Hartosh Singh Bal: Those Who Do Not Want to Bury Modi
Commentators warming up to Modi forget that his decade in power has seen the logic of the 2002 violence pursued by other means
See also: Modi and the Muslims’ Malaise
Those who like Narendra Modi, or perhaps more accurately, no longer consider him a danger, are suddenly growing in number. Some are only a more sophisticated version of the internet loonies who pass for right-wing supporters, but they at least have the virtue of consistency. Some are industrialists, who claim to speak dispassionately, but they at least know what it is to attract Modi’s ire in a state that has been home to big business long before he was in politics. But there are others, who are now telling me—by ‘me’ I mean someone who embraces the descriptions ‘worried about Modi’, ‘anti-Modi crusader’ and ‘Modi’s enemy’—that I am ‘blindfolded’, I am choosing ‘fury over fact’, and that by attacking Modi, I am ‘disguising’ my ‘larger complicity’.
Let me cite some instances, because only through these is the cant on offer obvious. It is a cant that clubs together all those who oppose Modi and smears each with the views and associations of a few.
Pratap Bhanu Mehta, in The Indian Express, states: ‘Those worried about him first need to set their own house in order.’ And then goes on to write: ‘You can look at the convictions of Modi’s cabinet colleagues and point to those as proxy proof of his culpability. You can also look at them and wonder why so many Congress cabinet ministers still have not been made to answer for 1984. The point is not to use 1984 to politically exonerate Modi. The point is that it is hard to attack evil when we so widely condone it in other contexts. Third, the social and political isolation of Muslims is a large, complex phenomenon, in part a product of the tyranny of the compulsory identities the Congress has produced. It is also exacerbated by the fact that friends of minorities like the Samajwadi Party are running no more than protection rackets for them, depending on a permanent tutelage. Unfortunately, attacking Modi has become a way of disguising our larger complicities. It is more about assuaging our guilty conscience than setting things right. No wonder the attacks lose their sheen.’
Mehta’s odd use of pronouns is obvious even on a cursory reading, and it says something about the sleight of hand used to make the argument. Let me begin with his sentence, ‘You can also look at them and wonder why so many Congress cabinet ministers still have not been made to answer for 1984.’ I have indeed wondered, and have written that I believe Rajiv Gandhi’s complicity in the 1984 violence against Sikhs is similar to Narendra Modi’s in 2002, I have written that I think Kamal Nath’s presence in this Union Cabinet, given his role at the head of a mob that burnt two Sikhs to death in 1984, is a disgrace. Have you, Mr Mehta?
So perhaps when you say that ‘it is hard to attack evil when we so widely condone it in other contexts’, the ‘we’ is misplaced. I have not condoned it, you have, and now you want to shift that burden onto my shoulders, which is how you could reach the absurd conclusion that ‘unfortunately, attacking Modi has become a way of disguising our larger complicities’. Not ‘ours’ Mr Mehta, but yours. In the same newspaper, its editor Shekhar Gupta writes:
‘By choosing fury over fact, delusion over reason, passion over politics, Modi’s enemies — beginning with the Congress — make Gujarat politics a one-horse race.’
Writes Shekhar Gupta: ‘What gives Narendra Modi such invincibility? Shall we call it a self-defeating conspiracy of the faithful? The entire community of Modi haters and baiters, political rivals and ideological questioners has driven itself into a hole, creating its own delusions and believing them.’
Writes Shekhar Gupta: ‘What gives Narendra Modi such invincibility? Shall we call it a self-defeating conspiracy of the faithful? The entire community of Modi haters and baiters, political rivals and ideological questioners has driven itself into a hole, creating its own delusions and believing them.’
He goes on to explain: ‘How can we, as modern, liberal Indians, accept the brazenness with which a politician with as dodgy a record as Amit Shah is fielded in this election? But should our journalists confine themselves to still covering the riots of 2002? Do we take note of the intervening decade of governance and politics, or not? This is not an argument about moving on. Far from it. This is an argument about professional diligence in journalism, as well as academia and, indeed, politics. Modi’s detractors, including most of us in the media, have allowed our judgement to be led by our views on what we see as the “core” issue with Modi. The Congress has lazily taken the cue. The Congress has not tried to put together a five, even a ten-year plan to defeat him. That’s why I called it a conspiracy of the faithful.’
In 2010, a piece in the same newspaper had asked, ‘In fact, it is precisely in that realm, of education and health and social services, that Modi’s rhetoric must be tested. How effectively has he drawn the state’s religious minorities into Gujarat’s growth and success? Does his fabled governance genius translate into a better life for those his politics rejects?’ Now this paper’s editor wants me to forget the answer to this very question.
It seems to me that to be true to my calling as a journalist, I must consider who gained and who lost out in Modi’s version of governance and politics. Travelling through Gujarat, the answer is obvious, as it is obvious in Modi’s own constituency, particularly, where he has selectively chosen not to engage with Muslim voters over the past decade.
But beyond subjective observations, there is ample statistical data to back up this claim...
To think of Narendra Modi, the four-term chief minister of Gujarat, as a potential prime minister and the man who might revive the flagging fortunes of the B.J.P., India’s main opposition party, is to ignore the reality of Gujarat. Most infamously, Modi has been accused of deliberately allowing the sectarian mob violence that killed more than 1,000 people, most of them Muslims, in 2002, soon after he became chief minister. This may have been an extreme episode, but it is consistent with Modi’s divisive and exclusionary approach to governance and his efforts to marginalize Muslims.
The issue surfaced again last week, not on the streets but in staid government offices in Delhi, when Modi and other chief ministers gathered for a meeting of the National Development Council, India’s top policy making body, to discuss pressing economic matters, including Muslim poverty. The issue has been a source of much debate since a 2006 government report [pdf] on the community’s social, economic and educational status found that it lagged behind the national average on a host of indicators. The findings were especially embarrassing for Gujarat: It claims to lead India in development, but its Muslims generally fare worse than Muslims across the country.
Gujarat has an urban poverty ratio of almost 18 percent, compared with almost 21 percent for the country as a whole. Yet according to India’s Planning Commission, a government body that draws up five-year plans for the economy, 42.4 percent of the Muslims in urban Gujarat are poor, compared with 33.9 percent of Muslims in urban India overall. Still, Modi has opposed a national plan from 2007 to set aside 15 percent of development funds for Muslims, claiming it would threaten the “social fabric of the nation.” He also has refused to implement another program that would have provided 53,000 scholarships to Muslim students in Gujarat — a state where 75 percent of school-age Muslims are enrolled in school but only 26 percent go on to finish, while 79 percent of the total school-age population is enrolled and 41 percent go on to finish.
The results of such policies are visible on the ground. Modi’s own constituency of Maninagar, in the state capital of Ahmedabad, is a largely middle-class area. But in Millat Nagar, the heart of Maninagar and home to 20,000 Muslims, Modi’s famed roads give way to streets full of potholes and comfortable homes to broken-down shacks. When I first visited Millat Nagar in 2007, residents told me that about 75 percent of the houses had no drinking water and that the streetlights had not functioned in a decade. Modi had never visited this area, nor had any other member of his party.
I returned last month during the election campaign for the state assembly. The area hadn’t changed much, except for some work on roads and sewers started by the few Muslims from the area who had been elected on a Congress ticket in municipal elections in 2011. Still, by focusing on everyone but Muslims — who account for only 8 percent of the vote in Maninagar — Modi won 77 percent of the vote in his constituency. Modi and the B.J.P. also won 47 percent of ballots in all of Gujarat, securing 115 of the 182 seats in the state legislature. Not one of the B.J.P.’s candidates was Muslim, even though almost 10 percent of Gujarat’s population is Muslim.
A comprehensive 2011 report of government data by Abusaleh Shariff, who was chief economist of the National Council of Applied Economic Research for more than 15 years, concludes that Muslims in Gujarat “fare poorly on parameters of poverty, hunger, education and vulnerability on security issues — nowhere benefiting from the feel-good growth story” painted by the current government. When Modi argues against targeting development specifically at Muslims, it is not because he worries about destroying the social fabric by treating different groups differently. It is because such initiatives imperil his own attempts to isolate Muslims in Gujarat.
