But Gujarat is not, and cannot be, India and Narendra Modi’s future ascendancy to prime-ministership is a political pipe dream. First, we need to clarify that Gujarat’s ‘growth’ — on which Modi has put his personal imprimatur — actually dates back a thousand years in a region that has been at the intersection of innumerable trade routes. Gujarat’s economic history is bound to its geographical location both as a border region and a maritime one. Achyut Yagnik and Suchitra Sheth, in their book The Shaping of Modern

Gujarat, observe, “For almost a thousand years now, merchant communities — Hindus, Jains, Muslims, and later, Parsis — not only dominated the economic sphere but also wielded influence in Gujarati society and power in political affairs.” Much before they had their own state, Gujarati traders played a decisive role in creating Bombay’s share bazar. Once the state of Gujarat came into being, it saw both the Green and White revolutions. Today, Gujarat calls itself a ‘mini China’; in the early eighties, it was considered a ‘mini Japan’ — both claims of course coming at great environmental cost, but that’s another story. Between 1993 and 2000 — before Modi represented Gandhinagar — Gujarat’s manufacturing grew by 94 per cent. So we can safely assume that regardless of which party controls it, Gujarat will remain a high growth state. Those who argue that India’s future economic well-being would need a Modi are merely turning on the lights.

That apart, Gujarat itself has a social composition that does not approximate India’s. Not only does it have a higher percentage of upper caste population, it has lower Muslim representation. At the all-India level, Muslims represent 13.4 per cent of the population, while they constitute 9.1 per cent of Gujarat’s population. This combination of a higher upper caste/lower Muslim presence makes Gujarat unique (in UP, for instance a higher upper caste presence is accompanied by a significant Muslim presence), and makes it easier for Gujarati politicians across party lines to practise the politics of communal polarisation, something that is considerably more difficult to do at the national level.

... contd.