Shadow blocks Modi's road to
power By Siddharth Srivastava
NEW DELHI - A few days in India's Gujarat
state is not long enough to assess the political
mood ahead of assembly elections set to take place
by the end of this year. It does provide
indications as to why Chief Minister Narendra Modi
has ruled there for more than a decade. He has
made a difference. The Gujarat economy is robust,
though rising expectations could also see an
anti-incumbency factor creep in, and there are
always sections who believe that they have not
benefited enough or have been left out.
It
still will be a surprise if Modi does not win, and
on Monday his confidence reached high to enough to
see him challenge Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to
line up against him in the local assembly vote.
"I dare Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to
come and have a
competition with me. You
build roads, I also build roads, you build a canal
and I also do the same, you build hospitals and I
build hospitals too," Modi said on Monday.
Growth figures and investments by Tata and
Ford are well documented. The indirect
beneficiaries from such investment - hotels,
transporters, taxi operators, restaurants, retail
outlets, travel and tourism players - also form a
big vocal support base.
They call Modi
sher (lion), king of Gujarat who has
brought about change and prosperity. Large cutouts
of Bollywood super star Amitabh Bachchan, the
brand ambassador of the state, convey the message
of the incumbency - tourists, investors, business
houses that are good for the economy, are welcome.
There are plenty of signs of growing
spending power. Gujarat today has higher per
capita income and literacy levels and lower
poverty rates than the national average. This was
not so in the 1990s.
The big malls housing
some of the top global brands in Ahmedabad, the
state's biggest city, are choc-a-bloc with
shoppers and young people hanging about late into
the evening. The Reliance Mart at the Iskon mall
compares with any in Singapore in terms of size
and variety of products on offer. There were long
winding queues at the many billing counters.
Multiplexes screening the latest Bollywood movie
Barfi, starring heartthrob Ranbir Kapoor,
were sold out. A flight to the beach paradise of
Goa in the mid-afternoon was booked to capacity.
Roads and highways in the state are well
constructed, though it will take some time for any
city in India to be pedestrian friendly - the
traffic continues to be unruly, while walkers have
a tough time negotiating the maze. As emphasized
by Modi on many occasions, there are no power
cuts. Wherever the conventional grid is absent,
efforts are being made to supplement wind or solar
power, with some success.
Predictably,
cheap manpower drawn from states such as Bihar and
Uttar Pradesh are headed towards Gujarat, given
the politically motivated hostilities against
"outsiders'' in Mumbai, the usual hub of migrant
labor.
The development has earned Modi
rich electoral dividends since he took power in
2001 - he is the longest-serving chief minister of
the state. He has also managed to polarize and
coalesce the majority Hindu voters, cutting across
the usual caste divisions that define politics in
other states of India, especially in the north.
The big question, however, is whether Modi will be
able to translate his regional success to the
national level, assuming that he wins Gujarat
again.
Modi has not managed to douse the
ghost of the 2002 Gujarat riots, in which hundreds
of Muslims were killed. Sections of middle-class
India could pretend to forget the horrific events
and focus on more immediate ends - Modi's ability
to deliver economic growth and corruption-free
administration as an alternative to the scam-prone
Congress-led government headed by Prime Minister
Manmohan Singh.
The Muslims, however, will
not forgive Modi in a hurry. They will never take
the leap of faith with him. The fact remains that
a person of Modi's caliber who could galvanize
pro-active change could easily have goaded the
administration to check the 2002 communal attacks
if he so wished.
Even if the initial
reactions could not be contained, the later
damage, including biased investigations, could
certainly have been curbed.
In Gujarat,
Modi could do without his party Bharatiya Janata
Party (BJP), the main opposition at the center. He
could launch a regional party and continue to win
elections in the state, like Nitish Kumar in Bihar
or Naveen Patnaik in Orissa.
However, to
be prime minister of India, Modi needs the
umbrella support of the BJP, the organizational
backing and the cadres of the Rashtriya
Swayamsevak Sangh, which sets the ideological
agenda of Hindutva, or rule of the Hindus. Matters
would have been simpler if the BJP could win
national elections under its own steam.
As
that is unlikely given the internal dissensions,
policy incoherence and leadership battles, the BJP
will need the support of regional outfits from
Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Orissa and Tamil Nadu to
form a government. These parties count on their
Muslim support base and will no way accept or
support Modi as their leader. Modi is King of
Gujarat. It is not an easy path to become emperor
of India.
Siddharth Srivastava
is a New Delhi-based journalist. He can be reached
at sidsri@yahoo.com
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