Recasting India

by Hindol Sengupta

  What does this mean in the lives of ordinary Muslims? It means Gujarat has one of the lowest rates of poverty among Muslims in India. Only 7.7 percent of Gujarati Muslims are poor compared to more than 40 percent in Assam and nearly 24 percent in Bengal. Kerala is slightly behind at 8 percent. It is true that, as a state, Gujarat is more prosperous than Bengal or Assam and has more indigenous business enterprises than Kerala, but economists say that Modi has been able to ensure that during his tenure—and in spite of the feeling after the riots that he was deeply prejudiced against Muslims—the benefits of growth have reached Muslims.

  The economist Surjit Bhalla has calculated that Muslims in Gujarat have had one of the highest declines in poverty anywhere in the country.4 Gujarat has had the second highest relative decline in poverty among Muslims (Bengal had the highest decline, but its Muslims had a poverty level twice that of Gujarat).

  “There is only one thing that drives Muslim support for Modi—good economics, and therefore better livelihoods and the promise of a better future,” says Bhalla.

  And so it is that many Muslims, especially entrepreneurs, but not confined to them, say that their feelings toward Modi’s economics, if not toward the man himself, have altered significantly. Sareshwala’s own story is illustrative.

  I asked Sareshwala how this had happened while sitting in his all-white office at Parsoli Motors on the Sarkhej-Gandhinagar Highway in Ahmedabad.

  He seemed slightly upset by the question. “What do you think I am? You think I am a fool? You think I am an idiot?” He isn’t. His own business has been growing at 20 percent each year for at least the last five years. His BMW store sold nearly 600 BMW cars priced between Rs 30 lakh ($50,000) and Rs 1.5 crore ($252,000) in 2013—11 percent of these (double the number in 2012) were sold to Muslims.

  The Sareshwalas have been in Ahmedabad for more than 250 years, working in real estate and finance. Zafar’s father, Yunus, was a metallurgical engineer at the Indian Institute of Technology at Kharagpur in Bengal. On September 11, 2001, Zafar Sareshwala was busy selling Sharia-compliant financial products across the United States and the United Kingdom. Between 1998 and 2005, when he was based in London, he used to work in the World Trade Center on trips to New York.

  “But after 9/11, we saw with our own eyes how overnight everything changed. I just could not do business there anymore. The Islamophobia was too high—even people who had known me for years shied away,” remembers Zafar Sareshwala.

  Then came the riots of 2002, and “all that anger [of 9/11] was already inside me, and I thought, I have to do something.” As in every previous riot, his family was involved in running relief camps after the bloodshed in Ahmedabad. One of their apartments, which Sareshwala’s artist wife Asiya had bought, in Delight Apartments in downtown Ahmedabad had been burned down along with most of the building. The Shalimar Building, an office complex with 90 Muslim shops including a Parsoli office, had been gutted too. Shalimar is opposite the local office of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), the orthodox Hindu nationalist group, some of whose members have been accused of fueling the 2002 riots. VHP leader Pravin Togadia has been questioned by the Special Investigation Team looking into the riots about his role in instigating violence, but nothing concrete has been found against him.

  “Everyone wanted to exit Shalimar and Delight but I was adamant. I did not want to sell. I wanted to send a message to Pravin Togadia that if you think that Muslims don’t belong to this country, I want you to know that when you die, your ashes are washed away in the river and to the sea. But my bones will be buried in this land, as my ancestors before me. This is my land,” says Sareshwala.

  From that time, Sareshwala began campaigning against Modi in the UK, even attempting “as hard as I could to try and get the British government to deny him a visa and have him arrested for crimes against humanity in case he landed on British soil.” He met Colin Powell, the US secretary of state and former army general, and appealed for a ban on Modi’s entering the United States; he also filed a lawsuit against BJP veteran and former deputy prime minister Lal Krishna Advani.

  Then on August 17, 2003, urged on by theater director and activist Mahesh Bhatt, Sareshwala and veteran UK-based Islamic scholar Maulana Esa Mansuri met Modi at St. James’ Court Hotel in London during a visit by the chief minister. Sareshwala says Mansuri spoke to them for almost two hours, telling them that without justice, there can be no peace.

  “Modi told us that his performance as chief minister would show the state how remorseful he was about the riots. He said ‘judge my work, not my words,’ ” says Sareshwala. “I felt in that meeting that he was genuinely moved by what had happened and that he deserved a chance.”

  One of the biggest ways Sareshwala says he has understood that the chief minister means business is through his handling of five criminal cases in the last decade in which Sareshwala appealed to Modi. In each of the cases, there were Muslim men accused or convicted of grave crimes, including terror; one of the sections under which they were charged was 268, which declares a convict a public nuisance and therefore makes bail, parole or furlough (temporary leave from imprisonment on emergency) nearly impossible.

  “But the chief minister has the powers to remove the convict from being held under Section 268 and in each case that I have forwarded to Modi on humanitarian grounds, he has removed Section 268 from it,” says Sareshwala. The most defining among these was the help given to Habib Hawa and Anees Machiswala, convicted of involvement in the five 2002 post-riot bomb blasts in Ahmedabad that left dozens injured and came to be called the “tiffin bomb case” because bombs were packed in lunch boxes.

  The family members of Hawa and Machiswala appealed to Sareshwala—one had elderly, ill parents, another a three-month-old daughter—telling him that without the removal of Section 268 from this case, it would be impossible for them to get any relief even to attend to family crises. It was removed. (The accused are now serving life imprisonment sentences given by the Gujarat High Court.)

  Sareshwala would not directly confirm this to me, but almost every Muslim I spoke to in Ahmedabad told me that Sareshwala had become the man to approach for Muslims who were in trouble or who were seeking aid from the government. He has a “hot line” to Modi, I was told. What Sareshwala did confirm was that it was he who suggested to the chief minister that Arab envoys should be invited to Modi’s flagship Vibrant Gujarat annual conclave in 2009. The Arab League sent a representative, as did Oman, Brunei and Abu Dhabi, some of the wealthiest Arab states. At that time Mahmood Madani, the leader of Jamiat Ulema-i-Hind, one of the largest clerical bodies, protested strongly. By 2013, he was agreeing with Sareshwala that there were more Muslims in prison in Maharashtra than in Gujarat and that Muslims were worse off in Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh than in Gujarat. (This is not a unique volte-face but a signal of the times. In 2010, Ghulam Vastanvi, then vice chancellor of the Deoband Seminary, lost his post for praising the Gujarat development model. But in 2013 when another prominent Deoband cleric, Suhaib Qasmi, declared his support for the Modi for PM campaign, it barely created a stir.)

  Sareshwala’s role in all this has been to be the first to speak for Modi on Muslim issues. Mahesh Bhatt called Sareshwala after he received a message from Communist and theater activist Shabham Hashmi that Muslim slum dwellers had received no settlement after the redevelopment of the Sabarmati Riverfront in Ahmedabad. “I clarified that homes have been built for almost all slum dwellers, 68 percent of who are Muslims. Apart from a few cases stuck in court due to identification issues, everyone has got homes. You should go see them,” Sareshwala told me.

  “My point is simple—what do the Muslims want? The same as anybody else—we want a greater say in the affairs of this country. How will that come? Not by hiding in our ghettos but by becoming economically prosperous,” says Sareshwala, and he lives by that example. His business worth is now Rs 200 crores (more than $33 million).

  So I went to see the Sabarmati Riverfront development. The man w
ho took me to one of the sites where the homes have been built at Vatva on the outskirts of Ahmedabad was Mushtaq Guliwala. A Muslim businessman, he runs a sari printing business called Honest Print Care. “One hundred percent of my customers are Hindu, most of my labor is Hindu, I can do nothing unless there is peace,” says Guliwala, who says emphatically that he is no absolute Modi supporter. “I still believe that justice for 2002 has not been done—and any Muslim who tells you that they have moved on, well, I believe they are lying.”

  Although he is pleased that his business, worth about Rs 2 crores ($337,000) a year, is growing by 15 percent, he is angry that, in spite of numerous pleas, there is no proper road to his factory. “I am paying tax but getting poor service,” says Guliwala. “I cannot say that Modi has changed or Modi has done great things for Muslims but yes, this much is true, as long as Modi is in power, no antisocial element can disturb business. You want to do business? No one will stop you under Modi.”

  When we reached the rows of brown concrete apartments for Sarbarmati slum dwellers in Vatva, Guliwala stared sadly at the patches of collected garbage here and there. “The houses have been built, yes, but it is still dirty. But then you know—dirt is something people themselves have to clean too.”

  To understand the conflicts in the mind of the Gujarati Muslims, you have to understand that Gujarati society is one of the most communally divided societies in the country. Such has been the proliferation of ghettos that some areas in Ahmedabad are referred to as the “border”—between Hindu and Muslim areas. But the Muslims have realized that the ghetto won’t bring prosperity—and the community wants a share of the growth pie. At the moment Modi is the foremost Indian politician who is talking about fulfilling aspirations. Many are still skeptical about him—but there is no doubt about their eagerness for prosperity.

  In a sense, the Muslim in Gujarat is coming out of the ghetto, says Kareem Lakhani, one of the most prominent Muslim chartered accounts in Ahmedabad. Since 1999, he and another Muslim partner, Armaan Ismaili, and the Hindu Narendra Tundiya have run a successful chartered accountancy firm—Lakhani, Ismaili, Tundiya & Co. Lakhani was once so poor that he sold milk to make a living and lived in a slum called Ram-Rahim Nagar. He says he supports Modi because “Modi has brought peace.”

  The three partners studied chartered accountancy together and then decided to start a firm. But in 2002, when the riots came, the mobs came looking for their office and the Muslim partners.

  “Our office was saved because our Hindu neighbors gave them wrong directions and they couldn’t find it,” says Lakhani.

  Today Lakhani’s new office is in a building owned by Hindus, and most of his clients and staff are also Hindu. “When I was growing up, there was never a year when there was no tension between the Hindus and Muslims, but there has been peace for 10 years. Let me tell you why: riots are started and fueled by criminals, goons; ordinary people also participate, but the seed is always with criminals. Both Muslim and Hindu criminals are scared of Modi. No one talks about this but this is why he gets support—because the goons are scared of him,” says Lakhani.

  It is important to note that it is not the case that there has been no communal violence in Gujarat in the last decade; in 2013, the central government revealed the number of incidents (54) of communal violence for the first time—including 6 dead, three Hindus and three Muslims, by September of that year. The context is that these numbers were minuscule compared to 62 deaths in Uttar Pradesh in 2013 from nearly 500 incidents of Hindu-Muslim clashes. This sort of data has enabled Modi to retell his story of maintaining relative peace compared to a complete breakdown of law and order in Uttar Pradesh under chief minister Akhilesh Yadav and his father, Mulayam Singh (whose claim of being friendly to Muslims is so strong that he has been referred to as Maulana Mulayam because Maulana is an honorific used by Muslims for the pious) and their Samajwadi Party, which makes religious tolerance their core political plank.

  “I believe that Muslims have to come out of their ghettos,” says Lakhani. “I would say that 90 percent of Hindus are secular, and to curb violence you need strong law and order and that’s why the demand for a strong leader is growing.”

  Lakhani says he realized that the tide was turning when he went to speak at a career fair at Juhapura, the most notorious Muslim ghetto in Ahmedabad since the 1970s, which was once called “mini-Pakistan.” “Many of the speakers at the event were Hindu, and the response was very good. This would have been impossible for years,” he says.

  Earlier, Sareshwala had given me another example of changing times, also using Juhapura. “Even in Juhapura, there are now apartments for Rs 1 crore ($168,000) and Rs 2 crore; this is astounding for us who live in Gujarat and know its history,” Sareshwala told me. What he is referring to is this: after 5,000 Muslims were killed in the worst riots ever in the history of Gujarat in 1969 and the state had nearly 200 days of curfew following the bloodbath, property prices in Ahmedabad stalled for nearly two decades. This was especially true for Juhapura, which is on the outskirts of the city. Ahmedabad was affected by the real estate boom across the country, and Juhapura too should have benefited, but in this city of “borders” that did not happen. Even with the real estate boom, had there not been peace and an anticipation of peace, the area in and near “mini-Pakistan” would have remained untouched by the boom.

  To understand how Juhapura is changing, I went to meet Nadeem Jafri.

  Until 2002, Jafri, a graduate of the Institute of Management Studies at Indore, worked as an account executive in the advertising agency Grey Worldwide in Ahmedabad. “Even though I had seen Hindus and Muslims in my neighborhood coming together and fighting the mobs, there was a lot of pressure from my friends and relatives to move to a Muslim majority place,” says Jafri.

  It was also the time when Jafri, who has a BS in physics and an MBA, decided to start a business. But he did not move to Juhapura until 2006 and clarifies that it had nothing to do with the riots. He says he held back moving right after the riots but finally saw the business opportunity. There was “also the family pressure to move to a safer location.”

  “I was already interested in retail and there was an opportunity. Juhapura did not have a large utilities and grocery store. People used to bring things from outside,” says Jafri, who is from the Syed Shia Muslim community, who have close ties with the Chiliya Muslim sect. The Chiliya Muslims are famed restaurateurs and run most of the restaurants on the Bombay-Ahmedabad highway. So Jafri and seven partners pooled about Rs 60 lakhs in 2004 and opened Hearty Mart in the heart of Juhapura with contracts from many highway restaurants to supply wholesale groceries to them.

  Today, with 12 franchise stores across Gujarat and a turnover of Rs 12 crores in 2013, Jafri’s work has become a case study at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIMA), where he has also lectured.

  Jafri says he supports Modi’s work—though he has reservations about the man—because it has brought development. “If we blame him for failing to stop the violence in 2002, we also have to give him credit for 10 years of peace,” says Jafri, who once met Modi at a public event where they spoke briefly about growing Gujarat’s economic potential.

  He says all he wants is more development for Juhapura. “Already the locality is transforming. It has a series of new eateries where young people come for non-vegetarian [Gujarat is predominantly vegetarian] food,” says Jafri, who has bought an apartment in one of the poshest projects adjoining Juhapura called Al Burooj, a set of apartment blocks complete with an air-conditioned gym and landscaped gardens that would not be out of place in the swish financial and industrial center of Gurgaon on the outskirts of the Indian capital, Delhi, which has mushrooming condominiums everywhere. He paid about Rs 54 lakhs ($91,000) for a two-bedroom home that is about to be delivered.

  Standing inside Al Burooj, shaded by the palm trees that dot the neat walking track around the more than 300 apartments, Jafri said, “Does this look like a ghetto? No one actually wants t
o live in a ghetto.”

  IT IS SEEING PEOPLE LIKE SARESHWALA AND JAFRI THAT MADE ALI HUSSAIN Momin, 32, decide to create Gujarat’s first trade networking event of Muslim entrepreneurs. In 2014, 70 companies attended the event in Ahmedabad between February 7 and 9. The event was inaugurated by Modi in an unprecedented effort to reach out to the community.

  Momin’s Spider Communications, which does printing and public relations, and Muslim business networking platform Ummat hit a turnover of Rs 5 crores in 2013. His firm even got the hospitality business of Vibrant Gujarat, Modi’s flagship annual business summit. “Many people told me that if you try and do a Muslim business event, you will face trouble,” says Momin. “But the chief minister himself agreed to open it. He told me that every community needs to build since India desperately needs development and he was always ready to assist anyone who was building something. I have never faced any discrimination.”

  One of the people who had been a great source of support for Modi was the Syedna Mohammed Burhanuddin, the late absolute spiritual leader of the Bohra Muslim community—one of the most powerful business communities in India. The Syedna, who was born in Surat, had complete control over the Bohra community (though in later years there were some dissidents opposed to his absolute rule, which included payment to his office at almost every major occasion from birth to death). He gave many sermons around the world—several of these were in Gujarat—and inevitably he met Modi several times. They seemed to have developed genuine regard for each other. On the Syedna’s death, Modi tweeted a condolence message—the first he had ever done for any Muslim leader.