MODI’S JANMABHUMI REMAINS HIS KARMABHUMI

CHARITY begins at home. The sequitur would be that prosperity prospers at home.

Ever since Narendra Modi became prime minister in May 2014, Gujarat has been the recipient of government largesse. A state that had acquired jaundiced notoriety after communal riots in 2002 is now a riot of richness as India’s favourite Investment destination. Last week, news broke that the largest ever investment in recent times would go to Gujarat, and not Maharashtra as was previously believed—₹1.54 lakh crore by Vedanta Ltd and Taiwan’s Foxconn to set up a semiconductor project in Gujarat. But is Gujarat’s highly publicised prosperity a sign of Modi’s favouritism? Or does history hold hidden lessons lost in the syllabus of post-Independence positioning that favoured northern and central Indian provinces where the Mughal-colonial shadow fell the darkest? Modern Gujarat, created only in 1960 along linguistic lines after its neighbour Maharashtra was carved out of Bombay State, was championed by Sardar Patel’s close associate K M Munshi, without whose ardent arguments it would not have been what it is today—a region that regained pride in Gujarati identity. Synthesising its cultural unity with political reality visualised by the Chalukyas, who ruled for over 600 years, Munshi saw his state as connoting “the much larger linguistic zone in which the language known as modern Gujarati is spoken at the present time”.