Lok Sabha elections are never without entertainment. More so in the days of round-the-clock television. Every day we are regaled with stories of the epic fight between Narendra Modi and Rahul Gandhi.
It is very significant that neither Gandhi nor Modi criticise each other on issues that matter to the Indian masses. (There is of course everyone’s favourite whipping boy, corruption and poverty. Everyone who is someone in this country is apparently against them, but they only get bigger.)Throughout the land, both to his supporters and his detractors, Modi is identified with the 2002 Gujarat riots, which, with clear complicity of the state machinery, killed thousands and continues to ghettoise the entire muslim population of Gujarat. Interestingly, in his electoral speeches, Modi never talks about it. Even more interesting, neither does Rahul.
Perhaps to take attention away from 2002, Modi and his publicists focus on his so-called Vikas Purush persona. And that’s where the silence is loudest, not only from the Congress, but even from Modi’s other detractors. Modi’s tall (but vague) claims about the Gujarat development model go mostly unchallenged.
Vikas Purursh – but ‘Vikas’ for whom?
The media is of course all praises for the prosperity of Gujarat. This is understandable, given that the people who own the media, the top industrialists, are completely enamoured of Modi and his government, as are their middle-class acolytes.
Some months back, in the ‘Vibrant Gujarat 2013’ Modi appeared on stage flanked by none other than the Ambani brothers either side, united in their love for the man. Mukeshbhai was completely starry eyed; he said Modi was “a leader with a grand vision”. Anilbhai went a step further: “ Narendrabhai has Arjuna-like clarity of vision. Narendrabhai literally is the lord of men, a leader among leaders and the king among kings”. The dapper Ratan Tata, whose Nano plant found a safe haven in Gujarat after it was thrown out by the people of Bengal, was also there. He was just as glowing: “Gujarat stands out distinctly in the country and the credit for it goes to Mr. Modi”.
Ratan Tata is not wrong. Point is how exactly is Modi’s Gujarat distinct?
Statistically speaking, the performance of the state on manufacturing, infrastructure, agriculture and overall investment is ahead of the national average. Its GDP growth has been much better than the all-India average in the last decade, comparable only to Maharashtra, Haryana and Tamil Nadu. In fact, the growth rate seems more balanced, across all sectors, including agriculture.
At this point, let us pause and remind ourselves what is GDP growth, and what it signifies. GDP (Gross Domestic Product) signifies the market value of the total goods and services in a place in a given period of time. Simply put, it is a measure of the total quantum of wealth in a given place or society. What it is not is a measure of how that wealth is distributed in society. It is not a measure of the welfare or prosperity of the people. Let’s take an example. Imagine two villages A and B, both with ten people. In village A, the headman has Rs 900 and everyone else has Rs 10. The GDP of the village then is Rs. 990. Village B has a GDP of Rs 500, but everyone there has Rs. 50. So, while the GDP of village A is higher, the people in village B, with the lower GDP, are actually better off, with more income and less disparity.
Modi’s Gujarat is a little like village A. The earning is indeed higher, but it is centralised in the hands of the top few in of the social pyramid. It is creating wealth for the likes of the Tata and the Ambanis, but what is there for the working poor, the majority of the population.
The media doesn’t really talk about it, but the development model much loved by industrialists and business leaders, has increased unemployment, poverty and inequality in Gujarat. It has made more farmers lose their land and have reduced access to education and health. Of course, justice and peace has also been sacrificed at the altar of development, but more on that later.
Gujarat Model – what’s there for the common people and the working poor?
Employment: Employment has been one of the major victims of Modi’s development. The emphasis is on development of physical capital rather than human capital. Gujarat has the most capital intensive manufacturing sector in India, but employment is not only stagnant and low, it has actually gone down in the recent years. The Compound Growth Rate (CAGR) of employment had remained at 2.6% from 1993-94 to 2004-05, from 2004-05 to 2009-10 it actually came down to almost zero. Essentially, it is a classic case of jobless growth.
Employment is actually steadily falling in manufacturing and primary sector, whatever little employment is there is happening mainly in the service sector, especially in the urban areas. Even these jobs are mostly casual in nature. And the so-called soft skills that much service sector jobs demand, like English proficiency, makes people from poorer sections straightaway ineligible. The share of marginal groups like tribals, backward castes and muslims in the job market has also become worse.
Wages: Not just employment, wages have also remained low in the manufacturing sector. From 2000 to 2010, wages have increased by a meagre 1.5%, when the all India average was 3.7% (which in itself is pathetically low, given the rate the rich multiplied their wealth). The low wages are also because of the increased contractualisation of the workforce, with the percentage of contract workers increasing from 19% to 34% between 2001 – 08. Not so paradoxically, the worsening condition of the workers in manufacturing is accompanied by increasing profitability and more investments in the sector.
Agriculture: Gujarat’s agricultural growth is significantly higher than the national average. Again, the growth has not resulted in employment for the people.
The growth has come through a shift towards cash crops and high value agricultural products, and handing over agricultural land to corporates. This corporatisation has brought down rural employment and ensured that small farmers and various people employed in the agricultural downstream no longer have a place in this process, nor have access to cultivable land.
This has also led to a decline in food grain production, which doesn’t augur well for the poor, both rural and urban.
The Modi government has changed land laws and brought in an extraordinary liberalized agricultural land policy that has made corporatization and privatization of village commons easier. With the new land laws leading to relaxation of the land ceiling and making it easier for non-local, non-farming groups to enter the rural land market, Modi has paved the way for the builder lobby to take over village land. In fact, greeenfield projects and SEZs are also turning into thinly guised land grabs for forced urbanization by the private sector. There is rampant speculation in land, like in the proposed command areas of the Narmada Valley Project.
Landlessness is also on the rise in Gujarat, the worst affected being the tribals.
The relative ranking of the state in rural poverty alleviation has not improved much compared to its position in the early 1990s.By the end of 2009-10, the number of rural poor in Gujarat was still higher than Haryana or Tamil Nadu. So much for Modi magic.
Education: Gujarat is a rich state that spends very little on health and education for the poor. Key education indicators show that the improvement in the state’s literacy rate is significantly slower than rest of India. The state’s ranking in literacy rate and school enrolment fell from 5th to 7th position among 15 major states between 2000 and 2008. In terms of total students enrolled in schools in the age group of 6-14 years, Gujarat’s all India rank has slipped from 21 to 26 during this period. In another indicator, ranking based on school enrolment of children of 6 years and above, the state’s rank deteriorated from 23 in 1999 to 30 in 2008. In fact, in most studies based on basic educational parameters, Gujarat ranks between 19 to 30 out of 35 states and union territories.
Fewer girls go to school in Gujarat than the national average, as do children from lower castes and marginal communities. Where Modi’s Gujarat is proudly ahead of the national average is in disparity in education.
While the state spend in education is declining, private schools are mushrooming all over the state. Yet, more and more people are getting dependent on government schools, particularly in the rural areas, as the higher costs of private schools are taking them out of reach of most. How this is impacting education, particularly among the poorer children, is obvious.
Fact is, education is not a priority for the state and there is very little government spending on it. Overall, spend in education is low all across India. Modi’s Gujarat has the dubious distinction of allocating the lowest proportion of its GDP to education, as compared to all other states in India.
Health: With the advent of Modi, government spending on health went down well below the national average. In fact, the overall policy of unbridled privatisation is being pursued in the health sector as well. Healthcare is being left to private enterprise in both rural and urban areas, with spiralling costs making it inaccessible to most. Gujarat ranks 10th in the rate of decline in infant mortality. It is particularly high in rural areas, claiming more girl children and babies from SC and ST communities. In ante-natal care (care for newborn children), Gujarat’s ranking declined from 9th in 1990-95 to 11th in 2005-10.
In Gujarat, malnutrition is higher than the national average. This means that more people go to bed hungry in Gujarat, while the state’s GDP growth soars! The state of health of the people are also indicative of many other things in society, like the quality of food, access to clean drinking water, housing, clothing, ability to earn a proper livelihood. The public health situation is Gujarat is a glaring indicator of a larger economic crisis for the poor.
This sorry state of health or education is not due to corruption or neglect or an inefficient delivery mechanism, it is a direct consequence of this model of development.
Overall policy direction: Modi’s BJP, much like Manmohan’s UPA, shares a blind faith in market and private investments. So much so, investments are not seen as resources for social, pro-people spends, but as primary policy goal. In fact, investors today are willy-nilly deciding government policy priorities. The private investment led growth, while it makes the industrialists happy, completely misses out on creating employment and sustainable livelihoods, or poverty alleviation.
It prioritizes infrastructure development towards projects that strengthen investments and profitability of investors, rather than that meets the need of the common people. For example, road and rail access are created for SEZs and private industrial areas rather than linking human habitations. There are huge tax write-offs in favour of private capital and industries (remember, this is people’s money, not the government’s). Key sectors like ports, roads, rail and power are being handed over to private capital. The public, of course, has no control over corporate decision making, yet the government surrendering all decision making powers, as well as functional and financial control. The policy direction restricts the role of government and gives almost complete operational and tariff freedom to private investors. In fact, nowhere else in the country has the state given over the economy so entirely to private capital.
On the other hand, public expenditure in social or welfare sectors are being cut, government infrastructure is being rolled back and dependence is being on private capital initiatives, geared for profit maximisation rather than social welfare.
There is a simple truth we need to remember at all times: the interest of the rich, the elite, the industrialists and that of the common people, the working poor are not only different, but contradictory. What is good for the rich is not good for the poor and what is good for the poor is not good for the rich. This is the simplest, most obvious truth. Yet it is the one truth the powers that be want us to not see.
As the data show, the Gujarat development model, while being pro-industrialist and pro private investment, is particularly anti-worker, anti-poor, anti dalit, anti woman and against minorities and tribals.
Congress is silent because there is no real difference – Modi is UPA on fast track
The congress is silent on the Gujarat model or at best makes competitive claims, because Manmohan’s economic policy is not that different. In fact, every single major parliamentary party in India pursues policies that are fundamentally derived from the same foundation, whenever they are in power. Please remember, that every single party in the so called ‘third front’ formations have at one time or the other supported either Congress or BJP, often both of them.
After we look past the BJP-RSS propaganda rhetoric, there’s nothing particularly new about the Gujarat model, it’s the same neo-liberal economics propagated by the likes of IMF and World Bank, that Manmohan Singh had been trying to implement in India. If anything, it’s perhaps a more fervent and vigourous adaptation of the same model. This has been made possible by the fact that unlike the various constraints that Congress had to face in the form of both popular protests and parliamentary opposition (this included the BJP at times), Modi is comparatively free of such checks, having decimated his parliamentary rivals, repressed popular movements and has successfully polarised the population between those who love him and those who are terrified of him.
What makes Modi special is that he implements Congress’s policies even better than Congress. Congress, and various other major parties who share state power, are sometimes slowed down by fear of people’s movements and pragmatic instincts of self-preservation in the electoral competition. This sometimes results in token efforts to mitigate the brutal consequences of liberalisation. Of course, these are minor pressure letting mechanisms, which do not imply any fundamental change in policy direction, but, at best, slows down the march of the market a tiny bit. Sometimes our great industry leaders gets impatient with these electoral exigencies, and call out for the delinking of economics from politics (essentially demanding that the state wholly and solely looks after the interest of private capital, the will or the needs of the people be damned). That’s where Modi’s appeal to industry lies.
It tops in labour unrest, so why do industrialists love Gujarat?
Economic Survey of 2011 lists Gujarat as the state with the highest incidents of labour unrest (which is hardly unexpected, given the pathetic employment and wage situation). All over India, ‘labour trouble’ is the favourite excuse of industrialists to threaten movement of capital. Not so in Gujarat. They feel confident that no amount of protest or dispute can endanger their capital under Modi’s watch.
It’s because the Gujarat’s investor-friendly economic policy is backed by a very special kind of politics and administration.
The industrialists love him not because the tax sops and the favourable economic policy makes them forget the 2002 riots; but because they remember it and understand that the same forces that could subvert the formal structures of ‘democracy’ and state, and effortlessly kill and displace thousands, can be harnessed and used to safeguard their money.
The Gujarat riots of 2002 were particularly significant in two things – the complicity of the state machinery and the ability of Modi and RSS to unleash a well trained, well organised force of brutal goons. In fact, the two worked together like a well-oiled machine, orchestrated by Modi in his dual role of Chief Minister and RSS leader. Communal passions were skilfully flamed and public support drummed up, the police force was neutralised, key elements in it were instructed to assist the killers, overall state support was provided to the organisers of the killings both in the form of material assistance and cover. In fact, the complicity of the state is so much that justice for the victims is virtually impossible, with flawed FIRs, rubbish investigations and overt government support for the perpetrators, even after Supreme Court intervened and transferred cases out of Gujarat.
Simply put, the Gujarat riots display Modi’s iron hand that can be used to repress any protest, any inconvenient unionisation or people’s movement, big or small that can even minimally threaten the fat cat investors. Anyone reckless enough put up a resistance will potentially have to deal with the same force. (Muslim bashing to union bashing isn’t such a long journey, in recent times Shiv Sena also travelled the same path, albeit in reverse, and with a detour via the ‘lungiwalas’ – the South Indian immigrants.)
While ‘democracy’ or ‘rule of law’ hardly ever trickles down to the poor anywhere in India, in Gujarat Modi has taken it to new heights. Rule of law in Gujarat means a political culture of authoritarianism. According to economist Atul Sood, it is this culture of authoritarianism, which gives faith and belief to the investor to invest in Gujarat, even when this authoritarianism has manifested itself more recently in spectacular form in acts of violence against the religious minorities, scheduled tribes and lower castes (remember the anti-Narmada Dam movement).
Indeed, the destruction of justice and peace is not only an outcome of market driven growth, it is also an essential condition for it.
Data source – Poverty Amidst Prosperity: Essays on the Trajectory of Development in Gujarat (Aakar Books)
(Written in October 2013, First Published in Morcha in November and December issues)
Hillele 