Decoding BJP's Gujarat Story

Hindutva became the defining political common-sense in the state thanks to the party’s better statecraft

- Hilal Ahmed

Interestingly, CSDS-Lokniti Gujarat assembly election survey 2022 finds almost two-thirds of the respondents claiming that they are satisfied with the Gujarat state government’s performance. Although it is too early to comment on the outcomes of the assembly election based on this finding, the overwhelming satisfaction with BJP confirms that Hindutva hegemony actually sets the terms of the electoral discourse in the state.

The popular explanatory expressions such as ‘politics of polarisation’, ‘Gujarat Model’ and ‘Gujarat as a laboratory of Hindutva’ cannot explain this overtly enthusiastic support for BJP’s politics. One needs to historicise the post-colonial story of Hindutva in Gujarat to understand BJP’s electoral acceptability.

More specifically, two trajectories of Hindutva politics are crucial in this regard:

• Hindutva as a challenger,

• and Hindutva as a form of statecraft.

Hindutva was not the dominant political-ideological force in the state in the initial years. The influence of Gandhi and Patel had helped Congress to establish its electoral dominance. Subsequent industrialisation based on the Nehruvian vision of nation-building also contributed significantly in favour of Congress regimes.