The Model Between Mahatma And Modi

BY R.K.MISRA

Mahatma Gandhi’s Gujarat  is now Narendra Modi’s home state and his ‘model’ for countrywide replication.

The  symbolism of this transition was not lost when just  days  before Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrived at the Sabarmati ashram in Ahmedabad for the official celebration of the 150^th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi this October 2, 2019 his government unveiled plans for the takeover of the ashram.

The plan is to take-over all trusts, institutions, land and property, painstakingly built over the last 70 years ,with or without government grants. The Sabarmati ashram was served a notice informing the trustees and the 200 and odd inmates that the government was preparing to give them’ handsome compensation’ and apartments for ceding control of the institutions and the land. The government, the notice assured, planned to transform the Ashram into a fitting ’world class’ memorial to the Mahatma.

Stupified Gandhians wonder  at the contradictions. Simplicity and austerity were the bedrock of the Mahatma’s ideals. Modi is obsessed with size and scale, the big  and the boisterous. No wonder that Tushar Gandhi, the great grandson of the Mahatma tweeted, ”Stop the devious attempt by the government to take-over the Sabarmati ashram”.

Their anger is not difficult to explain. Narendra Modi ,as the chief minister of Gujarat, undertook a dream project in the Gujarat  capital of Gandhinagar . He named it Mahatma Mandir-a temple of piety-in his foundation stone laying speech on  May 1,2010.  Built at a cost of over Rs 200 crore , the glitzy   art  and convention  centre-cum memorial , has now   been handed over to a hospitality  group, which runs a chain of hotels, to operate.

Now the same government, which failed to run the art-cum-convention centre, is planning to takeover Gandhian trusts and land to have another shot at a ‘world class’ centre. Media reports suggest that Gujarat government signed a 20 year contract with the hospitality major ,Leela Group, and handed over the 32 acre prime property, in the state capital Gandhinagar.

Is it  a coincidence that the Leela Group is also constructing a 300-room luxury hotel which will tower over the re-developed Gandhinagar railway station next to Mahatma Mandir. This project is  also contracted by the union railway ministry.

Again, if BJP patriarch and the first NDA prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, had his way  Gujarat would have got the first All Indian Institute of Medical Sciences(AIMS) outside Delhi in Kutch, over a decade ago.

On January 26, 2001, a high intensity earthquake had devastated Kutch in Gujarat. Thousands perished . Among the buildings destroyed was the government district hospital at Bhuj with over 200 doctors, para medical staff and others being buried alive under the debris. A moved Prime minister Vajpayee  ordered it re-built from the PM relief fund  as a state of the art medical facility at a cost of Rs 130 crores. By the time the hospital was inaugurated  in 2004,   Keshubhai Patel had been replaced by Modi as chief minister. Subsequently the Kutch AIMS project went into a tailspin and the hospital built with funds from the PM relief fund -through an official process- ended up with the corporate giant Adani on a 99 year lease which now also runs the Gujarat Adani Institute of Medical Sciences(GAIMS).

Once known for communal amity, Gujarat is now a state divided against itself. An unwritten edict works against a muslim desiring to purchase a house in a hindu majority area. Even affluent, educated and accomplished muslims find it impossible to buy property in areas  other than places where  muslims are concentrated. Bureaucrats, retired judges and judicial officers or management executives have gone through similar experiences of being turned away.

On July 8, 2019,the Gujarat Assembly approved stricter punishment or violation of a state law  that prohibits  sale and tenancy of immovable property to persons of another religion in the areas notified  as disturbed, amid opposition from the  Congress . Another important change in the law was to make the district collector’s approval mandatory for any property transaction in the disturbed areas. Earlier the consent of the buyer and seller was enough. The government has now also armed itself with powers to review the  Collector’s decision.

The law was first  introduced as an Ordinance by the Congress  government in 1986 in the aftermath of the 1985  riots and converted into a law by the Chimanbhai Patel led coalition government in 1991 in which BJP was a partner. After the 2002 communal riots, large swathes of  Ahmedabad, Vadodara, Surat, Bharuch, Himmatnagar, Kapadvanj and Godhra were brought under its ambit. The government has to date not declared any figures of the number of  cases permitted or turned down under this Act. The figures, when revealed ,will be startling for it will bring out the skewered

Again, just ahead of Eid last year ,the Gujarat government banned the export of livestock from Tuna port in Kutch. In April this year ,Gujarat High Court quashed the three notifications,describing them as a “ colourable exercise of power”.

The judges noted in their order.” With a view to appease a section of the society which is averse to export of livestock from tuna port, the government has from time to time taken all steps to ensure that the petitioners and similarly situated persons are not able to carry out  this export from here “.

Significantly, the Modi government had threatened to extend the ban on livestock export  across the country but refrained from doing so. The message and measure had a  clear target.

Such examples  lead one to question whose Gujarat is this which discriminates and divides. Surely, not Gandhi’s. Where luxury hotels  and glitzy malls  are set to come up over railway stations( Gandhinagar); farmers commit suicide while insurance companies make money; the cow is idolized but  2754 villages in Gujarat are without community grazing lands: Where you are penalized heavily for traffic violations but potholed roads is passe and cows goring commuters to death is no offence;  Where  Rs 3000 crore is spent to build the world’s tallest Statue of Unity but in nearby  Surat city,22 children die in a building blaze because the fire brigade did not have a ladder to reach the fourth floor; Where  over Rs one lakh crore is proposed to be spent on the Ahmedabad-Mumbai bullet train project while the ill in inaccessible areas of Gujarat have to still be carried on a cot to reach the nearest road point and villagers travelling on the rooftop of buses is a common sight in villages. 

Those who witness  this contrast know Gandhi dies almost every other  day in Modi’s Gujarat !