From exclusion to division: the hidden costs of long-term BJP rule in Gujarat

The Bharatiya Janata Party has been governing Gujarat continuously for almost 30 years now. Notionally, Gujarat is a two-party state, but the Congress has not won either a Vidhan Sabha or a Lok Sabha election since the demolition of the Babri masjid. During this period the BJP has had the full scope and freedom to develop a structure of governance and law. Some 20 years back, after the 2002 pogrom, there came into currency the phrase ‘Gujarat Model’. We will take a look at what this model is and what it can reveal about ‘new India’.

The first element of this model is the political exclusion of Muslims. There has been no Muslim BJP legislator or minister in Gujarat for decades and the party no longer even gives them tickets. Absolute exclusion for the sake of exclusion. This has been replicated in ‘new India’, where the BJP in the last three Lok Sabhas has won two majorities and a substantial plurality but with zero Muslims. Today the BJP has around 90 Rajya Sabha MPs, none of them Muslims.

The second element is through laws that are aimed at minority persecution. Illegal cattle slaughter is ostensibly an economic crime (Article 48 of the Constitution is about animal husbandry and improving breeds). But no white collar crime attracts life in prison, as Gujarat’s laws on cows do. Duping banks and investors of thousands of crores of rupees does not attract life term. The reason is clear—cattle slaughter has been made into a religious matter and this has been replicated around the country. Laws criminalising possession of beef came in 2015 (with two BJP-ruled states, Maharashtra and Haryana). And then the lynchings started. Now the phenomenon is national.

Rajasthan’s Cabinet has said it will replicate Gujarat’s law which forcibly and legally ghettoises Muslims and prevents them from renting and buying property outside these ghettos.

Laws criminalising marriage between Hindus and Muslims began to be legislated in 2018 starting with Uttarakhand and are today in seven states. Laws and policies on citizenship and mass disenfranchisement are in place today and being rolled out across India.

This connects with the third element which is targeted persecution through use of state machinery.

The New York Times reported this week that in Uttar Pradesh’s Sambhal, the government apparatus is being misused by a majoritarian state. This has become the norm actually. It was around 2017 that in states ruled by the BJP, the governments began to use bulldozers to raze homes and businesses, mostly of Muslims, in violation of law. Two reports, one by Amnesty International India and another by the Citizens and Lawyers Initiative, have recorded the manner in which governments have encouraged lawlessness and then stepped in with bulldozers. The justice system has looked away from this for the most part and there is complicity in those organs of the state which could curb excesses and violence against individuals.

The fourth element is the manner in which the narrative around India and its communities is being shaped. The language is deliberate and it is meant to inject division. One way in which we can tell this has been successful is that what used to be unusual and episodic is today endemic. Violence against individuals purely because of the faith they were born into is now normal. The total lack of action from the state, judiciary and media has made it so. Undoing it will not be easy and can only happen if there is not only a stop but a reversal of course, which is hard to see.

The fifth element of the Gujarat model is a low priority on human development. Gujarat ranks low in the Human Development Index, which is made up of three elements—income, health and education. This is the basis of the intellectual opposition to the Gujarat model and the stressing by many on the Kerala model which focussed on the development of individuals. 

The privileging of capital and its interests as hallowed over the interests of people, our sixth element, is one of the unspoken but understood and accepted facets of the Gujarat model. It is communicated through maxims like ‘government has no business to be in government’. 

While all of the other five elements have found acceptability in society it is this sixth one that is slightly problematic. It is why the prime minister chafed at being the head of a ‘suit boot ki sarkar’, constantly and tiresomely talks about his humility and his fakiri. The idea of a handful of corporate entities, run mostly by Gujarati businessmen of a particular community, owning most of the ports, mines, airports, refineries, spectrum and other goods associated with government patronage is not easy to sell to Indians. This is so especially because the benefits of this have not come to a majority of the people who have seen no little improvement in their condition since 2014. No amount of government generated data can alter their lived reality. And this will likely be the one to cause the structural failure of the model in time.

However, for now and for the foreseeable future, it is hard not to accept that the Gujarat model has won and it is the base on which our ‘new India’ has been constructed.

Views are personal

More of his writing may be found here