ABSTRACT
Mega development projects have often had their most catastrophic consequences when the rulers who conceived them were most conscious of the gap that separated their subjects from ‘modernity’, when the need to abolish centuries of ‘backwardness’ through a compression of time seemed most imperative. Gandhi’s glorification of rural life, and his antipathy to urban industrial modernity – which ‘with its glittering baubles and trinkets (was) exactly what had enslaved Indians to the British’ – is well-known. Ashis Nandy’s assault on secularism is part of a more wholesale rejection of modernity. Communal riots are closely correlated with the deracination and social dislocation that accompany industrialisation and urbanisation, and that leave large sections of the population morally and socially disoriented. In Jawaharlal Nehru’s dream, then, Bhilai was a ‘beacon’ on the path to India’s future, a great national ‘temple’ to its industrial modernity.
