IN Liberalization, Hindu Nationalism and the State: A Biography of Gujarat (OUP 2012), Nikita Sud traces the state's politics under colonialism and later under its Hindu religious and business elites. Their joint vested interests led to the parallel consolidations of the economic and religious rights in Gujarat. The region inherited a rich mercantile as well as a rich peasant-artisan based handicrafts traditions that go back to three millennia. The region also inherited a rich plural culture that has been well chronicled in early and medieval Indian and Asian sources. Colonial intervention cut off the region from its Asian cultural and trade moorings and rewrote India's past, transforming the nation's and the region's history from one of cultural coexistence to one of perpetual religious confrontation wherein the British came as saviours of the poor Hindus.

In this history, Somnath temple in Gujarat was made a symbol of Muslim aggression and Hindu suffering. Noted historian Romila Thapar in her celebrated history of the temple, entitled Somanatha: The Many Voices of A History, dates the origin of this interpretation of Ghazni's raid on Somnath to the mid-nineteenth century, when Governor General Ellenborough found it politically expedient to argue in the British House of Commons that Hindus had suffered a severe national trauma at Muslim raids on the temple and that the insult must be avenged by bringing back the temple gates from Ghazni. In 1840, he triumphantly handed the by now dilapidated gates to the assembled Hindu chiefs and princes, much to their amusement. By the late 19th century, the return of the gates and the official version given to the raid came to be mentioned in colonial history books.

No where in Indian Sanskrit texts, says Thapar, is Mehmood’s raid mentioned as a religious attack, or one which had any significance. That the temple was often raided for its riches, more often by Indian chiefs, finds mention. That the area in these centuries was a rich trading centre where in Muslim Arab and Indian Hindu traders of the area lived in great cultural bonhomie is suggested by the presence of a mosque within the precincts of the temple area. Sanskrit sources mention that the land was donated or sold for the specific purpose of building a mosque and that the land transference deed was signed by temple priests.

If the colonial project of rewriting India's history to suit colonial interests was one master stroke, its land policy whereby it created British style landlords in India by legalising the sale of peasant land in India was another one. As feudal India's symbiotic bonds between the zamindar and the peasant were broken for good, land became a commodity for profit and not for use. The new landlord class emerged as the pillars of the British Empire. In Saurashtra, the newly created Rajput landlords were glorified as inheritors of a tradition of valour and honour that chose death to servitude to the Mughals. Once again truth was made a casualty to colonial need to hold on to power.

Factually, Rajput princes after their subjugation had emerged as junior rulers and proud defenders of the Mughal Empire. Rajput and Mughal royalty made umpteen matrimonial alliances to cement the bond. British civil servant and historian James Tod, whose fictitious ‘Annals of Rajput Romances’ became hugely popular, portrayed a history where in Rajput royalty chose death to surrendering to the Mughals. Tod's popular tales, Ellenborough's Somnath tale, in time came to subtly but greatly contribute to a Hindu-Muslim divide. This divide underlined all colonial literature, especially school and college textbooks. Hindu nationalism was nurtured on this received wisdom.

Gujarat was at the core of the freedom movement led by Mahatma Gandhi, from around 1915. The state was then a front-runner in the Nehruvian project of modernisation and development, a period that lasted about two decades. The post- Nehru decades proved a period of transition from Nehruvian policies of land-to-the-tiller to land liberalisation, and from Nehru's socialism to the looming fascism of today's Sangh Parivar. KHAM, a coalition of the marginalised under a Congress Ministry, was an experiment that could have succeeded. The rise of Hindutva and liberalisation in Gujarat could have been resisted with greater political commitment by the Congress to the secular and socialist visions of the nation's founding fathers. But the Congress of the 1970's and 80’s was already in an advanced stage of degeneration.

Today Gujarat is a model liberalised state. Not surprisingly India's most liberalised state is also marred with a "systematic exclusion of the substantial interests of the historically, socially and economically marginalised" as Sud avers. For a high growth state it also has a dismally poor human development record. In 2002, it had over 12 lakh registered educated unemployed. Its spectacular growth story, beginning from the 1990s, has been limited to specific corridors, regions and sectors while disease, poverty and deprivation amongst the masses have visibly increased in this period. According to the Gujarat government's own figures in 2001, out of 6,028,999 rural families 52.32 per cent lived below poverty levels. Its development story can be more accurately described as ‘Development and Deprivation’ to borrow the title of Ghanshyam Shah's classic study on Gujarat. And yet the facade of ‘Gujarat Shining’ has held on for good two decades, assisted by the state's massive propaganda machine.

Today Gujarat is also a veritable Hindu Rashtra, rather an upper-caste-Hindu Rashtra. Its higher castes, the Savarna castes, along with some middling castes that have benefited from development, own all state resources. For the Avarna castes, there is chance of social mobility, they can be considered as part of the majority as members of the fascist brigades of the RSS such as the Bajrang Dal. As foot soldiers of the Hindutva Movement, they have been routinely called upon to flex their muscles against minorities in the many Dang-modelled massacres and demolitions of mosques and churches. As in no other state of India it is in Gujarat today that the economic and religious Rights feed on each other with the state acting as the chief facilitator in both projects. The state's present grim reality is effectively masked by slogans of 'Gujarati Asmita' and ‘Gujarat Shining’. Sud wonders why scholars have seen no coincidence in the ascendance of Hindu nationalism with the opening up of the Indian economy to liberalisation and globalisation, and narrates two incidents that became stepping stones to Gujarat's journey to Hinduisation and Liberalisation.

The KHAM Experiment
Up to 1971, Brahmin and Vanya elites continued to dominate the state government as well as the state Congress, in spite of their constituting a mere four percent and three percent of the state's population. Congress managed to keep its hold over the poor, the lower castes and the minorities all through the 1970's but not without a struggle. In 1980, in what seemed a masterstroke, Congress in an alliance with the KHAM (a Kshtriya-Harijan-Adivasi-Muslim combine) formed a formidable ministry. KHAM represented over 70 percent of the state's population as well as the OBCs. Congress had won a thumping majority. Even 95 government boards and corporations were dominated by KHAM groups. The upper castes reacted with vehemence.

In 1981, a student agitation was started, with the support of the ABVP, the student wing of the RSS, against the roster system that gave further concessions to SC and ST students. Despite reservations, the SC and ST students at that time held only 11 percent of the 4,500 medical college seats in Gujarat. The agitation against the roster system led to mass violence against Dalits and their properties in the slums and in industrial workers settlements in cities. An earlier student agitation against corruption led by ABVP in the early 1970s, when Congress was in power, had rocked Gujarat Assembly, and in the process established ABVP as a rabble-rouser of some strength. In the 1985 agitation, BJP and Janata Dal joined the protests. The mass violence was now directed against the Muslims, killing 200 people. The engineered violence stopped only after the Congress Chief Minister's resignation. Thus twice within 12 years upper caste Hindu opposition assisted by the BJP had brought down the Congress government, through street mobilisation. In the process, the BJP became a political force. Congress's biggest mistake, as Sud avers, was that it "treated KHAM merely as an electoral plank", and did nothing to politicise the group. Its shifting alliances with different groups in the following years revealed its opportunistic politics.

The Karkhana Case
Karkhana (pseudo-name) was a case of land acquisition for private Indian cement manufacturing company, the Karkhana, wherein the state brazenly flouted all environmental and land laws. In 1995, the state government converted a protected wildlife sanctuary in Gujarat's Kachchh district for the exploitation of minerals by Karkhana. It also manoeuvred around Coastal Regulation Zone laws for a private port to be built for export of Karkhana cement. Kachchh was an area rich in minerals such as limestone that is used in cement manufacture. Karkhana's mining proposal meant usurping land from the wildlife sanctuary, set up in 1981 to protect and develop wildlife and the environment. In a district with less than 2.5 percent green cover, the sanctuary was considered as particularly important. But brushing aside all considerations, the then Congress government issued a notice in 1993 that deregulated the sanctuary from around 800 sqkm to around 94 sqkm. Since the deregulation had not been passed by the Assembly as required, an NGO challenged the decision and got it declared as void by the state high court. However, the government and Karkhana were both so confident of finding a way out that while the project was stuck in the courts, the Karkhana could buy 2 1/2 sq km of forest land from the state at a throwaway price. In 1995, when the BJP government came to power, it hastily got the deregulation resolution passed with little debate in the absence of an opposition that earlier in the day had been expelled from the Assembly for rowdy behaviour.

Today Kachchh is a leading cement manufacturing centre. India is the world's largest cement manufacturer and exporter. Asbestos, banned in almost all western countries, continues to take the lives of millions. Yet no government, either at the Centre or in Gujarat, has been able to ban its manufacture. That a water intensive cement manufacturing industry was set up in Gujarat's desert region led to many NGO protests and uproars from the opposition. The state government handled both in its own high-handed manner. Those NGOs who questioned the gains of liberalism at such cost were dismissed as "anti-development, anti-nationalist, and terrorists". Even the state high court dismissing an NGO petition decreed that "it is clear that people of Kuchchh would benefit at large" (HC Gujarat 1995). To facilitate the project, government departments overlooked all procedures and acted as brokers for the Karkhana. The state's open alliance with big business and its Hindutva agendas went hand in hand.

Narendra Modi's style of functioning as the state Chief Minister foreshadowed his later functioning as the Prime Minister of the nation. Trained in an RSS sakha, he ran the state as one. Often key decisions unilaterally taken by Modi even bypassed the state assembly. BKS, the farmers' wing of the RSS, is more often than not a tool to spread the agenda of the RSS. The landed and industrial elites appropriate all the resources of the state. In this regard, they mirror the prevalent national and international practices, with one difference. In Gujarat, the process of political bargaining is often filtered through Hindutva lenses.

The state's participation in the 2002 massacre has been well documented. By 2002, the composition of the government had reached a point that made its complicity a natural process. Modi's initial reactions need recall. During a ‘Gaurav Yatra’ (Procession of Pride) soon after the massacre, he said "What should we do? Run relief camps for them (Muslims)? Do we want to produce baby producing centres?"

It is important to remember that, unlike in Europe, India never had a state religion, either in the ancient or in the medieval period. Nor did the Indian state ever exclusively patronise one single religion. This was the reason why, unlike Europe, India never had religious wars. Religious fanaticism and big money are lethal combines. Today for the first time in Indian history the twin forces have seized state power. Their monstrous juggernaut can only be stopped by people’s power as the joint roadblock by the poor, the middle classes and the Left demonstrated in the recent AAP victory. Modi has not yet become the political heavyweight he fancies himself to be. If 31 percent voters voted for him in the last Lok Sabha elections, a good 69 percent voted against him. (END)