– A K Kukkila
Gujarat model, remember? Have you forgotten? In 2014, the BJP sold the Gujarat model across the country. People bought it in droves. The BJP was campaigning as if Gujarat were a wonderfully developed state, where people lived in luxury and wealth. The media also played along with this. Don’t even listen to social media. An atmosphere was created where all the people of this country wanted us to do Gujarat. The people of the country also wanted then Chief Minister Narendra Modi, who took Gujarat to ‘great heights’, to become Prime Minister of this country and through this, to transform this country like Gujarat. You know what happened after that. For the past one week, Gujarat has been the talk of the town, introducing the Gujarat model to the country. It is also clear why Narendra Modi, who won the elections in 2014 and became the Prime Minister, did not even talk about the Gujarat model after that.
A single rain has turned Gujarat into a living hell. More than a thousand houses and shops have been submerged. More than 20 people have died. People are being loaded into garbage trucks and taken around. There is no infrastructure in the cities. All the water has stagnated in houses, shops and roads have turned into ponds.
So why did Gujarat, which was portrayed as a model for the country in 2014, become like this? The thing is, the Gujarat model was propaganda. It was a balloon filled with air. There was only a hole inside. That is why after winning the elections in 2014, Narendra Modi never uttered the slogan of Gujarat model. BJP did not even talk about it. Because apart from the 2002 Gujarat massacre, it had nothing else to show that Gujarat was a model.
In 2023, NDTV published an article. This article entitled ‘Gujarat Model is Glass House Model’, exposed every inch of Gujarat’s weakness. It was said in this article that one-third of the state’s population or 31 lakh families are below the poverty line. Of these, 16 lakh families are said to be in extreme poverty. 80% of children suffer from anaemia, four out of every ten children’s height is below the national average, the weight of children under the age of five is below the national average, 65% of women aged 15 to 49 suffer from anaemia, and the highest number of children suffering from malnutrition are in Gujarat…. These details were given in this article.
You may know that when US President Trump came to Gujarat in 2020, he built a wall in Ahmedabad Basti. There were 700 families living beyond this, and this wall was built so that these poor families would not come into Trump’s sight.
Poet and writer Mehul Devkal wrote an article in The Telegraph in 2024. In that article titled “It is time people exploded the myth of the Gujarat Model”, he enumerated the myths of the Gujarat Model.
For the last three decades, the Patidar community in Gujarat has been supporting the BJP. But a large number of this community does not want to live there, they migrate to Canada, America, the UK, and work there, he wrote.
Caste-based discrimination is rampant in Gujarat. There are caste atrocities. He wrote that there are serious problems in important sectors, including education, employment, and agriculture. He wrote that Dalit grooms are not even allowed to ride a horse.
Even now, the BJP has forgotten the Gujarat Model. Narendra Modi has also forgotten. The media has also forgotten. Social media has no memory of it. But nature itself does not forget and often reminds the country of this.
By the way, a tower built on a lie cannot have a long time.
