In this pregnant moment — after the final vote in the Gujarat assembly has been cast and before the first vote is counted — let’s pluck out one of those compelling questions currently circulating in the ether. Can the politics of communal polarisation practised successfully in Gujarat be replicated in the country? There is the argument that Modi’s model of governance has a certain resonance in the New, Resurgent India, which is impatient with the burdens of the past, and its legacy of poverty, backwardness and encrusted Nehruvian values. Gujarat, with its ‘winning’ combination of muscular cultural nationalism and unstoppable China-like economic growth, offers the citizens of New India a passport out of Old India. There are some — for the moment confined largely to those sympathetic to the Sangh Parivar — who even argue that the country cannot do better than acquire a PM like Narendra Modi; and the BJP, if it wishes to re-capture power at the Centre, couldn’t do better than embrace hardline Hindutva.

There is, of course, no denying that the consolidation of what can be broadly termed ‘sustainable Hindutva’ has been achieved in Gujarat. The fact that the BJP has been able to account for more than 40 per cent of the votes over three consecutive elections — 1995, 1998 and 2002 — underlines this. There cannot also be any doubt about its impressive economic achievements: according to the Gujarat government, it recorded a growth rate of 12.7 per cent in 2006-07 and 26 per cent of total bank finance was in Gujarat in 2006-07, according to RBI figures. The Gujarat Model could appear compelling indeed, especially when bathed in the neon-lit effulgence provided by its spinmeisters.

... contd.