In the early years of the last decade, I was working on a book which took me frequently to the western Indian state of Gujarat. It was an unsettling time to be there. Hindu fundamentalist-led mobs had killed over a thousand Muslims in an outbreak of communal violence in 2002, most of them in the state’s largest city, Ahmedabad. The judicial repercussions of the riots continued to dominate the national news. Inside Gujarat I found Muslims fearful and Hindus unrepentant, many even justifying the violence as a necessary ‘lesson’ for the victims. Journalists covering the violence pointed to long-term indoctrination by Hindu fundamentalist groups. I felt there was more to it than that. What was it about Gujarat that had made it so hospitable to violence?
I began to look deeper, and it quickly became apparent that something unusual was going on in Ahmedabad. Every time I visited a new mall or hotel had gone up, or a new road had been built. To an extent this was not remarkable. When India adopted capitalist reforms in 1991, it committed itself to a programme of accelerated urbanisation, enacting laws to give more powers to local authorities and launching schemes like the (2005) Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM).
The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, influenced by globalisation and the neoliberal ideology sweeping the post Thatcher-Reagan world, were behind the urban push. With economies of speed and scale, the urban form was considered a necessary complement to neoliberalism and sold as a global aspiration. The city also became the unit of competition between nations, assuming an entrepreneurial role to attract global finance from corporate investors and tourists. In the late twentieth century, New York gentrified neighbourhoods, cleaned up Times Square, and launched the ‘I Love NY’ campaign to attract tourists; the desert outpost of Dubai emerged as a banking, tourist and transport hub; and Tokyo and Seoul leveraged their experience in heavy industry. In 2008, Beijing hosted the costliest Summer Olympics of all time. Terms like ‘place marketing’, ‘imagineering’ and ‘worlding’ entered the lexicon as cities vied with each other for attention and cash.
In India, urbanisation and liberalisation proceeded fitfully. The capital city Delhi was revamped for the 1982 Asian Games, and cities like Bengaluru (Bangalore), Hyderabad and Mumbai entered the global circuit, but these were exceptions. The cautiousness was understandable. Neoliberal reforms inflict huge job losses and mass displacement on everyday citizens, and democratic politicians are generally wary of causing potential voters such pain. In this context, the scale and haste of Ahmedabad’s transformation was unusual.
Naomi Klein presents us with a possible explanation in her book The Shock Doctrine, which describes how leaders use moments of crisis to push through controversial neoliberal policies. In this case, the violence of 2002 and its handling by the state had been bitterly criticised by the national and international media. Narendra Modi, then chief minister of the Gujarati legislature, presented the hostile media coverage as a blow to the pride of Gujaratis. To restore the state’s sheen, he told the electorate, he would institute a breakneck modernisation plan. In the peculiar atmosphere of heightened terror and emotion following the mass violence, his sell was startlingly successful.
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Amrita Shah | Radio Free (2020-02-24T07:00:07+00:00) The revanchist politics of Narendra Modi. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2020/02/24/the-revanchist-politics-of-narendra-modi/
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