India’s economic structure reflects a political component that is rarely clearly discussed: the direct influence of the religious framework on state administration. Tamil Nadu and Gujarat constitute the sharpest contrast. Both are industrial, coastal, populated states, although each produces completely different results due to the way their public life is organized.
Gujarat is at the western end of the country, on the Arabian Sea and the border with Pakistan. Its main economic city is Ahmedabad, while the political capital is Gandhinagar. Narendra Modi governed there for more than a decade before becoming prime minister, and his national image was built on the “Gujarat model” with large visible works, direct negotiations with industrial conglomerates, accelerated expansion of ports and highways, all wrapped in intense religious nationalism.
It is a scheme where the leader presents himself almost as a spokesperson for the gods, more comfortable in symbolic acts, rituals and scenes with sacred cows and elephants than in front of long series of statistics. This framework generates a type of growth that favors megafactories and large-scale projects with low labor absorption, which explains why social indicators remain weak even with a robust GDP.
Secondary schooling is below the national average, multidimensional poverty remains high and technical training does not keep pace with investment in infrastructure. The logic of the system is built around religious identity cohesion and not around the development of human capital.
Tamil Nadu occupies the southeastern corner of the country, facing the Bay of Bengal. Its big city is Chennai, former Madras, one of the main port, industrial and technological hubs of India. Behind the Tamil model is a political tradition marked by the rationalism and militant atheism of figures such as EV Ramasamy “Periyar”, who openly questioned organized religion and caste hierarchies.
The parties that governed the state for decades inherited that line and their current leaders uphold it. Thus, the head of government declares himself an atheist, without nuances, and does not hide that he does not believe in any god. The population continues to be religious in their daily lives, although the government does not introduce that dimension into state policies or use it as a tool of cohesion.
For the administration, the gods are left out of the budget and imaginary friends do not intervene in the planning of roads, hospitals or universities. That approach produces a system that distributes resources to schools, hospitals, technical institutes, professionalization programs, and labor mobility mechanisms.
The result appears in the data: Tamil Nadu has the highest secondary school enrollment rate in the country, the highest density of hospital beds in the public system and one of the most diversified industrial profiles in India, with electronics, cars, motorcycles and techno-scientific services supported by a reserve of engineers and qualified workers.
The difference between the two cases does not come from climate, geography or commercial history, because the two states share access to the sea, industrial economies and influential diasporas. The difference arises from a simple fact, in one state politicians who make decisions in the name of invisible deities govern and in the other they govern politicians who openly say that they do not believe in any.
Tamil Nadu operates with an openly atheist framework at the top of power, directing resources towards people, skills, engineering and services. Gujarat operates within a framework where religious identity structures legitimacy and makes monumental infrastructure the center of state action. This choice produces two models that advance in opposite directions, when one generates stable productive capacities, the other depends on large-scale works without a broad base of human development.
Things as they are
Mookie Tenembaum addresses international issues like this every week with Horacio Cabak on his podcast El Observador Internacional, available on Spotify, Apple, YouTube and all platforms.
