Ahmedabad, the frayed city of Gandhi and Modi

What sort of a city is Ahmedabad? Is it the city built on the wealth generated from textiles, now residing in the bungalows of seths who once owned those mills? Or the city of labourers whose jobs vanished when those mills closed, and who had to figure out new ways of making a living? The city from where Mohandas Gandhi left on his March to Dandi to lift salt from the sea and defy an unjust British tax in pre-independence India? Or the city that erupted with fury that the state could not, or did not, control in 2002, after the burning of a train compartment in Godhra in which 58 Hindu activists died, and in the retaliatory violence that followed, at least 900 people died?

In Ahmedabad: A City In The World, Shah writes a concise profile of India’s fifth largest city. She has been working on this project for several years now and has squeezed the city’s diverging narratives through vignettes, bringing us close to the lives of people from many walks of life, the way its many communities live, and how once intertwined lives are increasingly separate.

In “Highway Dreams”, Shah writes about the new roads and malls, and offers an insight into the way the Modi administration thinks about the contentious issue of land acquisition, which explains the government’s stubbornness in attempting to pass a law that disregards so many rights. A government official candidly tells her how he manages to convince farmers to part with their land—sweet negotiations followed by force; the notion of informed consent is absent.

In “New York Tower”, we encounter overseas Gujaratis who rue that the state is not able to fulfil its destiny because of the minor matter of “2002”, which continues to besmirch its reputation; in “Bombay Hotel”, Shah brings us back to the harsh reality in which many Muslims live.

As the book reaches its end, it becomes less about Ahmedabad or Gujarat, and more about how Modi sought to shape the state, and fashion his own image. She offers a comical portrait of Modi’s image consciousness, and sardonically observes the directory-sized government publicity materials produced on expensive art paper extolling Modi’s achievements. It sounds like a colossal waste, except that it worked—not only in Gujarat, thrice, but last year, all over India.