Modi’s Strategy, Rise, and Rule, from Gujarat to the Indian Nation State: Interview with Christophe Jaffrelot
Christophe Jaffrelot, renowned specialist in Indian politics and society, is the author of the long awaited—for reasons he explains here—Gujarat under Modi: Laboratory of Today’s India (Hurst, 2024). Christophe Jaffrelot’s insightful work shows how Gujarat served as the laboratory of Modi’s India, in terms of not only Hindu majoritarianism and national populism, but also caste and class politics, changing society as a whole. Christophe answers our questions in the following interview.
The book starts with two prefaces, one of which dates back to 2013. Can you explain why and tell us the story of writing this book?
Research on this book started immediately after the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom, when I visited the places where violence had been unleashed and the relief camps, including those of Juhapura, which had become a huge Muslim ghetto near Ahmedabad. The first journal article I wrote on the subject was published in 2003. For ten years, I visited Gujarat at least once a year to study the politics of Narendra Modi, who had become chief minister of the state in 2001.
By 2013, a book manuscript was ready. But my Indian publisher, after consulting its legal advisers, asked me to cut out too many parts, including those about the pogrom and Modi’s political style. I preferred to wait. I wrote two other books instead, one on India’s First Dictatorship: The Emergency, 1975–77 (Hurst) with Pratinav Anil, and another one on Modi’s India: Hindu Nationalism and Ethnic Democracy (Princeton University Press). These two books helped me to understand what Modi had done in Gujarat between 2001 and 2014.
I continued to visit the state at least once a year until 2020 and revisited the 2013 manuscript almost ten years later.
You did not renounce publishing this book despite all the trouble. Why is it important to publish it today, twenty years after you started working on it, and what does this tell us about the role of academia?
Firstly, academics bear some responsibility toward history. They have to testify. If they don’t, who will? Those who are in India can’t speak anymore—at least not as much as I can. If books like Gujarat under Modi stopped being written—and published—the memory of what happened there in 2002 and after will fade away.
Secondly, only academics can spend years on a political phenomenon like Modi to offer a detailed analysis—which makes comparisons with other similar developments in the world possible: because we use concepts that can travel from one country to another. It’s significant to note that illiberal national-populists like Modi, Erdogan, Netanyahu, Orban, and so on learn from each other too!
The book deals with the Indian state of Gujarat and its leader, Narendra Modi, who later became the prime minister of India—still in power today. You called this state a “laboratory of Hindu nationalism”. Can you tell us why?
Revisiting the book ten years after writing the first draft—and almost one decade after Modi became prime minister of India—allowed me to compare what he had done in Gujarat with what he was doing in Delhi. The main thesis of the book therefore changed: the book was not only about the creation of a new political system in one Indian state anymore; it was also about the ways in which this system was scaled up to the national level, an unprecedented enterprise. In the book, I show that the four pillars of what can be called "the real Gujarat model" were implemented at the national level after 2014.
Firstly, the strategy of communal polarisation—which had found expression in the pogrom and the organisation, soon after, of elections—remained the order of the day after 2014, with Muslims being targeted as much by the state as by vigilante groups working in tandem with the police.
Secondly, the desinstitutionalisation of the rule of law, which occurred in Gujarat immediately after the pogrom through the politicisation of the police and the capture of the judiciary, has taken place in New Delhi too since 2014, as evident from the decline of the Supreme Court between 2017 and 2024, the weakening of the Election Commission, the marginalisation of Parliament, and so on.
Thirdly, the political economy of Modi’s Gujarat has also been transposed to Modi’s India: crony capitalists playing the role of oligarchs have flourished—sometimes the same people, including business magnate Gautam Adani, have transitioned from a provincial status to a national one and even travelled from Ahmedabad to Delhi—and policies have favoured infrastructure more than public health and education. In India today, like in Gujarat before, inequalities have increased, a symptom of the socially conservative dimension of Hindu nationalism.
Fourthly, the political style Modi invented in Gujarat has remained the same, a combination of Hindutva and populism, which has allowed him to relate directly to the voters by short-circuiting even his party to saturate the public sphere. What is more, the supporters of this political repertoire, and its victims, were the same in Gujarat and in today’s India. Among the former figure prominently upper caste middle class people who found in "Moditva" an antidote to the caste politics that had started to translate into the social emancipation of the plebeians. Among the latter were not only Muslims, but also lower caste and tribal people and rural folks at large, who have been the direct casualties of the new dispensation.
You emphasise the importance of geography in several aspects of Gujarati history. Would you mind giving us some examples?
Gujarat is a frontline state—or at least often conceives itself as such because it shares a border with Pakistan, India’s number one enemy. In 1965, the Pakistani army attacked India in Gujarat first. Besides, Gujarat is rather extraverted: Gujarati migrants formed a major diaspora in Africa, the United Kingdom, the United States, and elsewhere, and these groups have helped the Bharatiya Janata Party from outside. But the internal geography of Gujarat itself matters too: the political culture of Saurashtra, the western part of the province, differs from that of the rest because of its social composition, the landowning castes (including the Rajputs) playing a bigger role than the brahmins and Vaishyas (merchant castes) who dominate the centre and the north. But this division eroded in the 1980s-1990s when the most important caste groups of rural Gujarat, the Patels, joined hands with the upper castes in reaction to the rise of policies of positive discrimination in favour of lower caste groups.
Interview by Miriam Périer, CERI.
Illustration copyright:
1. Kolkata, India, March 2021. Photo by papai for Shutterstock
2. Book cover, Hurst publisher
3. Wall separating Juhapura, the Muslim ghetto of Ahmenabad (Gujarat) from the Hindu area. Photo by Christophe Jaffrelot
