Opportunity Costs Of A Leader

I moved to Delhi some three weeks ago after spending over three decades of my life in
Ahmedabad, prepared to be quizzed about the impending elections in Gujarat and whether the present government is likely to return to power for the third consecutive term; hear praise for peace returning to Gujarat after the violence of 2002, since no incidents of violence have taken place since then; and hear about Gujarat’s astonishing economic development and the prospect of the state’s leadership moving from Gandhinagar to New Delhi. I get all that. 

But I also wonder if the people who ask me these questions realise that the Gujarat development model is inextricably linked with a certain set of ideologies, ambitions and aspirations which facilitate and sustain it?

In some ways, Gujarat is a microcosm of India. It has a great diversity of religions, castes and communities. The percentage of Muslim minorities in the state is just slightly lower than the national average. Dalits and adivasis together form about a fifth of Gujarati society, just as in the rest of India. (However, the Dalit-adivasi ratio is quite different). And all these communities, along with fisherfolk, pastoralists and the landless poor, have paid the price for helping realise the economic dreams of the state’s expanding, ambitious middle classes. Common property resources—coastal land, rivers and pastoral lands in rural areas—have been systematically taken over to make way for special economic zones and large industrial and infrastructure projects. Lakes and riverfronts have been gated and redeveloped as entertainment zones and real estate for the urban elite, dispossessing the poor, marginalised and the voiceless.

What is the worldview that underpins the shaping of such a socio-economic order? I am neither a political analyst nor a sociologist, just a teacher of design and I speak from direct experience. This is a development model, it’s plain to see, whose motive force is the ambition of the Gujarati middle class, made possible through large-scale dispossession and sustained only by denying dissent. Anyone raising issues of equity, justice or sustainability associated with such a model of development is likely to be branded antediluvian at best and ‘outsider’, anti-Gujarat and pseudo-secularist at worst. Either way, dissenting views would find no space in the local media or in public discourse.

Since the 1980s, episodes of caste and communal violence have sharpened spatial segregation of communities, resulting in Muslim and Dalit ghettoes and upper-caste enclaves and declining social interaction. Muslims increasingly send their children to schools run by their community in their own localities. Within the municipal school system, they prefer the Urdu medium of instruction, while Gujarati medium schools are attended overwhelmingly by Dalit children. Schools are spaces for shared childhoods leading to adult bonds of friendship and understanding within accepted traditional social boundaries, but such spaces are no longer available. So it’s not Muslims and Dalits who are victims of social polarisation, but Gujarati society as a whole.

After three decades of caste and communal violence, and almost fifteen years of the present political regime, we now have a generation of young Gujarati adults who know no other social order, no other way of being. The lack of access to diverse views through the media or public debate breeds intolerant parochialism and uncritical acceptance of the mirage of miraculous growth-rate figures. Perhaps, the middle class elsewhere is no different in its aspirations for a Gujarat style of development. But they might like to take a moment to consider the kind of social order that will inevitably accompany it and the political sanction it will receive. Would that be their idea of India? Significantly, cases related to the murder of an activist protesting against illegal mining in south-western Gujarat (he was murdered right outside the Gujarat High Court) and the blocking of community access to a river by a prominent industrial house are now before the Supreme Court. It is worth remembering that in the thousands of cases related to the 2002 riots that were closed in local courts, the process of bringing the perpetrators of communal carnage to justice had restarted only on the intervention of the SC. What will happen to democratic institutions of checks and balances if a Gujarati worldview were to be established nationally is anyone’s guess.

As a university teacher I can attest, as will other colleagues in design, architecture and management institutes in Ahmedabad, how difficult it is to even discuss ideas like secularism or social justice in the classroom, or to debate whether or not the state’s development model is socially and economically sustainable, or the human costs involved. Yet, I remain optimistic, happy with small signs that there is some intuitive goodness, even courage, in young people that shines through my experiences with students. This year, Id was celebrated at roughly the same time as the festival of Rakshabandhan. In a classroom assignment, students were asked to observe the social geography of the old parts of Ahmedabad. One student, a young woman, reported her observations of a side-lane flanked on one side by a Muslim mohalla and on the other by a Jain pol. Id decorations lined the mohalla-side of the road and rakhis were displayed for sale on the opposite side. She said she was really happy to see this, that the two communities could celebrate their festivals side by side. In another classroom project, architecture students were asked to visualise designs for the disputed Ramjanmabhoomi site, in accordance with the Allahabad High Court ruling. Each student in the class offered designs which, while complying with the ruling, brought the irreconcilable communities together, using the space creatively to resolve the differences.

While young people often echo the prejudice and parochialism that surrounds them, when given a chance to experience reality freely and to relate in a human way, they respond positively. Left to themselves, they can intuitively feel the rich web of their environment and respond humanely. But these impulses need nurturing, they need space to breathe and expand and be expressed. In Gujarat, and also in the rest of India.

(Suchitra Balasubrahmanyan teaches at the School of Design, Ambedkar University, Delhi, and co-authored Ahmedabad: From Royal City to Megacity, Penguin 2011)