Gujarat was transformed into 'a laboratory for Hindu nationalism', called 'the Hindutva laboratory' after the rise to power of Narendra Modi, who governed the states between 2001 and 2014. The Gujarat identity was rooted in Hinduism and directed against Muslims. It had been a Hindu nationalist test site, a new form of Hindutva politics that unfolded at the national level. Modi, as the Prime Minister of India, has replicated the modus operandi he had fine-tuned as Chief Minister of Gujarat. Professor Christophe Jaffrelot, in his scholarly book Gujarat Under Modi: The Blueprint for Today's India' gives a gripping account of how Modi's politics transposed to the national scene in 2014. Some selected mainstays of Modi's politics in Gujarat, drawn from the book, are discussed here:

Communal polarisation was the first pillar of Modi's politics in Gujarat. This polarisation remained Modi's trump card in national politics. On February 27, 2002, violence broke out in Godhra, a district headquarters in eastern Gujarat. Some 59 Hindus were burned alive aboard the Sabarmati Express. The train was returning from Faizabad, Uttar Pradesh, carrying many kar sevaks who travelled to Ayodhya to try to build Ram temple on the ruins of the Babri Masjid. Of 2,000 passengers, about 1,700 were kar sevaks from Gujarat. They chanted Hindu nationalist songs and slogans throughout the journey, all the while harassing Muslim passengers.

More abuse occurred at the halt in Godhra, a town known for its large Muslim population and history of communal riots. On the evening of February 27, after visiting Godhra, Chief Minister Narendra Modi announced that there would be a state bandh the next day. Thereafter, he called a meeting of senior police officers. According to Sanjiv Bhatt, a senior policeman who attended the meeting, the meeting was the point of departure for 'the official orchestration of the 2002 riots in Gujarat': Shri Narendra Modi said that the Muslims be taught a lesson to ensure that such incidents do not recur ever again. The Chief Minister expressed the view that the emotions were running very high among the Hindus, and it was imperative that they be allowed to vent their anger. On the day of the bandh, there was absolutely no police bandobast. The state and Ahmedabad city police control rooms were taken over by ministers. And repeated pleas from people were blatantly turned down. And what followed was communal carnage on an unprecedented scale.

In the wake of the 2002 riots, the Modi government pursued a strategy of politicisation of the police and the judiciary. The most professional policemen who had done their duty were sidelined, whereas the others were promoted. Some of them were also implicated in a new politics of fear targeting so-called jihadi terrorists, who were victims of extra-judicial killings. The judicial process itself was affected by the nomination of prosecutors belonging to the Hindu nationalist movement and the infiltration of the judiciary.

In parallel with the politicisation of the police and the judiciary, the Modi government spread corrupt practices and criminalised politics; whistle-blowers were targeted, and the state indulged in new forms of surveillance. The de-institutionalisation of the rule of law found expression in the promotion of Hindu vigilante groups, which resorted to cultural policing in the streets as well as on university campuses. These groups benefited from the protection of the government and became well entrenched at the grassroots level. Their penetration of society resulted in the making of a 'deeper state' propagating the Hindu nationalist ideology at the expense of the rule of law. The de-institutionalisation of the rule of law became a strategy for strengthening Modi's political control. This process translated into the saffronisation of the state institutions.

To polarise Gujarat and to protect himself from legal challenges, Narendra Modi needed to exert stronger control over the rule of law to perpetuate the politics of fear. Hence, the need to de-institutionalise state power. Not only were the policemen who had made the riots possible rewarded and others punished but police officers were used by the government to further polarise society along religious lines through fake encounters. Between 2002 and 2006, there were a series of such encounters, which, among others, included the three most infamous 'encounters' – the Sadiq Jamal, Ishrat Jehan and Sohrabuddin cases - that resulted in the killing of several young Muslims who were portrayed as Islamists. The police played a significant role in propagating the climate of fear.

The involvement of key members of the Modi government in fake encounters became more obvious in the Sohrabuddin case. Sohrabuddin Sheikh, part of the underworld, was killed in an alleged fake encounter on November 26, 2005. In March 2007, the Supreme Court ordered the state CID to probe the case. In May 2007, the State's Inspector General Geeta Johri reported that "the collusion of the state government in the form of Shri Amit Shah, MoS for Home makes a complete mockery of the rule of law and is an example of the involvement of the state government in a major crime."

The CBI arrested Amit Shah, one of Narendra Modi's most influential lieutenants, who was in charge of ten portfolios in the Gujarat government, on July 25, 2010. After his arrest, Tushar Mehta virtually gave up his practice and became 'the point-man for Amit Shah' and his 'eyes and ears.' He was involved in all the legal procedures that mattered in Gujarat after the 2002 riots. Amit Shah was granted bail in October but was ordered not to reside in Gujarat, fearing his interference with the ongoing judicial process. The Supreme Court transferred the Sohrabuddin case from Gujarat to Mumbai in September 2012 after the CBI expressed apprehension that witnesses were intimidated and a free and fair trial was impossible in Gujarat. The fake encounters helped the Modi government to maintain an atmosphere of fear attributed to the Islamist threat. Gujarat was a test site for the communalisation of the police.

Modi projected himself as the protector of the Hindu majority. The orchestration of fake encounters with jihadis who allegedly intended to kill him helped Modi to consolidate the image as the saviour of the majority community. The de-institutionalisation of the judiciary occurred due to the infiltration of the judicial machinery and a well-thought strategy of appointing reliable men to key posts. This policy prepared the ground for what Modi and Amith Shah were about to do at the Centre. Exerting systematic control over the police and the judiciary became a priority. The techniques used to that effect were drawn directly from the test site that Gujarat had become under Modi and Shah.

(a) They tried to appoint police officers who had been part of their entourage in Gujarat to key positions. In 2015, YC Modi – who had been part of the SIT that probed Modi's role in the Gujarat riots and investigated the murder of Haren Pandya - became additional CBI director. In 2016, another IPS Gujarat cadre, Rakesh Asthana – also part of the SIT- was appointed additional director of the CBI and became its 'special director' despite opposition from the CBI director Alok Verma, who was forced to quit. He was appointed Delhi Police Commissioner, directly reporting to the Home Minister Amit Shah.

(b) Modi and Shah focused their attention on the judicial process. They brought the people who had helped them in Gujarat to Delhi. Tushar Mehta, who had defended Amit Shah in the Sohrabuddin Sheikh case, was appointed additional solicitor general in 2014 and solicitor general of India in 2018. SV Raju, who had been practising at the Gujarat High Court and had been Amit Shah's lawyer in different cases, was appointed as additional solicitor general in 2020. Earlier in 2014, the Modi government refused to appoint Gopal Subramanium as a Judge of the Supreme Court because he was the Supreme Court's amicus curiae in the Sohrabuddin case, in which Amit Shah was the main accused. In 2020, a special SIT court in Ahmedabad acquitted all 67 accused, including BJP MLA Maya Kodnani and Bajrang Dal leader Babu Bajrangi, in the 2002 Naroda Gam massacre case. In many cases investigated by the CBI, the agency abstained from filing any appeal against the judicial decisions, including the case relating to the death in 2018 of Judge BH Loya, who was hearing the Shahabuddin fake encounter case.

The RSS was conceived as an organisation where individuals had to sacrifice their identity: The Sangh was above the man. This is why Swayamsevaks all have to wear the same uniform, from foot soldiers to the supreme leader – the sarsanghchalak. The guru of the organisation is the saffron flag, not an individual. The secondary role of its leader vis-à-vis the organisation explains the collegiality of the RSS decision-making process. Nor are sarsanghchalaks high profile public figures. Though trained in this tradition as a pracharak, Narendra Modi has abjured such a collegial style of functioning. No Hindu nationalist leader had gone so far in this direction before. Narendra Modi's rise to power reflects a different trajectory and strategy.

Never before had the BJP seen such a concentration and personalisation of power. Instead of investing in the bureaucracy, Modi selected a handful of civil servants who became part of his personal entourage. PK Mishra, Modi's personal secretary in Gujrat and the most formidable advisor to Modi managing IAS Babus, became the power Principal Secretary in the PMO. Not only did key bureaucrats become part of Modi's inner circle, but they also solidified the nexus between his government and the corporate sector. This triangular relationship is exemplified by the role of former bureaucrats in the Adani Group. In addition to IAS and IPS officers, lawyers were also part of this nexus. According to the lawyer Anand Yagnik, over twenty lawyers who had fought cases against the Adanis were retained by the Adani Group.

Once he became Prime Minister, Modi replicated the strategies he had experimented with in the testing ground of his home state. He relied on bureaucrats to govern India. Some of those who had been part of his close guard in Gujarat followed him to Delhi. Modi sidelined the old guard like he had marginalised Keshubhai Patel, Suresh Mehta, Kashiram Rana and Gordhan Zadaphia in Gujrat. LK Advani, his mentor, Murali Manohar Joshi and other veterans were marginalised. As the prime minister, Modi prevailed over the RSS national leaders in the same way he had prevailed over the RSS state leaders in Gujarat.

The continuity between Modi's political style before and after 2014 is fascinating. Only minor adjustments were needed to shift from state-level to national-level politics. His body language was the same, and so was the general overtone. His commitment to crony capitalism, which is capital-intensive and not labour-intensive, remained the same, ensuring so-called growth minus job creation. The targets were the same, be they Pakistan and the Muslims or, on the domestic scene, the Congress and the Nehru-Gandhi family. That Modi could centralise and personalise power at a pan-Indian level, as he had done at the state level, is amazing. The victims of social exclusion and ghettoisation, Muslims, were turned into de facto second-class citizens. Personalisation of power is total. The manner in which he announced the demonetisation in 2016 and took the decision to impose the most draconian nationwide lockdown in 2020 without consulting anyone amply demonstrates that what we see today at the Centre is unbridled absolute political power exercised by one man, with all constitutional checks and balances failing.

In conclusion, Professor Christophe Jaffrelot says, "under the aegis of the Modi government, Hindu nationalism penetrated Gujarat society so deeply that they came to form a state deeper than the official one, and a control system that was well entrenched at the societal level. This modus operandi has been replicated at the national level since 2014. It would make any return to the status quo ante difficult, even if the BJP loses elections. Only a mass movement could probably counter such a majoritarian osmosis with society."