Addressing senior Sikh leaders on the eve of Punjab polls, Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke about the Gujarat-Punjab connect. He said, “As someone from Gujarat, I want to say that I have ties of blood with you as one of the Panj Pyaras of Guru Gobind Singh was from Gujarat.” Such an invocation is not entirely new. In 2020, speaking at the Visva-Bharati centenary celebrations, Modi had referred to the fact that Rabindranath Tagore’s brother Satyendranath was posted in Ahmedabad and Tagore visited him there frequently. The PM had brought up more than one reference to bolster the Gujarat-Tagore-Bengal connect. Tagore wrote a portion of Kshudhita Pashan or Hungry Stones while in Ahmedabad. “Gujarat’s daughter” Srimati Hutheesingh married into the Tagore family and so on and so forth.
Attachments umbilical
The PM seems to use “Gujarat” as a metaphor. In January 2021, when the BJP’s Bengal debacle was barely a possibility, the PM spoke about Subhash Chandra Bose’s Gujarat connect. It was in Haripura town that Bose had taken over the presidentship of the Congress party. In the 2019 general elections, the BJP did not win a single seat in Kerala. Assembly elections were due in 2021. The PM paid a visit to the state in June 2019, offered prayers at the Krishna temple in Guruvayur. He told a gathering, "Be it Udupi, Guruvayur or Dwarkadhish, for us --- the people of Gujarat --- there is an emotional connect.” In Bihar too, while addressing his last rally in 2019 in the run-up to the Assembly polls, he spoke of the Gujarat-Bihar connect through Krishna. He said, “I have a strong connection with the Yaduvanshis as I come from Gujarat, where Dwarka is situated. The community worships Lord Krishna and knows how to play the flute and when and where to strike with the Sudarshan Chakra.”
From the horse’s mouth
Not all the assertions are direct, some work tangentially. In 2020, addressing officers of the police academy in Hyderabad, the PM harped on the similarity between Assam and Surat. In both places people pronounce ’s’ as ‘h’. It was a sweet victory that the BJP mustered in the northeastern state a year later. When he was still just the BJP’s PM candidate, while addressing a Vijay Sankalp Abhigyan rally at Pasighat in Arunachal Pradesh, Modi said, “The Modi clan of the Adi tribe with a population of around 7,000 must have relation with the Modis of Gujarat.” But the mother of metaphors must be this. In 2013, when he was Gujarat chief minister, Modi was attending Maharana Pratap’s birth anniversary function at Udaipur. Talking about the olden relation between Gujarat and Rajasthan, he said among other things how Maharana Pratap’s horse Chetak had belonged to the Kathiawar breed of Gujarat.