The narratives on Gujarat over the last decade have been among the most polarising in India. The 2002 riots made Gujarat the centrepiece of the secularism versus Hindutva divide. The Hindutva response of projecting the state as a model of development laid the ground for an understated widening of the growth versus inequality divide. More recently, Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi’s ways have brought to the fore the conflict between authoritarianism and democracy.
In the midst of such sharply polarised views, it is easy to slip into simplistic understandings of what is happening in Gujarat. These views are often led more by predetermined conclusions rather than a calmer analysis of evidence. Against this backdrop, Nikita Sud’s work is refreshing. Going beyond casual contentions, Sud takes us into the underlying complexities with a great deal of competence, even if she falls somewhat short of providing us with an alternative perspective that will help us understand the larger processes in Gujarat’s and India’s recent political economy.
Shaking off any need to be committed to a single model, Sud feels free to draw from a variety of very different academic analyses of the liberalisation process in India. She takes this open analytical approach to the two critical elements of Gujarat’s recent story: land, and relations between religious groups. Sud first explores in considerable detail the process through which land is being liberalised and the multiple roles the state plays in that process. She captures vividly the manner in which the state, in pursuit of privatised economic growth, has actively allied with national and international big business.
The government’s unrelenting pursuit of privatised growth has been matched by its determination to alter official interaction with different religious communities, particularly in times of communal violence. Sud’s account highlights the political process through which a state gradually moves from championing secularism, at least in official statements, to the extension of Hindutva to all levels of government.
Implicit in this elegant academic recounting is a critique of the way we tend to look at the last two decades of Indian political economy. There has been a tendency to focus on precise cut-off points which mark transformation: 1991 for the economy and the 2002 riots for Gujarat’s polity. As Sud traces the economic and political processes in Gujarat over the last two decades, she brings out the elements of continuity in the changes taking place, instead of focusing on dramatic transformational moments. There is much in her argument that liberalisation began before Manmohan Singh was finance minister, and Gujarat had a deteriorating communal situation before Modi became chief minister.
The more significant critique is of the widely held belief that liberalisation necessarily implies a massive decline in the role of the state. Sud is convincing in her argument that “...contrary to neo-liberal presumptions about its recession, the state is not absent from a liberalising economy, nor is it merely on the regulatory sidelines. It is critical to the current growth story in many ways”. It has to be recognised that the state has latent competencies unavailable to other actors, such as the market or civil society.
What is disappointing about Sud’s ‘biography of Gujarat’ is that having come right up to recognising that the liberalisation process is not about the decline in the importance of the state, she chooses to go no further. The fact that the old state-versus-free market perception does not explain India’s liberalisation process raises a number of questions. If liberalisation leaves the state with a direct role in the economy, is the entire post-1991 process a mere modification of the Nehruvian strategy? Does this new combination of the state and privatised growth lead to crony capitalism? And does the Gujarat experience suggest that sustained crony capitalism can contribute to authoritarian trends?
Sud unfortunately does not discard the academic’s straitjacket long enough to attempt even a preliminary answer to these questions. All she is willing to conclude is that “the state is critical to the independent trajectories of liberalisation and Hindu nationalism, and it is an important factor at points of their merger (p 200)”. Sud’s work undoubtedly adds to the growing evidence that liberalisation has been a process of the state changing its role, rather than handing things over to the market. It’s a pity she serves no more than an appetiser.
