Gujarat has started the process of disowning Modi

Being the very smart man that he is, Narendra Modi will be the first to recognise — even if he does not acknowledge it publicly — that August 25, 2015, is the day when Gujarat finally started the process of disowning him. Future historians may even mark August 25 as the date when it all unravelled and the Modi political meltdown began. An over-statement? An exaggeration? A wishful fantasy?

Consider this: from March 2002 to August 24, 2015, nobody, and that means nobody, other than Narendra Modi had been able to collect a crowd of five lakh people in any part of Gujarat. The last time such a large-scale mobilisation took place was way back in the mid-1970s, during the days of the Navnirman Andolan. The August 25 congregation, right there in the heart of Ahmedabad, took place despite Modi’s wishes and his long-distance monitoring and micro-managing of everything political that goes on in Gujarat. And, not since 2002, has the Army been asked to come out in aid of the civil authority. Words in headlines like ‘curfew’, ‘police firing’, ‘deaths’ belonged to a bygone era, so we were told. The rockstar who mesmerised the suburban Gujaratis at Madison Square Garden has been upstaged by an upstart: a hitherto unknown Hardik Patel, who has the native Patels eating out of his hand.

The all too obvious communal underpinning of the Modi project apart, the Patidar eruption demands a sober reassessment of all that we have been persuaded to believe about the Gujarat model of development.

The thinness of the so-called Gujarat model now stands so demonstratively exposed. Those who questioned the claims made in its name were dubbed anti-Gujarat and damned as pseudo-secularists. The pain of deepening economic inequalities was never allowed to intrude into the ‘vibrancy’ optics. Rather, those at the receiving end of the harsh economic realities were palmed off with the Hindutva rhetoric and practices. Those realities have not vanished.

Nobody, for example, was allowed to ask how many local Gujaratis had been given jobs in the famed Nano project at Sanand. For that matter, no one knows the terms of the agreement between the Gujarat government and the Tatas. All we have been told is how a pro-business, pro-market, pro-growth, pro-industrialisation Chief Minister had grabbed the opportunity to entice an entrepreneur, scorned by those backward looking politicians in West Bengal. That was the defining moment when the ‘vibrancy’ of the Modi model was reaffirmed and consecrated. Soon the captains of industry were queuing up in Ahmedabad to issue the certificate of good conduct to the then Chief Minister. The road to Delhi was mapped out.

If the Gujarat model of development was so successful, so transformative, so revolutionary, how could a 22-year-old become the fulcrum for a caste-centric mobilisation? And why should Bihar buy into the presumably post-caste ‘development’ rhetoric?

There are basically two reasons for the current uprising.

The Patels had set up a lot of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) across Gujarat in Saurashtra, Jamnagar and Rajkot. These survived on governmental support for years. But, with the Gujarat model of development, the Modi government laid stress on big industries. In the past ten years, some 60,000 of these SMEs have shut down.

Even the diamond business, where many are engaged, has been facing a slowdown.

The second aspect is the problem of jobs. The government has been giving away jobs under the contractual programme (instead of permanent jobs). For instance, in education, vidya sahayaks, who are contractual teachers, get about Rs7,500 per month. Contractual jobs were also extended to land revenue department and police forces.

Within the Patel community, there are also a number of them who are middle class. They are interested in securing jobs as teachers or in the government services. For instance, in Kutch, you will find a lot of Patel teachers who hail from the Mehsana district, which is also the epicentre of the protests. So when contractual jobs were being awarded, many became unhappy.

Indirectly, the protests are a take on Gujarat’s model of development that has failed. And Narendra Modi is responsible.