A Chinese Singaporean who visited Gurgaon before it discovered the antique dignity of Gurugram noted that looking up, the skyline was Manhattan. Looking down, the potholes and slush betrayed India. In the looking glass world of a satellite township that tops India’s Human Development Index but was also the world’s most polluted city, people whispered over the new year weekend that the Gandhis are really Jinnahs. With an eye on the Uttar Pradesh election, my driver blamed Sonia and Rahul Gandhi for the dispute over namaz sites.

Despite a dizzying modernity that reflects the Indian dream, Gurgaon is no stranger to absurdity. In November 1947, when an emergency committee decided that every 10 refugees to Pakistan could take a cow, Lord Mountbatten observed, “So, if there are only five in a family, they can take half a cow?” Election fever has aggravated the absurdities of a township where slums fester within two miles of the shimmering splendour of CyberHub and where many of the chowkidars and maids in my neighbourhood turned out to be Bengali-speaking Muslims, some of whom might have taken pains to iron out Bangladeshi accents.

Jawaharlal Nehru may have been looking at Gurgaon 63 years ahead when he warned in 1958 that the “communalism of the majority is far more dangerous than the communalism of the minority” because it “wears the garb of nationalism.” Gurgaon’s communal majority celebrates Govardhan Puja with a vengeance to prevent public namaz, bellows “Jai Shri Ram” while namaz is in progress, and brands those with no appetite for such obstruction anti-national or, more pointedly, Pakistani agents. The minority communalism it can provoke is also dangerous; it can invite terrible reprisal.

The New York Times writer who called Gurgaon “a riddle at the heart of India’s rapid growth” may have understood the phenomenon of today’s India better by acknowledging the clash of cymbals and chanted slokas with which the new elite worships its digital deities. The Sheetla Mata Mandir is the most important temple of India’s IT capital. Appropriately enough, Sheetla’s spouse was the duplicitous Dronacharya, who received Gurgaon as a gift of ‘Guru Gram’ and who is honoured in the names of several local colleges as well as the government’s annual awards for sports tutelage. Given that heavy dose of Hindu lore, it is impolitic to recall that Gurgaon is also where Begum Samru, the Muslim dancing girl and courtesan who converted to become India’s only Catholic ruler, held court.

Any suggestion that the origins of today’s 26 malls, the offices of more than 250 Fortune 500 companies, and the glittering six-acre sprawl of the Kingdom of Dreams stretch back to Frank Lugard Brayne’s Gurgaon Experiment in development through self-help may be even more furiously rejected. A competitor for the minds and muscles of the same men, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was not only “amazed” by Brayne’s zeal but smugly declared that “the Gurgaon Experiment must be pronounced virtually a failure.” Philip Mason dismissed his fellow Civilian as “a dyed-in-the-wool Evangelical, absolutely confident that he was the sole possessor of revealed truth, religious, moral, sanitary and agricultural.” Clive Dewey held in Anglo-Indian Attitudes: The Mind of the Indian Civil Service that facing “recurrent droughts, epidemic malaria, an excessive revenue demand [and] crippling debts”, Gurgaon’s villagers wanted tangible official assistance while Brayne urged self-help.

Prosperity did eventually come but it was a mixed blessing. Many believe that the turning point was Gurgaon’s selection for the Maruti plant during Bansi Lal’s regime. If so, Sanjay Gandhi’s methods to produce a Maruti notoriously without an engine would have been anathema to Brayne. Yearning for “a mass movement” of peasant volunteers to solve all problems “whether they are of agriculture, social or moral or relate to public health”, he would certainly not have approved of the rampant sectarianism that seems to go with booming prosperity.

Amit Shah didn’t set the ball rolling during his election campaign in Uttarakhand by accusing the Congress of “appeasement politics” in allowing Muslim prayers on roads. Another Rashtriya Syamsevak Sangh veteran, Haryana’s chief minister, Manohar Lal Khattar, had already announced that namaz should be offered only at “designated” places. Although permission for prayers at eight of 37 such sites was revoked last month, Khattar’s intentions were no secret and prompted Gurgaon’s Muslims — five lakh out of a population of more than 15 lakh — to try to buy two sites as long ago as 2016. Apparently, their 13 functional mosques can accommodate only 20,000 worshippers. Local Hindus won’t allow the restoration of several ruined mosques left over from when the district had a Muslim majority.

The land purchase wasn’t approved. The presence of two Bharatiya Janata Party luminaries at last year’s Govardhan Puja at a designated site smacked of official collusion in turning namaz prayers into an obstacle race. The nationwide campaign to stop public namaz that the organizers propose may not yet appeal in Calcutta where expressions of private faith in public places is a common sight — an ever-increasing variety of pujas converting the city into a dazzlingly raucous Hindustan, popular Christmas commercialism, the sadly dwindling Chinese community’s dragon dance and, of course, namaz on Red Road. But Khattar’s denunciation of namaz as “a show of strength” may find a resonance in UP, Karnataka and elsewhere.

Communal animosity must have some economic content in a country where the richest 1 per cent own more than four times the wealth of the bottom 70 per cent. Areas of darkness stretch beyond Gurgaon’s glittering malls, fancy restaurants and upscale shopping. The Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy reported last year that Haryana’s 26.4 per cent unemployment rate against the national average of 6.9 per cent was India’s highest. Gurgaon’s estimated 2,00,000 migrant workers labour on construction sites or as domestic help.

Haryana is history. Kurukshetra’s echoes are epic. Panipat witnessed the rise and fall of empires. Burning stubble smothers the O.P. Jindal Global University’s gracious campus at Sonipat in smog. Sudhir Ghosh, Gandhi’s Emissary, transformed Faridabad from another refugee colony to a throbbing industrial hub. Mianwali reeks of nostalgia. Rohtak recalls for me the late Hardwari Lal who boasted that Haryana had only “one and a half-educated men”. He being the one, I dare not try to guess even after all these years whom he considered half-educated. Nor dare I mention the chief minister whose alleged crimes provoked him to write several libellous booklets. I had a stack of them. R.K. Dhawan dropped in at his bungalow. So did Gundu Rao and Satish Sharma.

Hardwari Lal was deeply offended when I took off for Singapore without so much as a by-your-leave and wrote me a pained letter in his spiky hand. We never met after that. But I have happy memories of his meticulous courtesy, impeccable English and the fine single malt whiskey he always served and himself imbibed in copious quantities without turning a hair. I cannot imagine him approving of Gurgaon’s flashiness, lack of civic amenities, or its communalism. Nor would he have been mealy-mouthed about any of it. He once tartly reminded a foreign correspondent who called him a defector that since his party had only three legislators, his exit was not defection but a legal split. The realist in him would have advised restraint on the ruling party and urged Gurgaon’s Muslims not to overdo the cap and beard.

With its mix of myth and modernity, Gurgaon could be India’s future. How troubled that future will be will depend on the ruling party as well as Muslims heeding this advice on the eve of elections that have already spawned extravagant propaganda and vicious canards. Having delivered himself of this advice, Hardwari Lal might have quoted with quiet approval the British administrator who observed, “A Jat is right when he is right. He is also right when he is wrong.”