Searching for the Mahatma in Modi’s Gujarat

MY FOREFATHERS, LIKE GANDHI’S, were Kathiawari banias who worked as administrators in the courts of the petty princes of Kathiawar. My grandfather, Prabhudas Kamdar, was of that generation of Indians who came of age in the late 19-teens, just in time for the publication of Gandhi’s manifesto, Hind Swaraj. As a youth, Bapuji, as we all called him, gobbled up each issue of Gandhi’s

political tract, Young India, as it came off the press. Naturally, he joined Gandhi’s satyagraha movement. In 1920 or 21, he left home to live in Gandhi’s ashram in Ahmedabad on the banks of the Sabarmati river. Though he didn’t stay more than a year, those heady youthful days as a satyagrahi marked him for life.

In my family, devotion to gandhian principles died with my grandfather, a man who wore khadi dhoti to the last and inveighed passionately against such evils as Bollywood movies and Western technology. If this was the case in my family, I wondered what, if anything, remained of Gandhi and his life’s message in the land of his birth. Last December, I went to Gujarat to find out.

Gujarat owns Gandhi as no other part of India does. But under the leadership of Chief Minister Narendra Modi, Gujarat has moved farther away from Gandhi’s vision of swadeshi than any other part of the country. Narendra Modi has created a state where religious communities are scrupulously segregated, lower castes and other marginalised poor know their place, and big business dictates the terms of governance.

In Gujarat, there is no happy ‘multiculturalism’ of the sort vaunted by India’s image-makers to the world. Since the 2002 pogrom, Muslims of any class are restricted to well defined ghettoes. Even Hindu buildings are segregated according to vegetarians and non-vegetarians, upper castes and lower castes. The head of a well-known institution in Ahmedabad complained to me that one of his star employees, a Hindu woman married to a Muslim man, had to quit her job and leave the city because they could not, as a mixed couple, find anyone who would rent them a flat.

As for Gandhi’s vision of a nation of villages where small-scale farming satisfied local needs with the lightest possible effect on the environment, and empowered peasants dictated national governance from the village level up, Gujarat has become quite the contrary. In Modi’s ‘Vibrant Gujarat,’ natural and human resources have been placed entirely at the disposal of private capital, which has responded with gusto: Memorandums of Understanding valued at 14 billion dollars in 2003 shot to 243 billion in 2009.

In Vibrant Gujarat, farmers love genetically modified seeds; the urban middle class adores the new shopping malls. Unions were broken decades ago, and there are no requirements to hire local workers anyway. Set up shop in Gujarat, and you not only get land, electricity and water, you can have it all virtually tax-free. No wonder business leaders have hailed Gujarat as the model of all that India should aspire to be, a beacon of industrial-strength light guiding the way to a fat future. As Ratan Tata observed at the Vibrant Gujarat Global Investors Summit 2007, if you’re in business, and “you’re not in Gujarat, you’re stupid.”

Unfortunately, the people of Gujarat are not doing as well as the captains of industry rushing to set up Special Economic Zones on Modi’s generous terms. The International Food Policy Research Institute’s 2008 Global Hunger Index ranked Gujarat lower than Haiti.

THE NIGHTMARE VERSION of ‘Vibrant Gujarat’ is surely Alang. Drive far enough south from Bhavnagar, and you come to a stretch of poisoned coast where the world’s ocean-going vessels come to die. Modi is proud of Alang, citing it with no irony as part of Gujarat’s growing range of transportation industries.

I had imagined ships arrive at Alang as empty hulls. That is how they look in photographs, their rusting hulks lined up like beached whales along the shore. Not at all. Along the road to Alang, an endless stream of specialised markets stretches for several kilometres. The shops sell pumps, gas tanks, iron chains, pulleys and hooks. There are life jackets and ring buoys; life boats and stacks of crockery bearing the names of shipping lines. There are thousands of mattresses, pillows, bedsheets and blankets. One shop sells nothing but iron portals. Everything is sold by weight. People come from all over India to buy a few items or truckloads at rock-bottom prices. After all, it’s all garbage as far as the folks who got rid of it are concerned, and it costs virtually nothing to extract this booty from the abandoned ships.

A doctor at Alang’s sole clinic, a grimy little place, told me the 25,000 workers come principally from Orissa, Bihar, Chhattisgarh and Jharkand. They don’t speak Gujarati, and many are illiterate. They shuffle with the air of the utterly exhausted, like the inmates in grainy old films of Nazi work camps. I watched six men struggle to lift a heavy iron ring. They inched forward, straining every muscle. Others hunched over sheets of steel, cutting out sections with torches. They wore sunglasses, not proper visors. These men are exposed daily, like the beach and the sea, to heavy metals, asbestos, PCBs, chromates and mercury.

A man in one of the examining rooms of the clinic was being treated for ‘foreign object in the eye.’ Another very young man came in and collapsed on the floor in front of the reception desk. A doctor looked at the man and said, “High fever. Malaria is endemic, you know.”

I was told workers are paid between 140 and 375 rupees per day, depending on their skill. They are provided no housing and sleep ten or more to huts slapped together from the ships’ detritus. There are no toilets. They squat on the beach to relieve themselves. Their waste is scavenged by packs of dogs. They wash themselves as they can with a bucket of water from one of the few pumps. After their shift, they gather, all dirt and sweat and stunned relief in slightly larger shacks to watch a movie or a cricket match. Some have an arm looped over the neck of another. Some just sit dazed, staring ahead. At regular intervals, punctuating the unrelenting grime with bright, fresh colour, are signs for Reliance Mobile. I was told the workers spend their earnings on calls home and country liquor.

Foreigners are not allowed inside the ship-breaking area, and photography and filming are strictly prohibited. Clearly, the human reality of Alang, as opposed to the profit reports about Alang, is not one Gujarat wishes the outside world to see.

DRIVE NORTH FROM BHAVNAGAR and you pass through kilometres of salt pans, shimmering shallows of evaporating water next to small mountains of salt. It is impossible to see the sun-grizzled, bare-legged men working the salt pans and not think of Gandhi’s 1930 march to the coastal town of Dandi. The Salt March was the most potent symbolic act Gandhi performed of his concept of swadeshi, which does not mean ‘independence,’ as it is carelessly translated, but rather ‘homeland self-sufficiency.’

The approach to Ahmedabad along a four-lane highway is like that to any of India’s now mushrooming cities: farmland gives way to factories and warehouses, then to concrete apartment blocks of increasing height and amenities. There are hoardings everywhere hawking wedding togs and mobile plans. Finally, there are the glittering malls, where India’s elite gather to pay air-conditioned tribute to their arrival as marketing targets of international brands.

Yet nowhere in this new India is Gandhi’s image more ubiquitous than in Ahmedabad. Kasturba Gandhi Road leads to Gandhi bridge which leads past Gandhi’s statue in the middle of Income Tax Circle to Gandhigram and Gandhi Nagar. There are statues of Gandhi walking with his famous stave; statues of him sitting cross-legged with his impish grin; statues of Gandhi with Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, the defender of India’s peasant farmers. At the entrance to the tunnel that leads out of the city to the airport, there is a fresco depicting the Salt March.

Setting out from Sabarmati Ashram on 12 March 1930, Gandhi vowed not to return until India had achieved swadeshi.  He never did.  As he laid out in 1918 in Hind Swaraj and repeated in a letter to Jawaharlal Nehru in 1945, independence from Britain only to ape Western capitalism was not what he was after. In 1947, India embraced, in the mode of Nehruvian socialism, the Western imperative to manufacture and consume, not Gandhi’s freedom from the tyranny of unnecessary consumption. Gandhi knew his vision of swaraj had been rejected but he stuck stubbornly to it, writing to Nehru: “…if I am left alone in it I shall not mind, for I can only bear witness to the truth as I see it.”

ON THE AHMEDABAD CAMPUS of Gujarat Vidyapith, the university founded by Gandhi in 1920 to educate India’s youth for life in swaraj, is a small open-air café. It serves the best chai I have ever tasted. I stay for a couple of hours as the afternoon shadows grew long talking with Dina Patel.

“I love to take tea here,” she says, smiling. A slim woman with dancing eyes, Dina is a volunteer in the best gandhian tradition and the daughter of Prof CN Patel, deputy chief editor of Gandhi’s collected works for over 25 years. Dina had just shown me the room where she and her team are painstakingly scanning the best copies obtainable of

original volumes from the 100-volume set of Mahatma Gandhi’s collected works. Her team is producing an official, guaranteed original master copy. Dina showed me how each letter of each word on each page is carefully screened and, if necessary, gently reshaped with absolute fidelity to the original edition. Dina receives no salary, and pays for all her own expenses. Gujarat Vidyapith provides the room, the desks, the computer terminals, and pays the salaries of her team.

Whence such devotion? She tells me, “It was two months after my father died that I saw the revised edition,” referring to a print and digitised version commissioned by India’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting in 1998. The Ministry, then under the government of the newly elected National Democratic Alliance, took up a reorganisation of the collected works, as well as the production of a CD-ROM version. Gaining access to Gandhi’s collected works is difficult. The 100-volume original edition is available only in research libraries and Government of India institutions and archives. A CD-ROM version seemed like a boon to scholars and ordinary citizens alike.

There was one problem: the new version was not faithful to the original. There were omissions in the index, for example. Texts had been reordered. Dina was appalled that anyone would dare to tamper with the original, painstakingly assembled by a series of editors who dedicated their lives to a task entrusted to them by no less an eminence than Jawaharlal Nehru. “How can someone think of reshuffling this?” she asks me, her eyes flashing. “It is a crime,” she continues in a low, even voice. “I was driven mad.  For several days, I could not think of anything else.  I finally decided that, even if I had to stand alone, I had to protest this.”

In her fierce dedication and willingness to stand on principle come what may, Dina strikes me as a fitting guardian of Gandhi’s legacy. The Friends of CWMG (Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi), a group of scholars formed to rectify the revised edition, identified “over 500 instances of deletion or misinformation in the CD-ROM version and over 300 cases of deletion from the print version,” according to an email sent out on behalf of the group by Tridip Suhrud on 26 October 2004. Dina’s team is working first to bring out the 29 out-of-stock volumes. In three years, the entire 100 volumes of the original collected works should be digitised. It is the work of several lifetimes, performed with collective effort by individuals motivated by a

passion for Gandhi and an unshakeable belief in the importance of preserving his words as they were penned by the man himself.

Democracies are fragile systems. They depend on the integrity of founding documents. Constitutions, declarations, bills of rights are mere words on which the entire edifice stands. Delete chosen phrases, shift their order, erase some sections, and the foundation cracks. TheCollected Works of Mahatma Gandhi are certainly an important piece of the foundation of a free India. Preserving them word for word, however far India may have strayed from Gandhi’s vision, is the only insurance against a perversion so extreme the nation ceases one day to be anything like what its most hallowed founder envisioned.

IF WORDS ARE IMPORTANT, so are deeds. Chunilal Vaidya, 92 years old, is a man of both. Born in 1917, Chunilal spent his youth engaged in the freedom struggle, distributing seditious tracts and hiding from the police. “For months and months, I was underground, moving from village to village,” he explained, sitting on a divan in the small front room of his home directly across from Sabarmati Ashram. He proudly told me that during Indira Gandhi’s Emergency in the 1970s, “I had the privilege of going to jail.”

At nearly a century old, Chunilal is still going strong. He continues to publish regularly. He is also busy defending villagers near Bhavnagar where the Modi government has authorised without their consent a cement plant and a limestone mine that will swallow up 3,288 hectares of the state’s most fertile land. On 20 February 2010, several thousand farmers protested under the banner of Chunilal Vaidya’s Gujarat Lok Samiti after their repeated pleas, including a petition sent to the Modi government with 11,500 signatures in blood, were ignored, and hired goons were sent to terrorise them into selling their land for a song. Their slogan,  “Jaan denge, jameen nehin”—“We will give our lives, but not our land,” echoes Gandhi’s freedom cry, “karenge ya marenge”—“do or die.” The Modi government has reacted in the mode of India’s former imperial masters: a vicious lathi charge by police on 20 February sent ten people to hospital. The next day, police beat local legislator Dr Kanubhai Kanaria and his wife so severely, they too were hospitalised. This is the state of democracy in Vibrant Gujarat.

Chunilal told me that in 1947, the people of Ahmedabad asked Gandhi to return to Sabarmati Ashram since India had won its freedom. “And Gandhiji told them,” Chunilal explained, his hands folded on a portable writing desk balanced on his knees, “that this is not the swaraj of my concept.  In my concept, the villages will be sovereign and self-reliant.”

He told me that when Gandhi was assassinated in 1948, his dream of swaraj based on sovereign villages was abandoned by India’s leaders. He recounted to me an observation by Vinoba Bhave, considered Gandhi’s spiritual successor, that captures for Chunilal the perversion of swaraj after Gandhi’s death: “Vinoba Bhave told that under the British, the villages were sovereign and the country was a slave, while under independent India, the country was independent but the villages were slaves.”

IN GUJARAT, I FOUND Gandhi down but not quite out. All over the city of Ahmedabad and across the state, the shining face of chief minister Narendra Modi beams from larger-than-life technicolour hoardings. Modi’s image, omnipresent, vies with Gandhi’s. At Income Tax Circle, the government put up an enormous hoarding of Ratan Tata and Narendra Modi, the mega-industrialist smiling alongside the Hindu nationalist chief minister, a duo confident at having knocked the old pair of Gujarati freedom fighters and village defenders, Gandhi and Patel, off their pedestal.

In his letter to Nehru in 1945, Gandhi wrote: “I must not fear if the world today is going in the wrong way. It may be that India too will go that way and like the proverbial moth burn itself eventually in the flame round which it dances more and more furiously.” As the frenzied

dance of economic growth at any cost spins out of control, Gandhi’s message is finding new purchase. Will the flame incinerate or merely singe the fascinated moth before it realises it is burning?

I AM YOUNGER THAN the Republic of India by a decade. I have lived in an India where the adults in my life wore khadi and anyone who had a car drove an Ambassador.  I was in India when MTV beamed its first show into the country. Over the past two decades, I have witnessed the transformation of India into a place where gratuitous consumption is colliding shamelessly with the limits of human and environmental exploitation. I know the clubs, the cars, and the lavish homes of the rich as well as the utter despair of farmers driven to suicide. Watching the destruction of late-stage capitalism plough through India like some kind of giant processing machine, gobbling up land and cheap labour at one end and spitting out gated communities, SEZs and consumer durables at the other, Gandhi’s words, like those of my Bapuji, increasingly haunt me. My own Bapuji was marked for life by his experience as a satyagrahi. Gandhi’s truth would not let him go, even when he saw that his children and grandchildren were not much interested. Though not prepared to embrace all of Gandhi’s precepts—his thoughts on sex, for example, give me the willies—I increasingly find myself unable to shake this one skinny man who connected as no one else has consumption and violence, the personal and the political, social justice and environmental sustainability. And I find myself remembering those conversations I had with my Bapuji before he died, and thinking: “The old man was onto something.”