Tuesday , December 10, 2002
The making of Modi's Gujarat
Communal violence is rooted in an economy that has gone awry
Mani Shankar Aiyar
Armed with the heart-rendering masterpiece, Gujarat: The Making of a Tragedy, edited by Siddharth Varadarajan, I have spent the weekend in Ahmedabad contributing my two-bits worth to the election campaign. It is hard to tell that it is election time in Ahmedabad.
There are hardly any posters or banners, flags or buntings. Nor any raucous loud-speakers. And in deference to the strictures of the Election Commission, the walls are bereft of wall-paintings. In this dull, sanitised setting, there is only one hoarding which caught my eye.
It asks: what is 'in stock' and what is 'not in stock' in today's Gujarat? 'Available', it says, are American soft drinks; French perfume; English shoes; imported jeans; and Italian pizza. 'Out of stock' are electricity; water; law and order; peace; justice. And, above all, employment. That is what this election is about. Basics.
Over the decade of reforms, Gujarat has been the fastest-growing state in the country and poverty levels are among the lowest in the land. Much of this development derives from globalisation. Gujaratis have been globalised since long before the word was made fashionable. Across the darkest reaches of Africa, it was Gujarati enterprise which followed the British flag. After the end of empire, Gujaratis migrated to Britain and America, beginning as petty shop-keepers and ending, often within a year, as the most dynamic entrepreneurs of their host countries.
Golders Green in London is now a mini-Gujarat. American highways are dotted with 'potels'. It is the NRG more than any other NRI who is swelling our foreign exchange coffers. The most renowned industrialist of post-Independence India is Dhirubhai Ambani. And the first drops of the Sardar Sarovar dam have already soaked the soil of the state.
Then what has gone so horribly wrong? Why has the globalisation of Gujarat translated into the making of the most riot-prone state in the country? Why is it that communal violence has been at its most vicious in the only state of the country to rival China's rate of growth?
The answer seems to lie in the nature and pattern of economic growth in Gujarat. Much of Gujarat's miracle performance can be attributed to massive capital-intensive hi-tech projects which generate high income but little employment.
Thus, GDP rises but associated employment stagnates or even declines. Growth in Gujarat has been jobless growth. The magic figures have been spawned by petroleum refining, petrochemicals and fertiliser. Excellent for the GDP. Terrible for employment. Especially with labour-intensive textiles in the final stages of terminal decline. Worse, much worse, is that the largest urban employer of them all - powerlooms - are down to a tenth or less of where they were at the beginning of the decade of reform. Neither Asia's biggest refinery at Jamnagar nor the privatisation of IPCL can mask the grim state of Ahmedabad's shuttered textile mills.
Those thrown out of employment cannot find alternative jobs in refining or petro-chemicals. It is from this restless army of the unemployed - rendered unemployable by the march of 'progress' - that the likes of Narendra Modi and his ilk hire the murderous perpetrators of unspeakable crimes against the utterly innocent.
The lead story in the Ahmedabad edition of India's largest-read Sunday newspaper quotes an analyst on Modi's appeal: 'His image attracts the unemployed youth, frustrated by the ways of the world'.
The 'ways of the world' are not accidental. Globalisation has boosted income, not employment. If we do not go in for a strategy of revival and start-up of high-employment, labour-intensive industry, the horrors of Gujarat will visit us oftener than teams from the IMF and the World Bank. It is in Ahmedabad that the statue to Joseph Stiglitz should be raised. With its factories shuttered and its powerlooms silenced, Ahmedabad wears the exhausted look of the Depression towns of Europe and the US and Japan in the thirties. It was the Depression which led to the horrors of Hitler and Mussolini, Franco and Tojo. It is Ahmedabad's prolonged depression that has led to Narendra Modi.
The perennially poor are not communal; they are too involved in existence to provide the recruiting field for fascism. That is why the communal virus has not entered the blood-stream of either earthquake-devastated Kutch or drought-ridden Saurashtra. Nor has it overtaken Surat, whose diamond-cutting industry is deeply labour-intensive, nor Vapi where small not big industry rules the economic roost.
It is not the perennial poor but the non-perennial poor - those who have know better lives and now find the good life snatched from them for no fault of their own - that are the fodder on which communalism feeds.
We need an economic agenda to fight the spread of communal violence. That requires top priority not to fancy new-tech industry but the revival of closed textiles mills and the restoration of handlooms and powerlooms to primacy in our economic programmes. What we need is not disinvestment in favour of the obscenely rich as investment in favour of the despairing poor. Even after centuries of industrialisation, the US, Europe and Japan have determinedly protected their textiles industry because the thirties taught them the social and political consequences of depression in textiles. All their principles of liberalisation and globalisation have been thrown out of the window when it comes to textiles.
The market for them ends where the textiles industry begins. Now the dismantling of their barriers on imports is in sight. It is an opening which India must avail of as surely as Brazil and Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea availed of the earlier GATT regime and its general scheme of preferences.
But no economic policy will succeed unless we carve Gandhiji's prayer in our hearts as surely as it is carved in marble at the entrance to his kutir at the Sabarmati Ashram: 'Give us the ability and willingness/ To identify ourselves with the masses of India/ O God! Grant that we may not be isolated from the people'.
Write to msaiyar at expressindia.com
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