Autocracy, with Indian characteristics
Narendra Modi, 2024|© Vipin Kumar/Hindustan Times/Getty Images
May 31, 2024
IN THIS REVIEW
GUJARAT UNDER MODI
Laboratory of today’s India
416pp. Hurst. £30.
Christophe Jaffrelot
THE INCARCERATIONS
BK-16 and the search for democracy in India
672pp. William Collins. £30.
Alpa Shah
At the dawn of the twenty-first century India’s intellectual classes professed a cautious optimism – verging at times on self-congratulation – about the nation’s tryst with democracy. For many, the unruly coalition governments of the late 1990s and early 2000s reflected the deepening of democratic norms and a shared commitment to the peaceful transfer of power. Others pointed to high voter turnouts – especially among the poor – and the rise of elected representatives from hitherto subordinated castes as proof that democracy had been profoundly vernacularized.
To be sure, these accounts were cognizant of the deficiencies and contradictions of democratic politics in India, including the concomitant resurgence of exclusionary identities, the criminalization of politics, the elevation of performative equality over substantive redistribution and the deepening of social cleavages along lines of caste and religion. But there was nonetheless a broad consensus about the legitimacy of India’s democratic credentials. Today there are many who question, with good reason, the country’s inclusion in the roster of democracies at all. It is now widely acknowledged that the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has transformed the country into an “electoral autocracy”. The institutional pillars of democracy – a robust legislature, a free press, a vigilant judiciary and a critical civil society – have crumbled, majoritarian passions have been actively stoked and the world’s third-largest Muslim population has been stigmatized as alien in its own land.
To understand how this astonishingly rapid transformation came about, Christophe Jaffrelot suggests that we turn to the recent past. In October 2001 Narendra Modi was elected chief minister of Gujarat, and over the next decade he transformed this prosperous frontier state on the west coast of India, renowned for its culture of commerce and protean caste structure, into a “laboratory for Hindu nationalism”. Gujarat Under Modi offers an impressive indictment of the template for governance that India’s current prime minister forged in his home state before applying it to the country as a whole. Modi’s unprecedented achievement in winning three consecutive elections in Gujarat, Jaffrelot argues, was the outcome of carefully calibrated strategies and policies designed to secure the unwavering loyalty of the majority Hindu electorate.
In the decade before Modi became chief minister, the BJP exerted a tenuous hold over Gujarat. For the better part of the twentieth century the state had been an electoral bastion of the Indian National Congress, the party that led the country’s struggle for freedom. Moreover, this was the state that had produced Mahatma Gandhi. Ironically, as Jaffrelot notes, Gandhian political culture in Gujarat was animated by a strong strain of traditionalism and displayed many affinities with the core doctrines of Hindutva. Gandhian conservatism in the state was represented by figures such as Vallabhbhai Patel (the “Iron Man of India”, credited with bringing about the accession to the newly independent Indian Union of the 500-odd princely states); K. M. Munshi (whose historical novels extolled Gujarat’s pre-Islamic warrior kings); and Morarji Desai (the first non-Congress prime minister). However, after the party’s internal split in 1969, Indira Gandhi’s Congress forged a new social coalition comprising the “backward classes”, Dalits, tribals and Muslims (known collectively as KHAM), and pursued policies of social justice that catered to their aspirations.
But the Congress’s new political orientation alienated its traditional upper-caste supporters, especially the patidars (rich peasants in the state’s central region). Jaffrelot highlights how the BJP was the principal beneficiary of this Gujarati elite ressentiment. From the mid-1980s the party began to pursue a twin-pronged strategy of social polarization in pursuit of electoral success. On the one hand it attracted the upper castes, who were seething at the growing assertiveness of the so-called lower castes. On the other it engineered anti-Muslim riots as a way of bringing together the different castes and communities within the Hindu fold. The BJP’s political strategies generated their own internal fissures and factional conflicts. Modi, a member of the paramilitary-style Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) on deputation from the mid-1980s to the BJP, was involved in this internecine warfare and eventually shunted out of the state in 1995.
Six years later he returned in triumph to Gujarat when he was chosen internally as the replacement for the physically ailing and politically floundering incumbent BJP chief minister, Keshubhai Patel. Remarkably, Modi had never fought an election until after he took office. In February 2002, barely four months into his tenure, Hindu vigilante groups massacred hundreds of Gujarati Muslims in a sickening pogrom. The intense communal polarization that occurred in the wake of these tumultuous events allowed the BJP to sweep the state elections held later that year. This marked the beginning of Modi’s political dominance in Gujarat. Over the next decade he tightened his grip both on the party and on the administrative machinery, and became the state’s longest-serving chief minister.
Jaffrelot dissects five key characteristics that enabled Modi to exert a stranglehold over Gujarat. First, his unbroken run of electoral victories was to a large extent the result of the relentless communal polarization that the BJP in Gujarat effected under his leadership. The pogrom of 2002 had proven to Modi that stoking anti-Muslim sentiment was guaranteed to consolidate Hindu majoritarianism. For the rest of his tenure he espoused a “politics of fear” that sought to vilify the state’s Muslim minority as the irredeemable “Other”. Second, he presided over a regime that systematically hollowed out the institutions that were meant to uphold the rule of law. Corrupt policemen were rewarded for enforcing his diktats; Muslims were framed as jihadis and killed in staged police “encounters”. Third, Modi promoted the interests of big capital over small businesses and privileged mammoth infrastructure projects over expenditure on social development. The economic model in Gujarat was based on a form of crony capitalism in which a small group of industrialists – among them the Modi loyalist Gautam Adani – could leverage their proximity to the chief minister to secure favourable concessions. Fourth, Modi cultivated a highly personalized, autocratic style of governance. Bypassing the existing hierarchy of RSS and BJP functionaries, and establishing a direct link with the electorate, he came to exercise untrammelled power over both the party and the government. Finally, Modi also paid close attention to the “neo-middle class”, a large and amorphous group of newly urbanizing castes and communities. In particular he crafted political strategies that showed a keen grasp of the status anxieties and aspirations of these claimants to middle-class “respectability”.
Jaffrelot’s acute analysis presents Modi’s “Gujarat model” as both a product of the state’s distinctive political culture and a stark departure from its previous traditions. Arguably, though, discrete elements of his governance style had non-Gujarati precedents. Pre-2001 India had seen authoritarian populist chief ministers. The southern states of Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu, for example, were governed for long spells by charismatic actors turned politicians who brooked no dissent. Likewise, Modi’s wooing of big business, his emphasis on infrastructure projects and his deep investment in technological modernity were prefigured in the 1990s by Chandrababu Naidu, the managerial chief minister of Andhra Pradesh. Modi’s singularity lies in his preparedness and ability to entwine these strands and place them at the service of an unequivocally exclusionary ideology.
What about resistance to the Modi regime in Gujarat? In the book’s final chapter Jaffrelot explores how Modi suppressed expressions of dissent against his government by different sections of society, ranging from the urban and rural poor to middle-class civic activists. With the Congress Party failing to rally public opinion against the BJP, it was left to these dissenting groups to mount resistance against its policies. But Modi effectively neutralized this opposition by curbing free speech, transforming universities into hubs of Hindutva ideology and allowing vigilante groups affiliated to the Hindu right a free hand in policing minorities.
The quotidian surveillance of society by what Jaffrelot terms the “deeper state” acquired a venomous salience after Modi became prime minister. Simultaneously his regime buttressed the powers of the traditional “deep state”. Notably, the BJP government invoked the draconian Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) against those sections of Indian civil society that challenged its policies. Under the stringent provisions of this act prisoners can be detained for years without a trial or any realistic prospect of bail.
The Incarcerations by Alpa Shah offers a chilling account of the notorious Bhima Koregaon case, in which sixteen civil society activists – among them writers, poets, lawyers and teachers – were arrested under the UAPA for “waging a war against the Indian state, overthrowing democracy, and plotting to assassinate Prime Minister Narendra Modi”. The origins of the event that triggered this case date back to more than two centuries. Koregaon Bhima, a village in the Pune district of Maharashtra, was the scene of a famous battle between the British and Baji Rao II, the Brahmin peshwa who nominally headed the Maratha confederacy. On January 1, 1818, a small English East India Company force of about 800 soldiers held off and routed a much larger army commanded by the peshwa. Fighting on the British side were Mahar soldiers in a battalion of the 1st Regiment of Bombay Native Infantry, whose bravery was later memorialized in an obelisk at the site.
By the bicentenary of the battle in 2018, it had become customary for large numbers of Dalits to travel to Koregaon Bhima on January 1 to commemorate their role in the peshwa’s defeat. A public gathering called the Elgar (Battle Cry) Parishad (Council) was held on New Year’s Eve 2017 in the city of Pune. Organized by two retired judges, this event featured many leading Dalit activists. The following day Hindu nationalist vigilantes viciously attacked Dalits who had gathered at the Koregaon memorial. The subsequent police investigation deliberately ignored the explicit evidence incriminating Milind Ekbote and Sambhaji Bhide, Hindu activists who reportedly instigated the marauding mobs. Instead the Pune city police targeted the participants in the Elgar Parishad, who were alleged to have links with Maoist terror cells. By the middle of 2018 this spurious investigation had implicated sixteen opponents of the Modi regime, most of whom had no links with the events at Koregaon Bhima.
Among the BK-16 were two individuals whose stories were covered widely in the international media. Sudha Bharadwaj, a trade unionist and human rights lawyer in Chhattisgarh, was born in Boston and spent her childhood across the Atlantic in Cambridge before returning to Delhi with her mother, the distinguished economist Krishna Bharadwaj. She graduated in mathematics from the elite Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, but eschewed a lucrative professional career, instead becoming drawn to the struggles for tribal rights in Chhattisgarh led by the charismatic Shankar Guha Niyogi. She gave up her American citizenship and immersed herself in political activism. By the time she was arrested in 2018Bharadwaj had become a widely respected trade unionist and lawyer in Chhattisgarh. Stan Swamy (born Stanislaus Lourduswamy) was an octogenarian Jesuit priest and tireless champion of Indigenous rights in Jharkhand. Subjected to brutal indignities in prison, made worse by Parkinson’s disease, he died in judicial custody in July 2021. Other, less heralded members of the BK-16 were also highly regarded figures in Indian civil society. Some – such as Anand Teltumbde, Sudhir Dhawale, Surendra Gadling, Jyoti Jagtap, Sagar Gorkhe and Ramesh Gaichor – were established or emergent Dalit voices. Others – including Varavara Rao, Gautam Navlakha, Vernon Gonsalves, Arun Ferreira, Shoma Sen, Hany Babu, Rona Wilson and Mahesh Raut – had campaigned tirelessly for the rights of dispossessed people in the most deprived parts of India.
Shah’s brisk narrative presents vividly etched portraits of the BK-16. Concurrently the book pieces together the murky story of how the Indian “deep state” ensnared recalcitrant citizens. Notably, Indian investigative agencies deployed sophisticated cyberware to mount a ludicrous prosecution of the BK-16 as the masterminds of an alleged Maoist plot to assassinate Modi. The Pune city police’s case against these putative “terrorists” (or “urban Naxalites”, as they were dubbed by the regime and its supporters) rested on supposedly incriminating documents found on Rona Wilson’s computer. Arsenal Consulting, a Massachusetts-based cyber-security firm, later testified that an external hacker had used malware to infiltrate the electronic devices of Wilson, Gadling, Rao, Swamy and Bharadwaj. Shah’s account reaffirms the findings of independent Indian and international media outlets that tracked the deployment of Pegasus, a highly effective spyware of Israeli provenance. The author also highlights a relatively neglected feature of this tawdry tale: the use by the state of “hackers for hire”, many of whom operate within India.
The BK-16 case encapsulates the defining features of the BJP’s model of statecraft. First, there is the calculated silencing of dissent, now with the added advantage of access to global surveillance technologies. Second, there is the deliberate use of the UAPA to short-circuit conventional legal protocols and incarcerate political opponents, helped along by a compliant judiciary. Third, there is the deployment of narratives of fear to divert attention from politically damaging truths. Thus, a riot incited by Hindu vigilantes was spun by state agencies into a Maoist conspiracy to eliminate India’s supreme leader. Finally, there is the BJP’s cynical manipulation of the media into an instrument that regurgitates its propaganda.
Alpa Shah concludes that the Modi government is “an Indian form of fascism”. Christophe Jaffrelot prefers to use the term “national populism”. Either way, both of these books powerfully illustrate the perils for a democracy when authoritarian state power is yoked to a brute majoritarianism intent on bullying into submission minorities and dissenters. As India confronts the prospect of another five years of BJP rule, with the final election results to be declared on June 4, these works are urgent tracts for our times.
Prashant Kidambi is Professor of Colonial Urban History at the University of Leicester. His books include Cricket Country: An Indian odyssey in the age of empire, 2019
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