidates, who do not enhance the secular cause.

Lastly, 2007 presents an opportunity to the Congress to prove that it can master its own faction-ridden State unit. The 2007 election is no ordinary battle; Congress leaders at the Centre (Sonia Gandhi) and in the State (Ahmed Patel) would need to demonstrate that they can combine persuasion and coercion to make the warring leaders recognise the extraordinary opportunity. Apart from setting its house in order, the Congress has an opportunity to tell the Gujarat voters that, in its view, secularism does not mean pandering to Muslim obduracy. The party is still paying the price for the company the Congressmen kept in the 1980s.

The last, and perhaps the most important, stake-holder is every decent, law-abiding Indian citizen who hopes Gujarat will firmly turn its back on an appeal that threatens the very fabric of modern India. All these decent citizens can only hope that Gujarat’s stake-holders will converge their opportunities to produce a most desirable democratic conspiracy.

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