The portable, moveable Modi

What strikes a casual viewer of the CD is its obsession with modernity. The Gujarat CM is sold as the forward-thinking captain of a State On the Move, with its Narmada dam, its oil refineries, its motorable roads, its check dams and primary schools, its quick industrial project implementation, its 15 lakh smart cards and e-governance.

Modi, we are told, reads the newspapers on the web every morning and videoconferences with rural Gujarat every evening. ‘The truth,’ or so goes the audio, ‘is that Narendra Modi has been practicing silently and effectively, holistic governance.’ So compelling is the picture that voters won’t need their Imax 3-D lenses to be swept off their feet.

Of course, it may be relevant to mention here that the apogee of Gujarat’s growth trajectory had been achieved in the nineties — between 1993 and 2000, Gujarat’s manufacturing output grew by 94 per cent and its trade, hotels and communications income by 84 per cent but there has been marked decline since.

Even were we to overlook this, there is a huge contradiction at the heart of Modispeak which renders the CD vision of a golden future a gigantic con. The fact is, Modi’s technological futurism is yoked together with regressive political practice that only feeds mass insecurities and sharpens communal divides. Obviously, the first cannot exist if the second persists because, as even a Keshubhai Patel will tell you, Gujarat’s progress is crucially linked to security and communal peace — continued, assured peace.

This is one thing moderniser-technocrat-engineer Modi cannot guarantee, and not just because his government was complicit in the communal conflagration of 2002, which left over a lakh people socially uprooted, psychologically scarred and economically ruined. He cannot be such a guarantor because he has not attempted to erase this divisive legacy or displayed the least desire to do so.

He opts instead for a strategy of denial and transference — a straight negation of the significance and scale of the riots and, when confronted, a neat attempt to transfer the blame on other agencies.

There is nothing new here. As early as mid-March, when the riots were raging in the state, Modi’s government presented the NHRC with a fairy tale as the ‘official’ version of events, which the Commission could not but dismiss out of hand. The chief engineers of the pogrom, the VHP and Bajrang Dal, were never mentioned even in passing in that report.

Similarly, in its reply to the home ministry dated April 1, the government actually praised itself for bringing the situation under control in 72 hours. In another convenient bout of amnesia, the Gujarat government did not make available to the Election Commission a state intelligence bureau report which revealed that communal violence had affected 24 of the 25 districts in the state.

‘Two minutes to the truth’ adopts a similar strategy. There is a special section in it entitled, ‘Trial by fire’ — Agnipariksha— where the language of communication, for some reason, switches from English to Hindi. The narration of the Godhra event is vivid, a 1000-strong mob, ‘rioters without conscience’ massacred 58 innocent people.

It is cited — quite rightly — as ‘one more eloquent testimony to the evil that lives in man’. But the tenor changes once the narration moves on to the events that followed. Riots, the CD claims, were always a part of Gujarat’s history, right from as far back as 1410 (no elaboration given). It goes on to talk about how the police swung into action and how the government machinery has been working overtime to provide relief and succor to the people.

It talks about the 4,146 FIRs filed, 200 people killed in police firing, 19,340 people arrested, 33,650 preventive arrests made, it tells you about how the police rescued people from besieged mosques and how 7,000 peace marches were held (notice how initiatives taken by concerned citizens and activists are neatly co-opted). It states that the army was summoned in 16 hours, that over 18,000 villages remained peaceful and that pencils were distributed to schoolchildren. If the music accompanying the Godhra narrative was laden with grief, it now turns soothingly melodic. Gujarat, the narrator concludes sanctimoniously, has always been a peace-loving state despite all the baseless and provocative words spread to malign it.

So who caused these ‘disturbances’ because clearly there were some? If we are to go by the CD, none other than the media, rumour mongers and, possibly, Arundhati Roy. There is pain in the narrator’s voice as the crimes of TV channels and newspapers are revealed: ‘The more blood there is…the more it (the newspaper) sells’. ‘Rumour writes faster than truth can erase’. Roy’s words are conveniently taken out of context. No mention is made of the fact that she had herself clarified a factual mistake in a piece she had written on the riots, yet — out of the blue — the narrative goes on to say, ‘Both his daughters are living in the US for quite some time now’, without clarifying that the the person being referred to is none is other than Ehsan Jafri, former MP, burnt to death in the horrific Gulmarg Society killings.

But that’s the thing with Modi’s ‘truth’ — it constantly sheds its skin. It could just as well be a half truth, a half lie or a complete dodge. After squeezing the famous ‘hum paanch, humare pachees’ comment to get a few laughs at Becharji village last month, he now informs us that the statement did not target Muslims, that he was only pointing out how the population climbs from 5 to 25, and so on, over a generation. Notice how the ‘hum’ in the ‘hum panch’ is now carefully excised from the script.

Modi’s image makers have bestowed upon him the title, the ‘best chief minister in the country’, a title that he is inordinately proud of. But, in truth, this must be altered to the ‘best packaged chief minister in India’. The question is how far will Modi’s moveable, portable ‘truth’ travel in the days ahead. It’s a question that should worry every Indian.