Substrata: Shaming Gujarati Middle Class

There’s a picture on my bedroom cupboard that I wake up to each morning. It’s from the catalogue of the artist Farhad Hussain, titled `After the Theatre of Absurdity.’ I bought this in the city of Ahmedabad in Gujarat for what it tells me about the kind of Gujarat that fuelled the imagination of the artist not so long ago, versus the dead space that it is today, as yet another election is upon the state. Farhad Hussain studied at M S University, Baroda, in the year 2005, three years after the infamous Gujarat pogrom of 2002.

His bio says Baroda’s art school left a huge impression on him, as did Santiniketan where he also studied. In my head, this scene is definitely from Gujarat. Friends from Ahmedabad said so and I believed them. This wasn’t just Hussain’s wild imagining. It was the flesh and blood of the swinging 60s in high society Gujarat, where everything could be, and was, turned on its head, including the swapping of partners. It was a time when the US psychologist, Erik Erikson, came and stayed in Ahmedabad to write his famous psychoanalysis of Gandhi, and taught at Gujarat University. Sudhir Kakar and Ashis Nandy – equally known for bending and re-shaping our worlds and predicting the shape of its current psychological chasm, also studied there. It’s when the Nav Nirman movement began with students going on strike in their universities, thousands going to jail, unafraid to stand up for what they believed in, unafraid of dissent.

Contrast that with the young people that are Gujarat’s new electorate and it’s clear why in election after election for the last two decades, Gujarat has mainly been a one-party state. Where subversiveness is no longer part of the culture, elections become more of a farce. It’s easy to see why the Home Minister of this country and Gujarat’s second most famous person, Amit Shah, opened the BJP’s election season with a strident defence of what happened in 2002.

When I moved to Gujarat the year after the anti-Muslim pogrom that Shah referenced, I found it strange that every middle-class Hindu, by which I mean most Hindus, would say,  `You won’t understand why we supported the mobs.’ They were still a bit defensive as they spoke in those days, because the rest of the country described that event as Gujarat’s great shame. By 2022, however, the pretence is gone and so is the uncertainty. Parents tell me that respectable middle-class schools, with one or two exceptions, have almost no Muslim students. When I returned to Gujarat in 2015 to write a book, the apartment block I lived in had in its rules, a clause forbidding flats from being rented, let alone sold, to Muslims.

I remember doing a report on hookah bars being shut down in Gujarat in 2016. Young people in Gujarat, already deprived of the opportunity to go out for a drink in a state where liquor is prohibited, were now also robbed of the other cool thing to do: hang out. But the young people seemed okay to go out for coffee instead. Conformity was fine, more than fine.

How does middle class Gujarat socialise? The annual garbas have more recently been held and managed by Hindutva outfits that ban the entry of Muslims. The colony residents don’t boycott this. They’re happy the colony resident association isn’t paying the bills. In the last couple of years, there have even been reports of garbas where people have been sprayed with cow-urine at the entrance, to keep Muslims out.

In 2003, one year after the anti-Muslim mob violence, my neighbour, who taught kindergarten children at a big international school, told me that none of the kids in her class was willing to go to the birthday party of the one Muslim student. They were scared of entering ‘that part of the city’ of Ahmedabad. She turned to me and asked how I frequented the walled city – places like Dariapur, Shahpur so much. “Those Muslims stand there, sharpening their knives.” I replied that they do that because they’re butchers, that is their trade.

The same year, in the municipal elections, the Congress party won and Ahmedabad got its first ever Muslim mayor – Anisha Begum Mirza. As I spent the day filming her for the TV channel I worked with at the time, she told me how her granddaughter was affected by the events of 2002. “Naani, let’s play riot-riot.”

The ‘riot-riot’ city also became a containment zone where respectable people practised various levels of conformity and concealment in their residential colonies. Eggs were always sold at the far end of residential spaces, out of the prying eyes of vegetarian residents. There are more egg stalls in Gujarati cities than most anywhere else in the country because they’re banned in middle class, non-meat-eating homes. Some grocers pack them in black plastic like they’re selling contraband. “Chhe safed aaloo dena, bhai,” (Please give me six white potatoes, brother) is what you have to ask for if you simply wanted to buy eggs in an ultra-vegetarian, Hindu society.

On the Gandhinagar highway, you can get yourself some `Jain chicken.’ This, I was informed by a friend, is chicken cooked without onions and garlic, so the good Jain boy or girl, going back home to their parents after eating forbidden food, would not smell of it.

‘You will never understand…you will never understand why we did what we did, you will never get why we supported the mobs’ was a refrain that over time began to make sense. In a state that has perhaps the fattest middle class, that section of people wanted to move from the political margins to centre-stage. The Vikram Sarabhais and B V Doshis of the state with their secular, socialist outlook had to be replaced by an equal and opposite. A strident Hindu party that would ‘teach rioters a lesson’ was a euphemism for a homogenising, Hindu social order, no eggs or Muslims please!

It’s the reason why the release of 11 convicts from the 2002 pogrom who raped Bilkis Bano and killed her family isn’t an electoral issue for the opposition.

We can always argue, of course, that, actually, at least half of Gujarat is rural and that in the last election, they voted almost unanimously for the opposition Congress and it was the urban vote that made the BJP pull through. I would plead that in Gujarat, the urban voter influences the popular imagination in a disproportionate way. Everyone wants to live inside a mall. If people in cities don’t dissent, if they are okay with a culture where Eid isn’t a public holiday and Hindu festivals have ten-day holidays, then, like them, much of Gujarat is also okay to overlook Bilkis Bano’s rapists being released and then garlanded.

Since the last election, the three main, young disruptors of Gujarat have changed where they were. Hardik Patel, the biggest thorn in the side of the BJP, has gone over to them, telling the press that that is where he always belonged. Alpesh Thakor did the same. Jignesh Mevani, the young, firebrand, Dalit activist who fought as an independent candidate, is with the Congress party this election and two election-watchers I spoke to said they’re not sure he will be able to retain his seat this time around.

In other words, those that did try and stick their necks out have either been swallowed whole by the main party – the BJP; or disappeared into the void that is the Congress, perhaps because it’s hard to sustain as an independent when the other side is flooded with majoritarianism and funds. As for the other opposition - AAP. “AAP is not looking to take on the BJP,” said an election watcher I spoke with. “Its looking to replace the Congress, which is very likely.”

But the real question for the people of Gujarat and the people of India watching the election unfold is this: are Gujaratis proud of this model they’ve exported to the rest of the country?

I have seen dissent in quiet quarters. Away from the prying eyes of parents and the police, people drink. People even in the establishment and the BJP criticise their own. But it’s the sort of disaffection of an old couple whose only real conversation is about their dentures, despite which they grin toothlessly and put up with each other for the sake of form.

There is something we can all do, as we watch this election unfold. In 2002, all those who held up a hideous mirror to Gujaratis and told them they were ashamed of what they saw, can do it again. Turn the knife. Make them squirm. Use the proverbial middle-class’s discomfiture with itself to say – ‘No, we don’t accept the homogenisation of Gujarat, so far removed from the picture Farhad Hussain painted. Go live another five years of monochrome conformism, if you like. The rest of us will continue to find that picture absurd.’

(This appeared in the print edition as "Grinning Without Dentures")

(Views expressed are personal)

Revati Laul the writer is author of the anatomy of hate, a journalist and filmmaker