EDUCATION should make most of us moderate, because it alerts us to the reasons for our condition. It is difficult to claim that this is the trajectory being followed by a majority of our middle class as it comes into literacy. The indication is the opposite, that education is making the middle class intolerant. Let’s analyze the issue dominating the news to illustrate this: the rise of Narendra Modi. ‘We need five years of dictatorship,’ said a man, once managing director of Britannia, to me at a party a few weeks ago. I knew what was coming after that, but tried to see it from his point of view. ‘Why five years,’ I asked. He began to answer this, but didn’t. Or couldn’t. He was convinced, however, that Modi assuming power as prime minister would be transformational for India.

A similar sentiment is expressed in the drawing rooms of Delhi, Mumbai and elsewhere. Many will be familiar with this, of course. People across India have been noting Modi’s no-nonsense, performance based, non-corrupt miracle in Gujarat and want him to come and sort out the mess in Delhi. The belief is that one man can set right the problems of this country, because what is missing is only the political integrity and toughness that Modi promises.

At one level, this shouldn’t really surprise us. The middle class has always been attracted to dictators. It was Rome’s middle class that voted Julius Caesar dictator for life. It is the aristocrats of the senate who got rid of him. It is the shopkeepers of Tehran, the bazaaris as they are called, who brought in Khomeini and his pious, totalitarian dictatorship. They might or might not be regretting this; one cannot ever know in a place without a free press. But certainly we know that many of their children, who now have exposure to what the world has to offer, resent their restricted lives.

In our immediate neighbourhood, the middle class preference has always been for strong men who can sort things out, whether in Pakistan through the past six decades or in Sri Lanka episodically. This sentiment and this preference for messianic solutions comes from a particular view. It is when you are convinced, like a child might be, that the fault is outside of you. It is the system that is to blame and somebody needs to fix it.

This is the basis for Modi’s popularity with middle class India outside his state. The people who, like that business executive I referred to, think Modi is the solution to the problem are actually somewhat simple-minded. They do not think that the anarchy that is around them in India, whether in traffic or in the passport office, is the result of their culture. Their culture is the source of only positive things, in their perspective. What needs to be sorted out is the state. This will resolve the issues. Such a view reveals more about ourselves and Modi’s popularity than about Modi himself.

 

Many in the middle class want the Gujarat model to be brought to Delhi. Because what we need, to finally free us from India’s horrible politicians, is the saviour who has transformed his state. It is difficult to argue against this view in my opinion, because the majority of the middle class subscribes to it. We’ll look at that later, but first let’s look at the phenomenon.

The miracle that Modi has performed is, for some reason, not immediately visible on Gujarat’s streets. Surat, where I was raised, Baroda, where I studied, and Ahmedabad, where I worked, look much the same as I knew them. The same as any other city in India, and if you’ve observed one properly you can describe them all. The traffic has no discipline, the police whines for chai-pani, public transport is poor, land is encroached upon with impunity. There are beggars, there is filth.

Given this vision of the promised land, the followers of Moses would have stayed back in Egypt. So, and let us be clear about this, life for the middle class is no different in Gujarat’s cities than for those in Mumbai, Delhi or Bangalore. In some ways it is inferior. There is, as is well-known, no alcohol sold in Gujarat except illegally. Like in Pakistan, the Gujarati drinker must risk arrest and cruise neighbourhood corners hoping to pick up plastic quarter bottles, which is what is usually available.

And then there is the oppressive vegetarianism. On Malabar Hill in Mumbai, the most expensive real estate in that city and where the old money lives, no non-vegetarian restaurant is allowed to come up. Think of Gujarat as being like that everywhere. If you live in a wealthy or even upper middle class neighbourhood, there is very little chance that you will have a place to eat animal protein around the corner. This is hardly Modi’s fault. Gujaratis have always had this attitude to meat and its eaters. But it says something about Modi that he has gone along with this. Indeed, with his love for the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, he might even be in favour of it.

 

There has been little change in Gujarat’s cities in the 12 years that Modi has been at the helm, because the idea that he has influenced big change is a fantasy. Let’s look at another illustration in what he refers to as the Gujarat model. What is it? According to his supporters, the model can be described by its outcome: Modi has personally created a development oriented, high growth, corruption free state. Let us accept all of this as true, and examine what the model actually consists of.

For a few years now, I have been pointing out something to the middle class that they might not be aware of. The unique thing about Gujarat’s economy is its skew against services, which is the big middle class employer elsewhere in the country. India’s jump into the high growth orbit has come with the domination of services, but Gujarat’s economy is old-fashioned and based on growth in industry and manufacturing.

What is India’s GDP mix? It is 59% services and 30% industries, with agriculture comprising the rest. The difference of the Gujarat model is apparent here. Gujarat has 46% services and 40% industry. Now Gujarat has always done well in industry (unless Modi’s people want to claim their leader produced Dhirubhai Ambani and J.R.D. Tata). After 1991, when the economy was liberalized, it has done even better in industries.

 

But despite the advantages, Gujarat has not achieved what it could have because it is held back by a lack of growth in services. India’s IT and IT enabled services alone are worth $100 billion, over five lakh crore rupees a year, which, to put it in perspective, is the size of the entire Gujarat economy. Of the IT and IT enabled services business, Gujarat gets close to nothing. A KPMG report says it got only Rs 200 crore a few years ago.

The reason, according to KPMG is that ‘Gujarat underscores in availability of talent pool’, because of ‘a lack of engineering institutes’ and ‘lack of proficiency in English.’ Is this an accident? No, it is deliberate. In Gujarat’s government schools, the children of lower middle class and poor Gujarati families are denied English education till Class V. This is because the RSS doesn’t like English. Millions of Gujarati kids, children of servants and drivers and labourers, start to learn the alphabet at age 10. Too late, of course, and so no talent pool. This policy has wasted an entire generation, and denied them access to middle class dreams available to other Indians.

It is not often remembered that in the last eight years Manmohan Singh has delivered four years (2005-08 and 2010-11) of 9% plus growth and two years (2004-05 and 2009-10) of 8% plus growth. The other thing to consider is that Congress hasn’t governed Gujarat after the reforms of 1991. The last election it won in that state was in 1985. In 1990, it came third behind the Janata Dal (which later folded itself into the Congress after a couple of years in power).

We actually don’t know how well or how poorly they would compare in performance to the BJP’s four chief ministers. Let us assume that they could not have performed as well as Modi has on the industries side. But even if we do this, purely by looking at the national growth figures above, we realize that Gujarat could not have performed too much differently when there was overall buoyancy to this extent.

And so it is difficult to see what the outstanding element is in the Gujarat model. So what then explains Modi’s electoral success? The answer is obvious. In Gujarat, as elsewhere, the BJP is a caste based party. Its primary vote bank is the peasant Patel, whom the rebel Keshubhai tried unsuccessfully to break in the last elections. To illustrate this, let’s look at the numbers. Four out of nine ministers in Modi’s previous cabinet and three out of seven in his current one are Patels. This is vote bank politics, not development politics, because in choosing his ministers, Modi looks at their caste. And so it’s wrong to believe, as many non-Gujaratis seem to do, that Modi spurns caste politics.

 

Let us now turn to the thing that he is attacked most for, the violence in his state. Usually the attack is that he did not do enough to prevent the riots. I am going to discard that and look at his performance as home minister, a portfolio he held then as he does now. Last year, a court convicted Modi’s minister for women and child development for the mass murder of women and children. Mayaben Kodnani’s role in the riots was common knowledge, and her conviction did not surprise too many Gujaratis. Twelve people testified to Mayaben assisting and egging on the rioters in the Ahmedabad suburb of Naroda Patiya. A total of 96 Muslims were killed that night, 34 children including a newborn, 32 women and 30 men. Kodnani supplied the killers with kerosene and swords, according to the survivors.

 

Why did Modi, who was in charge of the police when Mayaben was rioting, not know this? Why did he then give her a ticket to contest the assembly elections and why then did he make her minister? It is not easy for him to answer this, and he avoids it by saying the matter is in the courts. This is only partially true. The matter in the court is an appeal. The undeniable fact is that Modi’s minister is a convicted criminal.

The second aspect is the prosecution of Modi’s deputy home minister, Amit Shah. This man has been chargesheeted in a very sordid case involving fake encounters, the murder of a woman, the killing of a witness and extortion. He was prohibited from entering Gujarat, because of a fear that he would influence the police and the investigation. This is a direct comment on Modi’s hold over the force as its home minister.

Third, the fact that D.G. Vanzara, Modi’s head for anti-terrorism, is in jail for murder and extortion. Modi likes to talk about national security and terrorism and how the Congress is endangering India, but the fact is that his record as home minister is one of the poorest in India. It is on his watch that the anti-terror force was used for criminal activity. Why was he unaware of what was going on?

The fourth thing Modi must answer for is why his ministry was so incompetent at investigating riot cases, so much so that the Supreme Court ordered that they be reinvestigated by an outside, independent force. This is what led to the convictions, including Mayaben’s. In fact, the developments that have been recorded above have happened after outside pressure was brought to bear on an otherwise less than competent Gujarat home ministry.

Even if we were to set aside Modi’s inability in controlling the violence when it broke out, it is difficult for his supporters to explain, after an objective assessment of his performance, why he was and remains such a poor home minister. It is surprising that he then boasts about keeping India strong, when his record on that very count is demonstrably pedestrian. And it is astonishing, given these failures, that Modi continues to keep the portfolio of the home ministry. But the fact is that he cannot let go of power.

 

For many years I have been pointing out that Modi has run a one-man cabinet. In 2006, he was himself Gujarat’s minister for finance, home and industries, the three top portfolios. I could be wrong but there is no parallel to this in our contemporary history. There’s more. In addition, he was minister for the two largest infrastructure projects, Narmada and Kalpsar. And he was minister for ports, energy and petrochemicals, mines and minerals. All ministries relating to Reliance, Essar, Adani, Tata and Torrent were handled by him. And then Modi was also minister for general administration, reforms and for information and broad-casting, deciding which newspapers got government advertising.

There were other ministries he controlled but I’m not listing them. You get the picture. After the last election, he let go of a couple of them, but has held on to most. This is because Modi believes he is the only man with the ability to properly manage these ministries. What he needs in his Cabinet are not colleagues but chamchas. And this has always been the case. Flying back from Ahmedabad after interviewing Modi, I sat next to an IAS officer. He asked me what my business had been. I said I had just had a chat with the chief minister. ‘You’re lucky,’ he said, ‘my minister hasn’t had a meeting with him for six months.’

Given the record, it is difficult to resist the conclusion that Modi’s appeal primarily comes from his tough and uncompromising Hindutva. This ‘putting of Muslims in their place’ has brought him the admiration of many in the Gujarati middle class. Modi doesn’t need to advertise this side to his divisive politics because the media does it for him. He says that he is unfairly accused, but the facts are quite clear, as can be seen.

One can continue to talk about him as a development candidate, but the reality of his politics does not validate that claim. But today it has become difficult to argue against Modi on facts, as anyone who scans the internet will be able to see immediately. Opinion that is critical of Modi is attacked viciously and, more importantly, in overwhelming numbers. The English speaking middle class which dominates this medium is angry about the condition of the country and demands a dictatorship. Its propensity for this sort of solution can be seen elsewhere. The middle class’s answer to preventing rape is the death penalty and castration. Its solution to corruption was Anna Hazare’s Lok Pal, a virtuous body imposed on a democratic structure. Those disturbed by the righteous crowds of that time will see more of them this year and in the years to come, as the middle class expands and demands that other people improve.

We feel more clearly than before the absence of a figure like Nehru, who offered a modern and secular identity to Indians of the last generation. Today the trend is clear. It is the pluralist who is under attack, and the rise of Modi is a certain signal that dangerous times lie ahead.