Himachal Pradesh is small beer, Gujarat is not. To describe the poll outcome in Gujarat as a triumph of religious bigotry over secular principles is a cliché almost bordering on tautology. Tautologies advance the frontiers of neither knowledge nor understanding. The Bharatiya Janata Party and Narendra Modi, despite the net loss of 10 assembly seats, have this time actually increased their share of the total votes cast over what they obtained five years ago. More than one half of the voting electorate has chosen the BJP, and this despite the horror of the 2002 pogrom and its grim aftermath. Factors underlying this vigorous re-endorsement of faith in those preaching a lurid sectarian doctrine need to be analysed with some care.

Is not the BJP victory as much a crushing defeat for the Congress? The Congress was the most powerful party — overwhelmingly so — in the state during the first few decades following Independence. Gujarat is Mahatma Gandhi land. It is territory where Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel’s writ was law to the people. The Sardar from Karamsat had built the Congress party organization in the state brick by brick. He was hailed as the man of iron who commandeered the native princes to integrate with the Union of India. His advocacy of a no-nonsense approach while dealing with Pakistan, the new country born out of the womb of India, was appreciated by a considerable number of so-called ‘nationalists’, and not just in Gujarat. Many Gujaratis continue to nurse a grievance that the Mahatma picked Jawaharlal Nehru over Vallabhbhai as India’s first prime minister. Nehru, they are convinced, was a namby-pamby Anglophile who impressed Gandhiji by his airy-fairy ways; in their view, the strong-willed Sardar would have been a far superior choice. This sense of dissatisfaction, howsoever mute, has been a part of the Gujarati ethos all along.

Vallabhbhai, instead of heading the government, became the nation’s first home minister, which did not much assuage Gujarat’s hurt pride. He died within three years, but Gujarat could still claim to have provided the steel frame of Indian administration because men from the state remained in charge of the home portfolio at the Centre for long years. First it was Kanhaiya Lal Munshi and, after an interregnum, Gulzarilal Nanda. The Sardar’s daughter, Maniben Patel, was, during this period, a member of the Congress working committee. Meanwhile, another favourite son of Gujarat, Morarji Desai, also carved a niche for himself in national affairs. A fairly successful Union finance minister, he had to be accommodated by Indira Gandhi in the slot of deputy prime minister as well for some time. Yet another Gujarati, Khandubhai Desai, held, for more than a decade, the reins of the Indian National Trade Union Congress, which claimed to be the major organization of the working classes in the country. During this period, resources made available by public financial institutions under the control of the Centre helped Gujarati capitalists to ensure the state’s rapid industrial advance. In agriculture too, big farmers prospered on account of bounty from the Cotton Corporation of India and export subsidies. Everything taken together, it was a comfortable state of being for Gujarat, at least for those who formed the upper strata of its society.

The split of the Congress in the late Sixties and Indira Gandhi’s ruthless assertion of power marked the beginning of the end of Gujarati dominance in national politics. The Congress (Organisation), to which the bulk of Gujarat’s more eminent Congressmen — conservative by instinct — had transferred their loyalty, got rapidly enfeebled. The denouement of the Bangladesh war decisively shifted the centre of gravity of political power. Morarji Desai, eased out of New Delhi, was fuming and discontented, but did not know quite which way to turn. His opportunity came with Jaya Prakash Narayan’s Nava Nirman movement. Not the imposition of the Emergency alone, Indira Gandhi began to commit one blunder after another. It was, for the former adherents of the Congress (O), the regaining of paradise in 1977. With Jaya Prakash Narayan nominating Morarji Desai as prime minister of the Janata Party regime, Gujaratis had good reason to feel that their kingdom had finally come.

It was a very brief Gujarati summer though. The disparate ele- ments constituting the Janata Party fell out amongst themselves and Morarji’s tenure as prime minister ended abruptly. Indira Gandhi made a famous come-back. Gujaratis lived through the emotions of a lost tribe even as the self-righteous man, who had once lectured to Kosygin and Bulganin on the virtues of prohibition, retreated to his sullen heritage in Mumbai’s Marine Drive.

Indira Gandhi sought to build a patchwork of a base for herself in the state by herding together flocks from Rajputs, Dalits, tribals and Muslims. The nitty-gritty of power nonetheless ceased to be the inheritance of Gujarat. The Congress, at present reduced to family property of the Nehru-Gandhis, has none from Gujarat occupying a place of prominence in its hierarchy, nor, for the matter, in the government presided over by it in New Delhi; few know Ahmad Patel outside the precincts of 10 Janpath. To add insult to injury, Indira Gandhi at one time got elected from Gujarat a Bengali, with not a word of Gujarati in him, to the Rajya Sabha and named him her finance minister. Quite understandably, the arrival of her daughter-in-law and grandson in the campaign trail last month was red rag to the Gujarati bull.

Elephants do not forget; nor do apparently the people of Gujarat. Come the Nineties, large sections of Gujaratis had already made up their mind. The BJP gave back to Gujarat the stewardship of the ministry of home affairs at the Centre; Lal Krishna Advani, representing Gandhinagar, filled the position. No point in refusing to recognize the reality; Vallabhbhai Patel’s legacy, the largest chunk of it, now belongs to the BJP. It is not for nothing that Narendra Modi took his fresh oath of office as chief minister on Christmas Day at the Sardar Patel stadium in Ahmedabad. From Pakistan-phobia to rabid Muslim-baiting has indeed proved to be a relatively short haul.

Not to take cognizance of the other reality would be equally unwise: rustic, simple-minded Gujaratis, Dalits and tribals to the fore, are unable to make much of a distinction between Mahatma Gandhi’s Ram rajya and the version of it preached by fanatics of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad. The perils of using, once upon a time, a religious metaphor to rouse the masses for a great national cause are coming home to roost.

A third factor working for the BJP and Narendra Modi can hardly be underrated either. The state administration in Gujarat has succeeded in organizing, in the course of the past 15 years or thereabouts, a delivery system for social and economic welfare for implementing policies and programmes specifically intended for disadvantaged groups. Nothing else explains why voters in such once-strong bastions of Congress influence as Sabarkantha, Banaskantha and the Panchmahal region have switched over to the BJP. And should one be dubbed as naughty if it is pointed out that while Muslims form less than one-tenth of the population in Gujarat as against more than a quarter in West Bengal, the proportion of state government employees belonging to the community is significantly higher in the west coast state than in Left-ruled West Bengal?

It would be a tragedy of epic dimensions if religious bigots come to occupy a permanent lease in Mahatma Gandhi’s Gujarat. But mere hurling of invectives at the bigots will not reverse the situation. Gujarat’s wounded psyche, currently holed up in the anger chamber, needs to be offered the appropriate salve.