Skip to main content

Name change politics around Ahmedabad a "distraction" from dismal state of Gujarat

By RK Misra*
Narendra Modi brought BJP to power single-handed in 2014, cresting a promise to change the ethos of Indian politics and governance. He electrified hope. He energised India. With just months to go for his five year term to end, the man and his weather-beaten party machine stand reduced to niggling name changers.
By the last-published count, 19 of the 23 Congress-led UPA government schemes sit soundly in new BJP led NDA make-up. The hackneyed ‘old wine in new bottle’ sums up the ruling BJP’s pan-India penchant, post-2014.
From schemes to cities has been a short walk on a circuitous trail. Uttar Pradesh chief minister Adityanath’s high profile political polo of turning Faizabad into Ayodhya and Allahabad into Prayagraj at the inter-section of an RSS-orchestrated campaign for the Ram Mandir in a bid to hustle the apex court is now predictable poll politics. So Modi-led BJP government’s consent, so far, to the renaming of at least 25 towns and villages, across India in the past one year.
It is selective poll politics, point out opposition leaders. West Bengal chief minister, Mamta Bannerji has already charged the Modi establishment with partisan ‘name-games’ and deliberate delay over her long pending demand for renaming her state as Bangla. Gujarat has now climbed the bandwagon as well, dusting off it’s old demand for renaming Ahmedabad as Karnavati.
The Gujarat Congress has voiced it’s opposition to the move. "Ahmedabad is a historic city. UNESCO has given it the prestigious, Heritage City tag. The name Ahmedabadi does not denote a person staying in this city, it illustrates a way of life”, said state Congress chief, Amit Chavda, opposing the demand.
Former union minister and Congress leader Shashi Tharoor, who was in Ahmedabad for a function, also expressed his concern over the name changings. "It is being done explicitly to places which are muslim in origin. What is the message sought to be sent to a community of our own country, that you have less stake in this society? Do they even understand the implications of what they are doing”, he agonized.
Congress legislator Gyasuddin Sheikh, who represents Dariapur constituency in Ahmedabad, has threatened to launch a stir if the BJP government goes ahead with the move. "It is dirty politics and clearly a move to polarize voters ahead of the 2019 Lok Sabha elections”, points out Sheikh.
The VHP, facing an identity crisis in general perception in Gujarat after it’s high profile international president, Dr Pravin Togadia, was ousted, is quick to issue a warning to those opposing the renaming of the city. "We hear that some Babur devotees are putting roadblocks. Let them be warned that the Hindus will end their political careers if they persist”, says Ashok Raval, state VHP chief.
Togadia, who now heads a rival Antarrashtriya Hindu Parishad (AHP), laments that the BJP has forgotten it’s poll promise on both Ram Mandir and Karnavati. "It rules from the state to the centre, what prevents it?”, he questions. And so it goes on.
The Ram mandir chess games notwithstanding, the Karnavati quest case study provides a detailed insight into how the Sangh Parivar set-up selects, builds-up and then fine tunes cleaving pen-poison issues to monopolise political control. All the RSS arms work in tandem to contribute in wresting political control for the BJP. Let's analyse.
Gujarat’s queueing up apparently was on cue. On November 7, deputy chief minister Nitin Patel used the Faizabad-Ayodhya news peg to bring the cold-stored Karnavati issue back to life ."People desire it but there are legal limitations. If the law on renamings is changed, we are ready”, he said. Chimed in chief minister Vijay Rupani two days later "We will take concrete steps towards it after exploring legal and other possibilities”, hinting at another engagement that it may come about before the 2019 polls.
Another two days and the VHP-Bajrang Dal combine moved in to welcome the move and warn those opposing it. Soon the Congress opposition moved and so did all manner of men and women from a cross-section of society. And the lob and volley game was soon in full swing.

Pressing issues

Conveniently lost in this deliberately drummed up cacophony were pressing issues that showed the Rupani government in less than favourable light. The deepening agrarian crisis has led to 13 farmer suicide in less than three months due to crop failure, including a failed attempt at the chief minister’s own public meeting and three successful ones in the last one week, ending November14.
All this in the chief minister’s own region of Saurashtra, which is reeling under acute scarcity conditions. The Cotton Association of India(CAI) projects a 16 per cent output dip to 88 lakh bales in 2018-19 as against 105 lakh bales the previous year, and to add insult to injury, farmers in scarcity-hit Surendranagar district have been notified to repay bank loans within a fortnight or face legal action.
Vijay Rupani, Nitin Patel
The Government of India’s own pocket book of agricultural statistics 2017 puts the average monthly income of a Gujarat farmer family at Rs 3,573 and states that 43 per cent of it’s 39.31 lakh agricultural households are in debt. And the state government’s lone claim to fame is an official panel to probe crop insurance complaints.
The National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) rates Gujarat as the third highest in swine flue cases in the country with 63 recorded deaths till November 5 this year. The number of diabetics are up 89 per cent from 4.8 per hundred adults in 1990 to 6.8 in 2016. The rise in obesity over the same period is 132 per cent.
More data would be further unnerving. Gujarat’s public debt was less than Rs 10,000 crore when the BJP first came to power in 1995 and tripled during chief minister Narendra Modi’s reign to now rest at Rs 2,17,338 crore (2017-18).
“Thus it is that the dismal state of Gujarat affairs needs distractions like the Sardar statue and now the Karnavati controversy”, points out former chief minister Suresh Mehta, adding, “It is in the familiar mould of ‘if you do not have bread, eat cake, keep looking skywards and squabbling amongst yourselves'." Mehta should know for he was the second BJP chief minister of Gujarat, and subsequently quit the party over differences with Modi.
The fact is that the Karnavati controversy is about three decades old. Part of an expansion blueprint, it found implementation when the BJP came to power in the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation and in May 1990 passed a resolution to this effect. Later in September 1995, the first BJP government in the state led by Keshubhai Patel passed a similar resolution in the State Assembly.
According to the nomination document sent by the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation to UNESCO in furtherance of it’s bid for heritage city status states that ”this land (Ahmedabad) was also in proximity to smaller, older existing settlements (…) as Karnavati”. As per the document Karnavati was not on the site of the walled city established by Ahmed Shah but on it’s outskirts in the south-west direction.
In the 11th century the area around present day Ahmedabad was named Ashavali after a tribal ruler, so why not name the city so, asks an analyst, going on to answer, that it would not suit the narrative that the Sangh Parivar would want to build -- that of a Rajput warrior who patronized Jainism.
The re-naming of Ahmedabad was part of a larger Hindutva project for Gujarat entrusted to the VHP to begin with. In Ahmedabad posters had sprung up in the eighties stating Hindu rashtra ke shehar karnavati mein apka swagat hai” similar signboards came up at the entrance of villages in Gujarat stating likewise for the village to buttress the Hindu rashtra identity.
Town and village folk were encouraged to walk to famous Hindu shrines in key religious dates and ‘pag-pada sanghs’ were set up in residential housing societies of towns as well as in villages to band them into groups to undertake the walk. En-route villages would set up welcome and rest places where free food, snacks and tea were served as a larger philanthropic mission.
The religious zeal was subsequently monetized electorally in favour of the BJP leading to the first BJP government in Gujarat in 1995, and except for a short power spell by BJP rebel Shankersinh Vaghela, continues unhindered to this day -- a period just two years short of a quarter century.
The fact is that, after the BJP came to power, both in Gujarat and later in Delhi under Atal Bihari Vajpayee, and now Narendra Modi, it’s one time prime mover, LK Advani, who was union home minister for long, and in four years of his term Modi never bothered to raise the issue. It had, for all practical purposes, outlived it’s usefulness when power targets stood achieved.
However, with the BJP on a shaky wicket viz-a-viz 2019 when an embattled Modi goes back for a mandate, ‘opiate’ issues like the Ram mandir and the Karnavati controversy are being stirred up again with clear, obvious electoral intentions.
Notwithstanding the technical position in re-naming, the fact is that the move has come in for heavy trolling both in the social media and amongst enlightened citizenry who have made no secret of their opposition to it. Even the state bureaucracy which had worked hard to get Ahmedabad, the UNESCO heritage city tag is unhappy with such a political move as it may come with costs.
There is clear and inherent danger of loss, if the political leadership persists, the powers that be have been forewarned, say insiders.
---
*Senior Gujarat-based journalist. Blog: Wordsmiths & Newsplumbers

Comments

TRENDING

Insider plot to kill Deendayal Upadhyay? What RSS pracharak Balraj Madhok said

By Shamsul Islam*  Balraj Madhok's died on May 2, 2016 ending an era of old guards of Hindutva politics. A senior RSS pracharak till his death was paid handsome tributes by the RSS leaders including PM Modi, himself a senior pracharak, for being a "stalwart leader of Jan Sangh. Balraj Madhok ji's ideological commitment was strong and clarity of thought immense. He was selflessly devoted to the nation and society. I had the good fortune of interacting with Balraj Madhok ji on many occasions". The RSS also issued a formal condolence message signed by the Supremo Mohan Bhagwat on behalf of all swayamsevaks, referring to his contribution of commitment to nation and society. He was a leading RSS pracharak on whom his organization relied for initiating prominent Hindutva projects. But today nobody in the RSS-BJP top hierarchy remembers/talks about Madhok as he was an insider chronicler of the immense degeneration which was spreading as an epidemic in the high echelons of th

Central pollution watchdog sees red in Union ministry labelling waste to energy green

By Chythenyen Devika Kulasekaran*  “Destructors”, “incinerators” and “waste-to-energy (WTE) incineration” all mean the same thing – indiscriminate burning of garbage! Having a history of about one and a half centuries, WTE incinerators have seen several reboots over the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries. 

First-of-its-kind? 'Eco-friendly, low cost' sewage treatment system installed in Gujarat

Counterview Desk Following the installation of the Unconventional Decentralized Multi-Stage Reactor (UDMSR) for sewage treatment, a note on what is claimed to be the  first-of-its-kind technology said, the treated sewage from this system “can be directly utilized for agricultural purposes”, even as proving to be a “saviour in the times of water crisis.”

A Hindu alternative to Valentine's Day? 'Shiv-Parvati was first love marriage in Universe'

By Rajiv Shah*   The other day, I was searching on Google a quote on Maha Shivratri which I wanted to send to someone, a confirmed Shiv Bhakt, quite close to me -- with an underlying message to act positively instead of being negative. On top of the search, I chanced upon an article in, imagine!, a Nashik Corporation site which offered me something very unusual. 

Indo-Bangla border: Farmers facing 'illegal obstacles' in harvesting, transporting yields

  Counterview Desk  In a representation to the chairperson, National Human Rights Commission, human rights defender Kirity Roy, who is secretary, Banglar Manabadhikar Suraksha Mancha (MASUM), has said that Border Security Force (BSF) personnel are creating "illegal obstacles" for farmers seeking to harvest their ripened yields and transport them to the market in village Jhaukuthi of Cooch Behar district.

Wasteland, a colonial legacy, being used to 'give away' vast tracts to Ratnagiri refinery

By Fouziya Tehzeeb* William D’Souza, a 55-year old farmer from Kuthethur, Mangalore, was busy mixing cattle feed when we arrived at his doorsteps. Around 25 km from the bustling city of Mangalore, Kuthethur is a lush green village with thick vegetation. On the way to William’s house the idyllic view gets blocked by the flares and smoke arising from the Mangalore Refinery and Petrochemicals Limited (MRPL).

'Flawed' argument: Gandhi had minimal role, naval mutinies alone led to Independence

Counterview Desk Reacting to a Counterview  story , "Rewiring history? Bose, not Gandhi, was real Father of Nation: British PM Attlee 'cited'" (January 26, 2016), an avid reader has forwarded  reaction  in the form of a  link , which carries the article "Did Atlee say Gandhi had minimal role in Independence? #FactCheck", published in the site satyagrahis.in. The satyagraha.in article seeks to debunk the view, reported in the Counterview story, taken by retired army officer GD Bakshi in his book, “Bose: An Indian Samurai”, which claims that Gandhiji had a minimal role to play in India's freedom struggle, and that it was Netaji who played the crucial role. We reproduce the satyagraha.in article here. Text: Nowadays it is said by many MK Gandhi critics that Clement Atlee made a statement in which he said Gandhi has ‘minimal’ role in India's independence and gave credit to naval mutinies and with this statement, they concluded the whole freedom struggle.

CAA disregards India's inclusive plural ethos, 'betrays' ideals of freedom struggle: PUCL

Counterview Desk    "Outraged" at the move of the Central government to implement the Citizenship Amendment Act, 2019 (CAA 2019) weeks before the election, the top rights group, People's Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL), has demanded that the law be repealed. 

Buddhist shrines were 'massively destroyed' by Brahmanical rulers: Historian DN Jha

Nalanda mahavihara By Our Representative Prominent historian DN Jha, an expert in India's ancient and medieval past, in his new book , "Against the Grain: Notes on Identity, Intolerance and History", in a sharp critique of "Hindutva ideologues", who look at the ancient period of Indian history as "a golden age marked by social harmony, devoid of any religious violence", has said, "Demolition and desecration of rival religious establishments, and the appropriation of their idols, was not uncommon in India before the advent of Islam".

Sections of BSF, BGB personnel 'directly or indirectly' involved in cross border smuggling

By Kirity Roy*  The Border Security Force (BSF) of India and the Border Guard Bangladesh (BGB) of Bangladesh met for 54th Director General level meeting at Dhaka, Bangladesh, on 5th to 9th March, 2024 to discuss on minimizing killings at border area, illegal intrusion, trafficking of drugs and other narcotics, smuggling of arms and ammunitions and other crimes at bordering areas. Further, the summit had an agenda to discuss on overall development in 150 yards area at both sides of the border and design an activity plan for the same.