Modi-fication of Gujarat

The WikiLeaks have been a source of embarrassment, irony and scandal to those in power. The Congress has been working overtime protesting its innocence. More than the Congress, it is Indian democracy that looks silly and vulnerable, tainted by scandals which look almost too crude for belief. Standing tall in the middle of all of them is a surprising figure. Narendra Modi, long the bad boy of Human Rights, unexpectedly scores high as an “incorruptible”.
Mr Modi’s reception of the WikiLeaks report is also interesting.

The traditional scowl is gone and the chief minister smiles like a teacher’s pet, a favourite who has got 10 on 10. The wily politician seems to have all the moral luck with WikiLeaks singling him out as a great achiever.
The question one has to ask is whether this is the whole truth. There is no doubt that Mr Modi is a master of propaganda. The more important question is what is the nature of his mastery? What allows his authoritarianism to appear sanitised? It is not politics that Mr Modi has altered it is the culture of Gujarat. In reworking the cultures of the bureaucracy, the culture of educational institutions and the media, in trivialising the idea of dissent Mr Modi has become a master manipulator of culture.
Mr Modi has a tremendous contempt for his party and the bureaucracy. He has rendered his party ineffectual by distancing them signalling that as a mass leader he needs no party. The party, in fact, might be an embarrassment. With a show of threats and incentives, he has emasculated the bureaucracy. The Indian Administrative Services (IAS) stands as an “immaculate conception” behind him. What dissent there is, is private or in exile, more a drawing room murmur than a public expression. With the IAS behind him and the party hollow, it will be difficult to charge him with the riots. In fact the charges against Mr Modi will split with a “clean sheet” on the riots and charges against the police about encounters. The regime of investigative rituals from the Nanavati Commission to the Special Investigation Team (SIT) will sanitise him further. But the political skill of Mr Modi does not stop there. It is not just that he has normalised Gujarat but it is the nature and nuances of normalisation we must understand.
Mr Modi realises he has to move at two levels. Firstly, at the level of the market he had to guarantee stability, assure investment flow. Mr Modi has gone further by getting top corporate leaders from N.R. Narayanamurthy to Ratan Tata to give him certificates of leadership.
But it is his second ploy that makes him a master propagandist. Propaganda is a set of tactics to control belief and memory. Mr Modi made two moves here. He created a flat land of citizenship and pointed out that Muslims as an ethnic group were reluctant citizens.
He then took over the vocabulary of change, of progress, of development. Categories like the above empty memory and create an affinity for the future. The message is clear it is time to forget and move on.
Mr Modi then becomes the prime mover. Look at the hoardings on display. Like Stalin or Kim II Sung, he is the original cause of all goodness, from compressed natural gas to education to the establishment of the Nano. He creates a model of authoritarian democracy that a middle class in search of stability and mobility can identify with. Gujarat has invented its own core competence as a culture. It has created a religious-educational-entertainment complex which empties politics. There is no longer a possibility of idealogisation because Mr Modi has trivialised politics. In fact, he had contributed to the instrumentalisation of a society.
How has he done this? Consider the fact that Ahmedabad, apart form the institutes built in Sarabhai-Lalbhai era, is today a major intellectual corridor. It has a new Indian Institute of Technology, a Petroleum University, a new Central University, the Nirma and a string of private universities. Yet all these institutes work atomistically. There is little sense of an intellectual community that can speak autonomously on any issue. When education becomes instrumental and when an intellectual domain becomes equated to applied science, critique disappears. Protest seems effete and meaningless. The emphasis is on technology as a fix for problem solving.
This trivialisation is exaggerated by media by focusing on inane news. There is entertainment, leisure, a sense of mobility but little by way of political agenda. Even senior correspondents admit to the inanity of their columns and the trivialisation of news. The one dissenting force is today a parallel regime. Major religious cults redirect the middle class search for meaning to mobility and community leaving the state untrammelled in the pursuit of its agenda. Dissent at the media level is not possible. The best reporters remain content with innuendo or lapse into cynicism. Human rights institutions are virtually non-existent.
To trivialisation, the regime adds the tactics of certification. The diaspora and the corporate culture is constantly repeating the litany of how much progress Gujarat has made. While a regime of certification testifies to his legitimacy, dissent becomes isolated and lonely. Neither party, trade union or university can provide the culture for it. The non-governmental organisations (NGOs) remain happily silent, content to sustain their investment at the cost of the political. Between the emptiness of silence and the grand ovations, Mr Modi’s victory seems complete.
What is most pathetic to watch is Mr Modi’s treatment of dissent. The protest of his own party politician to the establishment of the Nirma plant is treated as treason against development. The protester is dismissed with the advice that they appeal to environment minister Jairam Ramesh who is portrayed as partisan and anti-growth. As a result the spaces for ecological debate, human rights battles and debates about the fate of marginals lapse into silence. The Congress under Ahmed Patel acts as if Gujarat is an alien country.
The hollowing out of politics in Gujarat is frightening.
The rhetoric from Delhi is illiterate or hysterical. The way the media waited after the Godhra judgment showed their inability to understand Gujarat. The news was damp squib and Mr Modi realised he did not even need to respond. People outside have little sense of the nature of politics in Gujarat. What is missing is a sociology of authoritarian democracy, of a tyrant being elected by acclamation. The “Modification” of Gujarat appears complete.

Shiv Visvanathan is a social scientist