Where the flood tide is like a torrent
And the ebb retreats as impetuously;
See the treasure-laden land of Cambay
Where the sea bites deeply into the coast;
I pass by a thousand other cities
Awaiting you with their amenities4
Indeed, Gujaratis, who were excellent sailors, made the Gulf of Cambay the easternmost point for trade in the western Indian Ocean and the westernmost point for trade with the East Indies.5 Both Levantine rigs and Chinese junks could be found here and along the coast of western India.6 Thus, Gujarat was at the confluence of several trading systems.7 Moreover, Gujarat’s prodigious textile production has given it a market from the Arabian Peninsula to the Southeast Asian archipelago, making its ports since the medieval centuries international trading hubs. During the age of British imperialism, Gujarati businessmen sold cloth to Yemen and were paid in silver, which they then lent to English merchants to buy Yemeni coffee, so merchants here made a double profit after they were repaid.8 This business acumen and penchant for innovation were supplanted by a spirit of adventure and risk taking. In the early nineteenth century large Gujarati communities, made up to a large extent of Shiite Ismailis, sprang up in Muscat, Aden, East Africa, and Java, with a heavy concentration especially on Malacca and Zanzibar.9 The fact that Gandhi began his career as a lawyer and political activist in South Africa rather than in India itself was very much part of this Gujarati tradition of planting roots throughout the Indian Ocean. Later, when the United States beckoned on the horizon and visa restrictions were loosened, Gujaratis flooded to its shores, becoming, among other things, motel proprietors and Silicon Valley software tycoons. It is estimated that 40 percent of the Indian immigrants in New York City are Gujaratis. In particular there are the Patels, village officials who in the nineteenth century amassed property and became landed gentry, and following that traveled to Africa and later the United States in search of commercial opportunities.
Faith—both Hindu and Muslim—became a tool of this business networking, providing a social and cultural framework for advantageous interactions. Thus, in Gujarat, devout, highly distinct ethnic and religious communities have been operating easily within a cosmopolitan framework. Even as the state leads India in the use of computer governance and indexes of economic freedom, it also has the strictest dietary restrictions, with alcohol publicly prohibited in this land of Gandhi, and vegetarianism (partly the result of the religious influence of the Jains) more widespread here than elsewhere in India. Hindus in Gujarat negatively associate meat eating with the tradition of the late-medieval Mughals, Muslim conquerors from Central Asia.
The Gujarati historical experience has been shaped not only by the Arabian Sea and the wider Indian Ocean, but also by Gujarat’s situation on a frontier zone of the Subcontinent. Thus it has sustained repeated Muslim invasions from the north and northwest, which have been documented here more excruciatingly than in other Indian states. The worst of the depredations came at the hands of the Turko-Persian ruler Mahmud of Ghazna, who swept down into Gujarat from eastern Afghanistan, and in 1026 utterly destroyed the seaside Hindu temple of Somnath. Whenever I mentioned the events of 2002 to Hindu nationalists, I was lectured about the crimes of Mahmud of Ghazna and those of the Mughals. For these Hindus this is living history, as if it happened yesterday. Indeed, the Islamic architectural genius that created the Taj Mahal and brought a luxurious civilization, blending the material cultures of Persia and Central Asia with that of northern India, is considered a regrettable historical episode in the minds of Hindu nationalists, one of whom, Vijay Chauthai-wale, a molecular biologist, told me, “Muslims in India must de-link themselves from the memory of [Mughal kings] Babur and Akbar, and from terrorism, and should become purely of India.”
Purely of India. This is a significant statement, which telegraphs a deliberate revision of history that the Indian media and school textbooks are partly responsible for propagating. The very Islamic migrations that make for today’s dazzlingly multicultural India, with many Arabic and Persian loanwords embedded in Hindi and Gujarati, are wholly repudiated because of the undeniably awful sufferings and plunder of cities and religious sites that they brought upon Hindus (although armed conflicts between Muslim rulers probably outnumbered those fought between Muslims and Hindus in Indian history).10 Even the Mughal emperor Akbar the Great, so named because of the religious pluralism he practiced (though a Muslim, he was accepting of Hinduism and spent his later life in search of a cosmic deity that spanned religious divides), is considered by Hindu nationalists just another Muslim subjugator.
Gone in significant measure in this worldview is the all-inclusive secular Indian version of history, originally subscribed to by the Congress Party during the Nehruvian era of the 1950s and 1960s, which emanated ultimately from Mahatma Gandhi’s gentle humanistic vision of excluding no one from the national project, and which sought to bridge the historical differences between religious groups. The aura of legitimacy and romance that invested the Congress Party—the party of independence, after all—was shattered during the dictatorial emergency decrees enacted by Indira Gandhi in the mid-1970s. Following that, a new logic was required to mobilize the Indian masses and particularly the emerging middle class, a segment of the population that arose in Gujarat sooner than in many other Indian states, supported by its history of successful trading.
This logic was provided perversely by information technology and higher education. Information technology has allowed for standardized and ideologized versions of Hinduism and Islam to emerge from the multiplicity of local variants: Just as Shiites became united across the Middle East, Hindus became united across India, and the same for Sunni Muslims here. But it was particularly so with the Hindus, for whom before the age of mass communications their religion existed more as a series of local cults, making a united Hinduism as such an expression rather than an actual fact.11 Meanwhile, education has made people aware of their own histories for the first time, and thus supplied them with historical grievances that they never previously had. “The Hindu poor are blissfully ignorant of Mahmud of Ghazna. It is the middle class that now knows this history,” explained one local human rights worker. That is why Hindu nationalism is strongest not among the poor and uneducated, but among the professional classes: scientists, software engineers, lawyers, and so on. The same phenomenon can be observed among Islamic extremists, from al-Qaeda to the Muslim Brotherhood. In the eyes of this new right-wing middle and upper-middle class, India was a civilization before it was a state, and while the state has had to compromise with minorities, the civilization originally was unpolluted, Hindu that is, even if the truth is more complex.
This search for a reinvented national greatness among middle-class Hindus of India also applies to the new Muslim middle classes of Pakistan and Iran, which is why all three are intoxicated about the idea of nuclear weapons. Whether it is the Mauryan Empire in India, or the Achaemenid Empire in Persia, for millions lifted out of poverty and recently educated, the bomb now summons forth these great kingdoms of antiquity.
In India such yearning was further ignited by the economic reforms of the 1990s, which brought India truly into the vanguard of globalization. Because the socialistic nation-state of Hindus and Muslims is increasingly a thing of the past, both groups need a strengthened communal identity to anchor them inside an insipid world civilization. Their newly acquired prosperity has made many Hindus suddenly nervous of their situation, and thus susceptible to an exclusivist ideology. This has been especially apparent among overseas Gujaratis, who while becoming successful immigrants in the West, have engaged in a search for roots that they have transferred back to relatives in the homeland. Again, it is the very encounter with the wider world that has caused a certain narrowing of horizons. Out of this crucible Hindutva (Hindu-ness) mightily arose, with Islamic extremism a reaction.
The word Hindutva first appeared in a 1923 pamphlet, “Who Is a Hindu?,” written by independ
ence activist Vinayak Damodar Savarkar. But it has really achieved prominence in the last decade with the opening up of the Indian economy, whose social effects have allowed the so-called Sangh (family of Hindu organizations) to flourish. They include the RSS, the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party), and the VHP (Vishwa Hindu Parishad, or World Hindu Council). But the RSS, founded in 1925, is the mother organization, a vast and, in some sense, informal, volunteer-driven self-help corps. Chauthaiwale, the molecular biologist, explained that the RSS provided a “true Hindu voice lost by the pro-Muslim tilt of the Congress Party. Muslims invaded in earlier centuries. They conquered,” he said. “We lost. The British conquered. We lost. We were a defeated society. We needed to come together as Hindus.”
In the minds of its followers the RSS performed the heroic task of saving many Hindus in Pakistan during the partition in 1947. It was banned after Gandhi was assassinated the next year by a Hindu nationalist, Nathuram Godse, who was linked to the RSS. But in the 1960s, the RSS began to stage a resurgence, entering student movements and, in particular, getting involved in social betterment programs, much like the Muslim Brotherhood in the Middle East. It initiated humanitarian projects in the Hindu tribal areas, and sought to eliminate untouchability, so as to make Hindus more equal among themselves. As the prestige of the Congress Party waned in the 1970s, that of the RSS grew. The BJP was formed to promote RSS ideals at the national political level. All the human rights groups with which I visited in Gujarat, both Hindu and Muslim, called the RSS a fascist organization, which, behind its veneer of humanitarian assistance to fellow Hindus, has a “cultural nationalist” agenda. After the 2001 earthquake here, the RSS reportedly provided relief to Hindu families only.
The throbbing heart of the RSS is the pracharaks (propagators, or propagandists). They spread the word of the RSS. They are usually unmarried, and give up their lives to the organization, living sparely, inspiring hundreds of workers while trying to remain faceless themselves, in a deliberate attempt to eliminate their own egos. They are like a priesthood, except that the average pracharak serves only two or three years before marrying and resuming a normal life. Narendra Modi is unusual. Born in Gujarat in 1950 into a middle-level caste, he was a pracharak for almost a decade before becoming chief minister in late 2001. Modi is unmarried and lives alone. His has been a life devoted to the RSS.
Modi, the Hindu ideologue and the innovative CEO of Company Gujarat, is the culmination of local history and geography at this juncture in time, testimony to Gujarat’s hard-edged communal identifications and its innovative business spirit that is right up to cosmopolitan Western standards. He is so honest that gifts for him are regularly deposited in the state treasury—a far cry from the corruption and nepotism that is so much a part of Indian politics. On visits to villages pregnant women regularly touch his feet so that their newborn will be like him.
Modi’s office is located on an upper floor of a massive ministry building, made of cheap stone forty years ago and with a scabby facade. It is surrounded by other equally massive and ugly ministry buildings in Gandhinagar, the planned city of government workers north of Ahmedabad that is a monument to some of the flawed architectural schemes of formerly socialist India. Gujarat constitutes only 5 percent of the Indian population, but that is still fifty million people, more than the population of South Korea, so it requires a sizable government bureaucracy.
There was considerable hubbub outside his office, as Western businessmen and investors in expensive suits clustered together after meetings with the chief minister. At 5 p.m. sharp, I was ushered into Modi’s office. He sat behind a desk that looked over a long committee table with the chairs empty. He wore traditional pajama pants and a long, elegant brown korta, with pens stuck in the pocket, the traditional dress of India that the Muslim Mughals had brought here. Wire-rimmed glasses rested on his face. He had a clipped and distinguished salt-and-pepper beard, and a handsome, welcoming visage. In front of him lay a small stack of documents, which he thrust at me before I even asked my first question. He clearly had little time for small talk. “I heard you were interested in development here, so here are your answers.” What he gave me was not the usual promotional brochures, but long lists of sourced statistics put together by an aide. Gujarat had had 10.2 percent annual GDP growth since 2002. It had eight new universities. More than half the new jobs created in India were in Gujarat. It ranked first in poverty alleviation, first in electrical generation. As I had experienced, Gujarat was a far cry from neighboring Sindh in Pakistan where there were only a few hours of power every day. Then there were the new dam projects and micro-irrigation systems—again, a far cry from Sindh, with its acute shortages of water and dams not improved upon since the era of the British.
Chile and China flashed through my mind. Augusto Pinochet tortured and murdered a few thousand people in his first months as leader in 1973 and 1974, and then went on to create an economic dynamo that benefited the whole country. Deng Xiaoping massacred many hundreds of students at Tiananmen Square in 1989, and then went on to improve the quality of life of more people in a shorter time than perhaps ever before in recorded economic history. In both cases, deliberately planned atrocities had created an atmosphere of shock and fear, which the leader manipulated in order to push through a host of reforms without opposition. It worked, even as it was repugnant. It was a fact almost difficult to admit, that since 2002 there had not been a single act of inter-communal violence in Gujarat.
Was Modi trying to create another Singapore or Dubai in Gujarat, a place that would be, in a positive sense, distinctive from the mother brand of India? I asked him.
“No,” came the reply. “Singapore and Dubai are city-states. There can be many Singapores and Dubais here. We will have a Singapore in Kutch,” he said, waving his arm dismissively, “and GIFT [the Gujarat International Finance Tec-City, a new high-tech city planned nearby] can be like Dubai. Gujarat as a whole will be like South Korea. Global commerce is in our blood,” he went on, lifting his eyebrows for emphasis. There was a practiced theatricality about the way he talked. You could see how he could move a crowd or take over a boardroom. Whenever he opened his mouth he suddenly had real, mesmerizing presence.
His ambition was staggering, whatever his roots as a faceless pracharak. South Korea was the world’s thirteenth largest economy. Yet I could understanding the comparison: South Korea is a vast peninsula open to major sea-lanes like Gujarat. It had congealed as an industrialized, middle-class dynamo not under democratic rule, but under the benign authoritarianism of Park Chung-hee in the 1960s and 1970s. I mentioned this to Modi. He said he wasn’t interested in talking about politics, only about development. Of course, politics constitutes freedom, and his momentary disinterest in politics was not accidental. Modi’s entire governing style was anti-democratic, albeit quite effective: emphasizing reliance on a lean, stripped-down bureaucracy over which he had taken complete personal control, even as he had pushed his own political party to the sidelines, almost showing contempt for it.
It was also revealing that he had referred to GIFT as but a detail in his larger game plan. GIFT was the pièce de résistance in the effort to make Gujarat an Indian Ocean economic nerve center. Modi had laid the foundation for this financial services hub in June 2007. The high-tech city would be five hundred acres, twice as large as Dockyards in London, 25 percent larger than La Défense in Paris, and larger even than the vast financial centers of Shanghai and Tokyo. GIFT would feature eleven modernistic skyscrapers, landscaped green zones, the latest in public transportation, waste management up to Western environmental standards, “intelligent buildings” with cutting-edge bandwidth connectivity and data integration, internal roads with storm weather drainage for monsoons, and a walk-to-work concept for its 50,000 residents and daily working population of 400,000. GIFT was to be a city of the future to compete with any in the world. And yet he now referred to it as merely a Dubai inside his larger, South Korean whole.
Modi spoke to me in to-the-poi
nt phrases with a didactic tone about the cosmopolitan trading history of Gujarat going back five thousand years, and how Parsees and others had come to its shores and been assimilated into the Hindu culture. I asked him about the contribution of the Muslims, who are 11 percent of the state’s population. “We are a spiritual, God-fearing people,” he answered. “We are by and large vegetarians. Jainism and Buddhism impacted us positively. We want to create a Buddhist temple here to honor Buddha’s remains.” He then prompted me for my next question. He had nothing further to say. Of course, Muslims are meat eaters.
I asked if he had any regrets about anything he did or failed to do since becoming chief minister seven years earlier. My question was clearly designed to give him an opening to show remorse, however oblique, about the events of 2002. Again, he had nothing to say. I then asked specifically if he regretted 2002. His answer: “There are so many views about that. Who am I to judge?” He said that a commission would decide about his role in the riots. In fact, a commission from his own state bureaucracy had already absolved him of any wrongdoing.
“There was no Kalinga effect on Modi,” Hanif Lakdawala, a Muslim who runs a human rights NGO, told me. Lakdawala was referring to a war fought in the third century B.C. by the Mauryan Empire under King Ashoka against the state of Kalinga on the eastern coast of India. Ashoka’s forces slew 100,000 civilians. The slaughter left Ashoka with so much guilt that he forswore further military expansion, and dedicated his life thereafter to nonviolence and the peaceful development of his empire.
Yet to give Modi the benefit of the doubt, I wondered if he wasn’t, at least partly, privately remorseful. To admit guilt would be to undermine his position in the Hindu nationalist movement. In any case, in the Indian political context, few admit mistakes. But by all accounts, after the riots, he shut himself up and manically dedicated himself to development, sleeping less than four hours every night, as he told me, up at 5 a.m., checking his email and reading the local papers. Eventually he visited about three thousand of seven thousand villages in the state, developing his own grassroots networks to check on how the state bureaucracy was functioning at the local level, and empowering the lowest reaches of that bureaucracy—those functionaries in most contact with the citizenry—through his slogan, “less government, more governance.” As Atul Tandan, director of the Mudra Institute of Communications in Ahmedabad, told me, “You have to separate Modi’s political ideology from his management ability. Because there is not a hint of corruption about him, Modi is effective because people believe his decisions are only results-oriented.” Indeed, even many Muslims have come to respect Modi for his accomplishments, such as cracking down on gambling and criminal rackets that have infested some of their own communities.
Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power Page 13
