Just after the 2002 communal riots, a beleaguered Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi sought advice from a former president of Singapore about how to move forward in his political career. Modi’s image then was at its nadir and Gujarat’s prestige was battered beyond recognition as an investment destination. The advice he received was simple, “Establish Gujarat as a brand and hard-sell it internationally.”

Modi seems to have followed this suggestion and crafted a strategy to market Gujarat as a paradigm different from India. Its double-digit growth rate is tom-tommed as a success story. Its robust infrastructure and business-friendly bureaucracy is a major attraction for investment.

But good economics is not always good politics. Nobody realises this better than Modi. With his rising political ambitions, Modi has launched two initiatives to reposition himself in national politics. The first relates to his emphasis on agricultural growth in Gujarat that has been consistently around 10 percent for nearly a decade. The second, though unrelated to the first, is the construction of a statue of Sardar Patel larger than the Statue of Liberty in New York to build a counter icon to the Nehru-Gandhi family.

The hero of Bardoli movement was drawn into the struggle for independence through agrarian unrest in Gujarat. And he never begrudged the primacy given to Nehru by his mentor and fellow Gujarati, Mahatma Gandhi, and allowed himself to play second fiddle. But in an atmosphere of hubris, such historical contexts are trivia better ignored.

As the iconic statue of Sardar Patel (costing '2,500 crore) is proposed to be built from iron pieces of agricultural implements collected from over 500 villages, Gujarat is ready to tell the story of its agricultural growth to win over farmers across India.

The swanky and sprawling Mahatma Mandir, the '135-crore convention hall in Gandhinagar, was the venue where this story unfolded in the first ever ‘global agricultural summit’ on September 9. The Vibrant Gujarat summits over the years have wooed investors and industrialists to the state; the agricultural summit attracted around 4,000 farmers from 542 districts across the country.

With his 45-minute speech, Modi set the tone for the two-day summit: “The centre and its policies have failed farmers of the country, and as a result 2,500 farmers are leaving agriculture every day. Gujarat, however, has succeeded in setting examples for the rest of the country.”

Even as Modi was warming up to the topic, about 100 km away, at Hansalpur village in Mehsana district, a farmer named Gokulbhai was mobilising fellow agriculturalists to protest against the state government’s forced acquisition of their land for the Mandal Becharaji special investment region (MB SIR).

Seated at the village temple, Gokulbhai was meticulously noting the details of farmers in his village who would be landless once the SIR notification is implemented. Sitting in a circle around him were Karsanbhai, Sartanbhai and other villagers.

“If the government acquires our fertile land, we will have no other source of livelihood,” he said. Hansalpur is one of the 44 villages that originally formed the MB SIR, a proposed hub for automobile, industrial and auxiliary industries.

While the government excluded 36 villages out of the SIR after farmers began agitation, carrying out rally and protest marches, eight villages, including Hansalpur, were not spared. The government said these eight villages still formed part of the truncated SIR, as they had not opposed the SIR notification. The villagers, however, refute the claim and say the eight villages were not excluded from the SIR because the land belonging to these villages has been given to carmaker Maruti Suzuki, which intends to build its largest manufacturing unit there. Gokulbhai and company say they won’t let that happen.

“We will give our lives but not part with our land,” Karsanbhai said. The sarpanches of these villages have passed another resolution in their gram sabhas opposing the government move. “If 36 villages can force the government to bend to their demands, so can we,” said Sartanbhai, who would lose 35 acres of land if Maruti builds its plant here.

Special investment regions, 13 of them planned under Gujarat’s SIR Act-2009, are turning out to be new flashpoints pitching the Modi government against farmers across the state. These regions, each spread over 500 sq km to 1,000 sq km, have been planned to take advantage of the Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor (DMIC) as 40 percent of the corridor is through Gujarat.

“The SIR projects, under which the government acquires 40 percent land of each farmer without any compensation, have been kicked off by the government after it gave away all the state’s wasteland and grazing land to big industrial houses at throwaway prices over the last 10 years,” said Sagar Rabari, a member of the Jamin Adhikar Andolan that launched the agitation against MB SIR. Now that no wasteland is left, the government has set its eyes on farmland, he added.

But acquiring land from farmers will not be possible for the Modi government without inviting negative publicity, which the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate would certainly want to avoid. “He will try to nip in the bud any agitation which has potential to harm his chances in the national scene by accepting their demands,” said Prakash N Shah, an eminent civil society activist based in Ahmedabad.

And that is exactly what the chief minister did when farmers of Mandal-Becharaji region rose in revolt against the SIR. Within three months of the agitation launched in May, the chief minister agreed to exclude 36 villages out of the total 44. Modi’s acquiescence came as a surprise to farmers, given his track record (he used brute force to suppress a similar agitation against a Nirma cement factory in Mahuva, Saurashtra, in 2009).

However, he still chose to keep eight villages within the SIR. Shah explained why: “Along with the farmers he cannot afford to show a red flag to industry. Showing Maruti the door will send a negative signal to industry.”

Meanwhile, the success of the agitation launched by the Mandal-Becharaji farmers has given hope to other farmers facing land acquisitions in different pockets of the state.

At Mithi Virdi in Bhavnagar district, farmers were making plans for a massive rally in Ahmedabad against a proposed nuclear plant which will gobble up 800 hectares of fertile land of five villages. The Gujarat government had signed an MoU with Nuclear Power Corporation of India at Vibrant Gujarat summit in 2007 to set up a 6,000 MW nuclear power plant at Mithi Virdi. “We will not let government acquire our land to set up a nuclear plant here,” said Krishnakant, one of the main organisers of the protest movement in Mithi Virdi.

Then there are 40,000 people from 70 villages who are protesting against the Modi government, which wants to acquire their land around the Sardar Sarovar Narmada dam site in Kevadia Colony to develop tourism. The government notified land acquisition in 16 villages first and then in a total of 70 villages which are part of the Kevadia Area Development Authority (KADA) that has been established to develop tourism. “The government had already displaced tribals for the Sardar Sarovar project and now it wants to displace them again under KADA,” said Lakhan, who is leading the protest in Kevadia. Under the KADA notification, the government intends to develop a water park, hotels, golf course, camping ground, trekking trails, boating facilities, sunset viewpoints, resort clubs and water sports, among other things.

“There is a serious problem of the land-use policy in Gujarat,” said Indira Hirway, an economist from the Centre for Development Alternatives, Ahmedabad. “The fact is there is no land-use policy in the state. Projects like SEZ and SIR have been undertaken without taking into consideration the socio-economic impact and environmental issues. You simply can’t change the land-use policy in order to build a Singapore or Shanghai here,” she explained.

Hirway was pointing towards another SIR project at Dholera, 120 km from Ahmedabad. The Modi government has hyped the Dholera SIR as the next Singapore or Shanghai. There is no problem with nursing such a dream, except that the area, lying on the coast of the Arabian Sea, is prone to soil erosion and cannot bear the burden of heavy infrastructure development.

Announced in the Vibrant Gujarat summit of 2007, it caught the imagination of the people and investors with its promising catchline: ‘A new Gujarat within Gujarat.’ An advertisement blitzkrieg was launched, highlighting how the prospective megacity would send land prices soaring. Recalling the days when the project was announced, Sachin Jain, a manager with an MNC, said it seemed Gujarat would have its own Shanghai. “There was no escaping the Dholera SIR. It was everywhere – on the billboards, on TV, on radio,” he said. Then suddenly, about two years ago, the noise died down after a centre-commissioned report by Anna University said that 25 percent of the area of the proposed SIR had serious soil erosion issues and no human activity was possible on this land.

A visit to Dholera confirmed the problem flagged by the Anna University report. Locals say much of the area has been lost to the sea. In fact, a village called Madhavpura has been completely claimed by it. During high tide the sea water comes four to five kilometres inwards. Any industrial activity, let alone a heavy infrastructure setup, is near impossible in this area. The government, however, has not only paid no attention to the ground reality but has finished development planning of the area by dividing it into different zones – like the ones for agriculture, IT, automobile, pharmaceuticals and residential.

Farmers in the area are annoyed with the government for taking away their fertile land and compensating them with land in the high-tide zone and, therefore, without any potential for farming. Ramdeo Sinh, a farmer from Bavaliyari village in Dholera SIR, said he did not have any problem with the SIR per se but then it should follow a fair procedure. “You cannot take my fertile land and in exchange give me something that is uncultivable,” he said. Sinh and other farmers have contacted the Jamin Adhikar Andolan for guidance on how to launch agitation like the one by Mandal-Becharaji farmers.

At Mahatma Mandir, Modi, meanwhile, was in full flow: “It would have been good if such a summit was held in Delhi. But anyway, this is my country and these are my farmer brothers.”

“The irony of the situation could not be missed. Even as Modi makes an overt attempt to win over farmers across the country, farmers in his own backyard have begun to revolt,” Rohit Shukla, an Ahmedabad-based economist, quipped.