rethinking state politics in india - taylor & francis group
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Rethinking State Politics in India
In recent decades, India has been witness to the assertion of geo-
graphically, culturally and historically constituted distinct and well-
defi ned regions that display ethnic, communal, caste and other
social–political cleavages.
This book examines the changing confi gurations of state poli-
tics in India. Focussing on identity politics and development, it
explores the specifi cities of the regions within states — not merely
as politico-administrative constructs but also as conceived in histori-
cal, geographic, economic, sociological or cultural terms. Adopting
a comparative approach, the book looks at alternative theoretical
approaches — the quest for homeland, identity, caste politics and
public policy.
This second edition includes a new Introduction that updates
the research in the area, while further developing the theoretical
framework.
One of the fi rst major volumes on federalism in India, includ-
ing studies from across the nation, this book will be indispensable
for students and scholars of political science, sociology, history and
South Asian studies.
Ashutosh Kumar is Professor, Department of Political Science,
Panjab University, Chandigarh, India. Previously, he lectured at
the universities of Jammu and Delhi. He has been associated with
the Lokniti network, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies,
Delhi, as State Coordinator for Punjab and has been a visiting fac-
ulty member at the University of Tampere, Finland, and the Fonda-
tion Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Paris. His research interests
include state politics in India, with emphasis on issues related to
elections, identities and development. He has co-edited a volume
entitled Globalisation and Politics of Identity in India (2008).
Professor Kumar has also published in national and international
journals. He was Editor-in-Chief of the Panjab University research
journal Social Sciences (2012–16) and continues to be a part of the
four-member Research Promotion Committee of Panjab University.
‘This [work] is one of the best specimens of the growing genre of Indian
scholarship on India. It carries the authentic stamp of originality and empiri-
cal insights that spring from the deep core of Indian area studies, while, at
the same time, expressing itself in a general mode and medium familiar
to students of comparative politics. Today, India is not only the largest
democracy in the world, it is also a major economy whose diversity and
commonalities provide laboratory-like conditions for comparative studies.
Anyone interested in knowing about the complex and diverse politics of
India will benefi t enormously from this important book.’
Subrata K. Mitra, Professor and Director,
Institute of South Asian Studies, Singapore
‘The book is a fascinating attempt to assert the autonomy of the discipline
of state politics in academia. It is comprehensive in its coverage of move-
ments for statehood in India and thus a signifi cant contribution to the fi eld
of federalism, autonomy and identity politics. It analyses the movements for
statehood and autonomy along the twin axis of identity and development.’
Rekha Saxena, Professor, Department of
Political Science, University of Delhi
‘The volume emphasises the signifi cance of regions and sub-regions as sig-
nifi ers of change in party politics, patterns of leadership, changing dynam-
ics of caste and class politics, and rural–urban differentiation in narrating
the complex democratic-developmental trajectory or lack of it in various
states of India. It will add new aspects of research to the existing scholar-
ship on the states’ politics, their political and public institutions and diverse
forms of governance in different parts of contemporary India.’
Asha Sarangi, Professor, Centre for Political Studies, School
of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India
‘An extremely valuable resource for the academic community as well as
those outside it who wish to understand Indian politics and its dynamics at
state, regional and sub-regional level.’
Sanjay Kumar, Professor and Director, Centre for the Study
of Developing Societies (CSDS), Delhi, India
‘Presents a signifi cant reorientation of both the subject and approach to
comparative state politics in India. Moving beyond single-state studies, it
fi lls the gap in the literature on state politics in the post-Congress polity.
The concept of regions within regions understood both as regions within
the nation state as well as regions within a single state is a useful tool for
subnational comparisons and opens up space for future empirical research.
With studies by expert contributors, it is among the best collections of
essays available to students of state politics in India.’
K. K. Kailash, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science,
School of Social Sciences, University of Hyderabad, India
Rethinking State Politics in India
Regions within Regions
Second Edition
Edited by Ashutosh Kumar
Second edition published 2017
by Routledge
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© 2011, 2017 selection and editorial matter, Ashutosh Kumar;
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The right of Ashutosh Kumar to be identifi ed as the author of the
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First edition published by Routledge India 2011
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Contents
List of Tables and Charts ixPreface and Acknowledgements xiii
Introduction — Rethinking State Politics in India:
Introduction — Rethinking State Politics in India: Regions within Regions 1Ashutosh Kumar
Part I: United Colours of New States
1. Rethinking ‘Regional Developmental Imbalances’; Spatial Versus the Socio-political ‘Region’: The Case of Tribals in Jharkhand 31Amit Prakash
2. Constitution of a Region: A Study of Chhattisgarh 76Dharmendra Kumar
3. The Creation of a Region: Politics of Identity and Development in Uttarakhand 107Pampa Mukherjee
Part II: Quest for Territorial Homeland
4. Regions within Region and their Movements in Karnataka: Nuances, Claims and Ambiguities 131Muzaffar Assadi
5. Backwardness and Political Articulation of Backwardness in the North Bengal Region of West Bengal 153Arun K. Jana
6. Assertion of a Region: Exploring the Demand for Telangana 197Rama Rao Bonagani
Introduction to the Second Edition — Beyond
Nation-State: Framing Regional Politics in India xv
Ashutosh Kumar
Introduction to the First Edition — Rethinking
State Politics in India: Regions within Regions 1
vi Rethinking State Politics in India
7. Region, Caste and Politics of ‘Reverse Discrimination’: The Case of Harit Pradesh 220Jagpal Singh
8. Regions Within but Democracy Without: A Study of India’s North-east 246Samir Kumar Das
9. Politics of Autonomy in a Comparative Perspective: Punjab and Jammu & Kashmir 275Ashutosh Kumar
Part III: Caste and Politics of Marginality
10. Garv Se Kahon Hum Lingayat Hain! Caste Associations and Identity Politics in Maharashtra 307Rajeshwari Deshpande
11. Emergence of Dalit Organisations in Tamil Nadu: Causes, Forms of Assertion and Impact on the State Politics of Tamil Nadu 329Neeru Sharma Mehra
12. Affirmative Action, Group Rights and Democracy: The Mala–Madiga Conflict in Andhra Pradesh 352Sudha Pai
13. Caste and Marginality in Punjab: Looking for Regional Specificities 382Ronki Ram
Part IV: State Electoral Politics — Regional Variance
14. Subregions, Identity and the Nature of Political Competition in Rajasthan 399Sanjay Lodha
15. Regions within Regions — Negotiating Political Spaces: A Case Study of Karnataka 430Sandeep Shastri
Contents vii
Part V: Politics of Public Policy
16. Political Regimes and Economic Reforms: A Study of Bihar and Madhya Pradesh 453Ashok K. Pankaj
Notes on Contributors 482Index 487
453
481
487
List of Tables and Charts
Tables1.1 Demography of ST Population in Jharkhand 421.2 Break-up of MPCE by Broad Groups of Non-food
Items Separately for each Social Group in Rural Areas 45
1.3 Break-up of MPCE by Broad Groups of Food Items Separately for each Social Group in Urban Areas 46
1.4 Literacy in Jharkhand, 2001 (Per cent) 481.5 Schools in Jharkhand 521.6 District-wise Number of Teachers and Pupil Teacher
Ratio (PTR) by Type in Jharkhand, 2002–2003 531.7 Enrolment of Scheduled Tribes in Primary Education
in Jharkhand 541.8 Work Participation Rate in Jharkhand, 2001 581.9 Estimates of Birth Rate, Death Rate, Natural Growth
Rate and Infant Mortality Rate in Jharkhand, 2002 611.10 District-wise Land Utilisation in Jharkhand, 1997–98
(Per cent) 641.11 Forest Cover in Jharkhand, 2001 and 2003
(sq. km) 671.12 Destruction of Forest Area for Developmental Projects
in Jharkhand, 1980–2003 691.13 Tribals Displaced from 1950–90 (in 10 million) 71
2.1 States with FDI-approved Support 95
3.1 Geographical Indicators 110
6.1 Districts of Andhra Pradesh (Region-wise Distribution) 200
6.2 Number of Primary Schools and Teachers (Region-wise Distribution) 201
6.3 Government Allopathic Medical Facilities (Region-wise Break-up) 202
x Rethinking State Politics in India
6.4 Chief Ministers Ruled in AP from 1956 to February 2010 (Region-wise Distribution) 207
6.5 Karimnagar Lok Sabha By-election Results (Held on 4 December 2006) 212
11.1 Electoral Alliances and Performance of the Parties on the Eve of 1999 Parliamentary Elections 340
11.2 Electoral Alliances on the Eve of 2001 State Assembly Elections in Tamil Nadu 344
11.3 Electoral Alliances in 2006 Tamil Nadu Assembly Elections 345
11.4 Voter Participation Rates in Tamil Nadu in Parliamentary Elections 348
11.5 Tamil Nadu 2009 Lok Sabha Election Results 349
12.1 Broad Categorisation of the SCs — Group Population 373
14.1 Geo-cultural Division of Rajasthan 40214.2 Distribution of the Population by Languages 40314.3 Distribution of Languages by Geographical Region
and Former States 40314.4 Major Castes/Tribes and their Regional
Dispersion 40614.5 Administrative Divisions, Districts and Subregions of
Rajasthan 41414.6 Distribution of Respondents by Castes and
Subregions (Per cent) 41514.7 Distribution of Respondents by Locality and
Subregions (Per cent) 41614.8 Distribution of Respondents by Land Occupation and
Subregions (Per cent) 41814.9 Distribution of Respondents by Occupation
Categories and Subregions (Per cent) 41914.10 Distribution of Respondents by Monthly Family
Income and Subregions (Per cent) 42014.11 Distribution of Respondents by Vote and Subregion
(Per cent) 42314.12 Distribution of Respondents by Vote and Caste
(Per cent) 425
14.13 Distribution of Respondents by Opinion on Type of Government (Per cent) 426
15.1 Caste and Religious Composition of the State of Karnataka 434
15.2 Karnataka Assembly Elections, 1978–2008 Region-wise Seats won by Congress, BJP, Janata Party/Dal (All Figures in Percentage) 446
Charts2.1 Types of Collieries and the Land they Occupy 88
2.2 Reduction in Workforce in Bhilai Steel Plant 96
3.1 Road Transport 123
List of Tables and Charts xi
Preface and Acknowledgements
The idea of putting together this volume was first conceived while attending a three-day workshop organised in January 2003 by the Indian School of Political Economy, Pune in collaboration with the Department of Politics, University of Pune and CSDS-Lokniti, in which the state papers, using the data from National Election Studies, were presented by Lokniti Network members teaching in different Indian universities. The overall feeling among the paper presenters and experts, including D. L. Sheth, Yogendra Yadav, Suhas Palshikar, Peter deSouza and Nilkant Rath, was to move beyond state as a unit of analysis for the study of electoral politics and focus more on regions within a state and underline their specificities in a comparative mode in order to understand the larger forces and long-term changes taking place.
The project to employ intra-state or inter-state regional perspective to take up a broader study of micro-level mechanisms, which have been shaping political actions and processes of mobilisation and development at the local level, finally took concrete shape in the form of a conference, attended by many co-travellers in the Lokniti network, held in March 2007 at the Department of Political Science, Panjab University. The conference was funded from the seminar grant of the University Grants Commission’s ASIHSS Programme. The ICSSR regional centre, as usual, provided excellent hospitality and institutional infrastructure to the participants. I would like to thank the UGC and Northwest Regional Centre, ICSSR. I would also like to record my profound gratitude to the contributors who not only allowed me to edit their articles but also agreed to revise them repeatedly first at my request and then on the basis of the detailed comments made by an anonymous reviewer. Special thanks go to Professors Sudha Pai and Ashok K. Pankaj who could not actually attend the conference but readily offered their articles on request. Over the years, a special bond has developed among us all state politics wallahs, meeting each other frequently during conferences and project workshops, sharing ideas through e-mail.
xiv Rethinking State Politics in India
A colleague in the department, Dr Kailash K. K., has been intimately associated with the volume — in organising the conference, coordinating with the participants, presenting a paper, and also preparing abstracts of some of the article. Over the years, he has become more a dear friend than merely an accomplished fellow traveller in the arena of Indian politics. I am also grateful to my two other colleagues Dr Ronki Ram and Dr Pampa Mukherjee for not only contributing articles for the volume but also encouraging me in the endeavour. Professor Sanjay Chaturvedi, Dr Deepak K. Singh, Dr Navjot and Ms Janaki Srinivasan, all dear colleagues in the department, have always been supportive in creating a congenial environment in the department for academic pursuits. Professor Bhupinder Brar, the ‘Bhishmapitamah’ of the department, has been the guiding force for all of us. While collecting reading material to write the Introduction for the volume, I received valuable help from Paramjit Singh, the office superintendent of the UGC-SAP and ASIHSS-assisted departmental library. This is also a befitting occasion to recall with immense pride the rich legacy that our department, amongst the oldest and finest in the country, has enjoyed over decades in the form of seminal contributions made in the discipline of state politics, especially by Professors T. R. Sharma, P. S. Verma and late Pradeep Kumar. I would be failing in my duty if I do not thank the students at the department who opted for the course on state politics for continued and productive engagements I have had with them in the classroom and outside.
I wish to thank the editorial board of the Economic and Political Weekly, especially Rammanohar Reddy, for providing me space and for constructive suggestions on the articles I have published in the journal. My two articles in the volume draw heavily from the articles published in the journal in recent years.
I also wish to place on record my appreciation of the keen interest shown by Routledge, New Delhi in this volume and am thankful to the Routledge team for their suggestions, support and extremely efficient and friendly handling of the manuscript.
Finally, I must thank my family — my wife Vibha and children Ishita and Siddharth — for being a constant source of great support and sustenance.
I dedicate the volume to my parents who gave their all to us children without asking anything in return.
Introduction to the Second Edition — Beyond Nation-State:
Framing Regional Politics in IndiaASHUTOSH KUMAR
IThere is much recognition and appreciation of the states to be
viewed as important units for developing a theoretical framework
for analysing politics and economy in India that has been under-
going a process of signifi cant transition/reconfi guration in the last
30 years ( Yadav and Palshikar 2008). Ongoing regionlisation/
decentring of polity and economy have led to the emergence of
the states, both as the prime political and economic actors as well
as the arena where political and economic processes take concrete
shape on the ground. For a nuanced understanding of the issues
about emergent ‘national’ politics in India, research focus on states
is being considered as absolutely ‘critical’.1
Greater level of recognition of state as the primary unit of politi-
cal analysis has led to the emergence of state politics as an autono-
mous discipline, out of the shadow of broader disciplines of Indian
Politics. Ironically, the newfound exalted status of the discipline of
state politics is in sharp contrast to its earlier dismal state not long
ago when it was treated merely as an appendage of the discipline
of Indian politics (read ‘national politics’). Comparative state poli-
tics with focus on the cross-state/supra-state studies have of late
1 More than a decade ago, Chhibber and Nooruddin had predicted that the
‘future analyses of Indian politics must concentrate’ at the state and local level
(19 99: 53). As of now, the regional states are considered the ‘mainstay of
India’s democracy and the crucial building block of the Indian nation’, providing
‘effective arena of political choice’ and so the argument is that national politics
is to be viewed ‘through the prism of the state’ (Mitra, 20 06: 46; Yadav and
Palshikar, 2008: 14).
xvi Ashutosh Kumar
received much more focus than the conventional discipline of com-
parative politics/area studies, as India specialists study the themes
like identity politics, development, welfare, ethnicity, populism,
party system, among others. This is unlike in the past when the
models/theories developed in the context of the western democra-
cies were being adapted/transposed to explain the Indian situation.
This Introduction aims at summarising as well as reviewing vari-
ous traditions of scholarship on the politics of states in India. Sift-
ing through some of the representative/trend-setting state politics
literature, the study makes an effort to go deeper into these varied
traditions of research and look for the adequacy of the approaches
undertaken and the important insights gained by each one in the
relevant fi eld. It also suggests the way to move forward.
IIWhile summarising the three generations of scholarship in the dis-
cipline and looking into their contributions as well limitations, the
study takes up the following interrelated sets of research questions
for analytical discussion related to the fi rst two generation of stud-
ies, before arguing for the promotion of the third generation of
comparative state studies which focus on the subregions within/
across the states.
First, what have been the processes/factors that have been criti-
cal to the emergence of constituent states as signifi cant and rela-
tively autonomous analytical categories for understanding politics of
contemporary India? In a related question, how can one explain the
relative academic neglect of the states as distinct units of analysis
by India specialists for a considerable period after independence?
Why state-level political studies started in real earnest only in the
late 1960s?
Second, what has been the contribution of the ‘fi rst generation’
of state-specifi c studies that came up in the 1960s and 1970s to
the understanding of the politics at the state level? What were their
limits?
Third, to what extent the ‘second generation’ of studies in the
form of both single state as well as interstate/two-state compara-
tive studies veering around a specifi c theme have been able to take
it forward and in what way? What makes the constituent states of
Indian union comparable in the era of economic reforms or even
Introduction � xvii
earlier under development planning model? How does the use of
comparative method help in developing theoretical framework or
reaching conclusions for ‘all India politics’? What are the specifi c
advantages of interstate studies over the single case studies, if any?
How do these comparisons help us in appreciating the specifi cities
of the politics of a particular state by situating them in the con-
text of what happened in the other states or theorising? Have the
benefi ts of comparative studies across the states been adequately
explored? What are the limitations of comparative analysis? Are
these limitations/challenges specifi c to India given the diverse and
complex nature of its society and politics?
Finally, this Introduction suggests what may constitute ‘third gen-
eration’ of studies within the discipline. It argues that comparativists
now should also be making efforts to situate state-level specifi ci-
ties in a multilayered context. There is a critical need not only to
move beyond nation-state, but also states, and begin looking for
intra-state/cross-state variations/similarities as well for developing
analytical framework to study politics and society in India. Focus
needs to be on the historical-cultural subregions also that have
emerged as political and economic subregions over the decades.
Several other experiments in comparative research, already in the
process, need to go on, like taking up a subregion within a state
as the reference point while comparing it with other comparable
subregions in the same/other states for taking up a particular theme
for study. Then, of late, even the cities have been taken up for
cross-state/supra-state comparative studies.
IIILet us take up the fi rst set of questions by referring to the factors
that have led to the emergence of states as important political units/
actors in the last three decades.
A foremost factor that has brought focus on the state is the poli-
tics of identity. The upsurge in identity politics has reconfi gured the
democratic politics of India in the last three decades in a most signif-
icant way, as diverse social groups in India, hitherto lying dormant,
have increasingly been politicised and mobilised along the lines of
social cleavages rather than on the basis of their common economic
interests or subaltern ideology. Recently, India has been witness to
frequent struggles around the assertiveness and confl icting claims of
xviii Ashutosh Kumar
the identity groups, and also of struggles amongst them, often fought
out on lines of region, religion, language (even dialect), caste and
community. These struggles have found expressions in the changed
mode of electoral representation that has brought the local/regional
into focus with the hitherto politically dormant groups and regions
fi nding voices. A more genuinely representative democracy has led
to the sharpening of the line of distinction between or among the
identity groups and the regions. These identity groups are sought to
be collectively recognised and mobilised either on the basis of caste,
tribe, language (script) or dialect. Almost all such social groups are
confi ned spatially to a particular state or subregion within it, espe-
cially after the reorganisation of the states on linguistic/ethnic basis
undertaken in the 1950s and 1960s. So invariably, politicisation/
mobilisation/participation takes place at the state/subregion level,
giving primacy to local/regional over national.2 This phenomenon
is especially true for the recently mobilised and assertive identity
groups in the post-1990 India.
That this can be an important ground for undertaking politi-
cal research on Indian states was recognised way back by Weiner
(1968b) , much before the Rath Yatra, Mandal and the Mandir
happened in the 1990s’ India. A pioneer in the discipline, Weiner
had argued that ‘it (is) at the state level that the confl icts among
castes, religious groups, tribes and linguistic groups and factions are
played out’. And almost two decades after, Wood (1984) obser ved
that states ‘are in frontline when it comes to coping with the ten-
sions produced by socio-economic change’.
IVThere has been utmost focus on the states (and of late the sub-
regions within them), as they have emerged as the spaces where
party/electoral politics with their specifi cities unfolds now. The
2 While asked to prioritise their loyalty in the National Election Studies (NES)
conducted by Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), Delhi, in
1996 and 1999, 53 and 51 per cent of the respondents, respectively, expressed
their fi rst loyalty to region/state they belonged to rather than to India, whereas
only 21 per cent in both post-poll surveys put their loyalty fi rst to India (CSDS
data unit).
Introduction � xix
huge presence of state-level parties in the successive parliaments
and the frequency of coalition governments at the centre in the last
three decades has made the national polity seeming little more than
the aggregation of the state-level politics (Kumar 2013: 147).3
This phenomenon has been attributed to the changed mode of
electoral politics since the 1990s, marked by high level of partici-
pation and contestation both in qualitative as well as quantitative
sense. It has made India’s democracy far more representative in
terms of the institutional presence. A causal factor has been the
decline of the social coalitional support base of the hegemonic
Congress, which led to the advent of a fragmented/regionalised
party system that is far more ‘competitive’ and ‘open’ now (Pal-
shikar 2004: 1477). S harpening of the social cleavages in the
‘post-Congress polity’4 has witnessed a visible surge in the fortune
of state-/substate-level parties,5 which focus essentially on a particu-
lar set of ‘voting community’.6
The rise of state-level parties raises another subset of questions.
What explains the fragmentation of party system and the subse-
quent long-term ascendance of the state-/substate-level parties?7
3 In the 16th Lok Sabha, in all 35 parties have at least one member elected
in the House. Only six of them are recognised by the Election Commission
of India as national parties, out of which only the vote share of the BJP and
the Congress could cross double digits. http://eci.nic.in/eci_main/archiveofge
2014/20%20-%20Performance%20of%20National%20Parties.pdf.4 Yadav (1999: 2395).5 Such a trend showed, over time, ‘the consolidation of the non-Congress
space as well as the decline of the Congress and, in some cases, fragmentation
of the state level party system’ (Sr idharan, 2012: 23).6 Yadav (1996: 95) referred to the verdicts in the assembly elections held
in 16 states of India in the early 1990s as the beginning of a ‘competitive
multi-party system, which no longer is defi ned with reference to the Congress’.
As a consequence, Congress learnt to ‘transform itself from the dominant party
in a dominant party system to a competitive party in a multi-party system’
(Rudo lph and Rudolph, 2008: 36).7 Ayyangar and Jacob (2014: 235) have divided state parties into ethnic, ter-
ritorial and ad hoc splinter parties: ‘ethnic parties are primarily interested in the
mobilization and empowerment of particular ethnic groups — which could span
multiple neighbouring states — and aim to capture state power to redistribute
resources to their targeted groups. Territorial parties mobilize citizens within
their respective states. . . .their focus is geographical, and they are concerned
xx Ashutosh Kumar
And also, what explains the endemic decline of an ‘umbrella’ party
like the Congress that used to manage ‘rainbow coalitional support
base’, but now has been struggling to remain even a ‘catch-all party’
like the BJP, the other ‘polity-wide’ party which now seems to be
on ascendance?8
First, the ascendance of ‘new’ state parties may be attributed
to a large extent to the ongoing collectivisation, politicisation and
mobilisation veering around social cleavages.9 These processes have
helped in the rise of these state-/substate-level parties across the
states,10 engaged with essentially state-/subregion-centric politics,
a phenomenon now visible even in the older democracies with the
long tradition of having only national parties in winning positions.11
Most of these newly emerged state-level parties in India trace
their origin to Janata Party/Janata Dal, and also borrow the same
rhetoric of social justice for the mobilisation purposes. These par-
ties, like Rashtriya Janata Dal, Janata Dal (United), Samajwadi Party,
Apna Dal, Lok Jana Shakti Party, have been based on the support
of the newly mobilised identity caste groups, not only rooting for
mainly the state, but also substate-specifi c issues and leadership
even when they contest the Lok Sabha elections.12 However, there
with issues such as self-determination, regional autonomy or simply access to a
larger share of national resources. Ad hoc splinter parties are usually too small
to aspire to come to power by themselves even at the state level. Many parties
within this subtype are personality-driven networks masquerading as political
parties’.8 Decline of the Congress that had been steady over the years beginning
1990s reached an alarming proportion after the fi ve states assembly elections
in mid-2016, which followed the 2014 debacle in the Lok Sabha elections.9 Different castes/sub-castes, especially the OBCs, have come together for
political gains. Gope, Gwala, Ahir — all these castes are now being identifi ed
and mobilised as Yadav caste in Hindi-speaking states.10 Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand are two notable exceptions. Both hill
states are the only two states in India having upper castes (twice-born) majority.
Upper castes voters have generally shown inclination to vote for the national
parties, as revealed in the CSDS-Lokniti data.11 The United Kingdom and Canada are pertinent examples where the
regional parties have of late done well.12 While referring to the nature of political parties at the state level, Narain
(1976: 598) had referred to the presence of ‘cadre and mass and ideology-based
and machine’ political parties.
Introduction � xxi
are also state parties which have come up taking up regionalist/
autonomist or developmental agenda. Following in the footsteps
of the older cadre-based/ideologically rooted state parties like the
Akali Dal, National Conference and DMK; the state-level parties,
like the Asom Gana Parishad and Peoples Democratic Party, have
taken up the regionalist/autonomist agenda, whereas parties like
the Trinamool Congress, Telugu Desham Party, and Biju Janata Dal
have followed the developmental agenda.
Second, as the state-level parties openly target and cater to the
narrow/parochial interests of a particular set of social categories,
they show greater potential than the ‘polity-wide’ parties in being
able to activate voter linkages that are sectarian, ethnic and popu-
list. The state-level parties, particularly if they are ‘ethnic parties’,
are more successful because they resort openly to the identity poli-
tics unlike the polity-wide parties who have to use it in the coded
form for fear of losing votes elsewhere.13 As a result, the state-level
parties have relatively better potential to create and retain a ‘core
social constituency’,14 which more often than not get them electoral
dividends under the single plurality electoral system, especially if
there is a multipolar contest.15
Third, even in terms of mobilising the hitherto dormant smaller
identity groups, state parties have scored over the national par-
ties. These communities are numerically as well as econom-
ically weaker ones, belonging to artisan/landless farming backward
13 This was evident in the 2014 Lok Sabha and 2015 Assembly elections
in Bihar, where the RJD chief campaigner Lalu Yadav openly mobilised the
voters during the campaign in the name of caste, whereas Narendra Modi,
the BJP chief campaigner, had to invoke the memory of Lord Krishna’s visit
to Dwarka to woo the numerically signifi cant Yadavs who consider Krishna as
their kinsman.14 AIUDF, a state party established in 2005, managed to emerge as the
main opposition party of Assam, winning 18 out of 126 seats in the assembly
elections held in 2011. In 2016, it however only got fi ve seats. The party banks
on 34.2 per cent of ascendant Muslim population in Assam due to Bangladeshi
infi ltration, which constitute majority in 9 out of 29 districts of the state, and are
territorially concentrated in Lower Assam/Barak Valley regions.15 BSP and SP were able to form majority governments by receiving respec-
tively 29 and 30 per cent of the votes polled respectively in 2007 and 2005
Assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh.
xxii Ashutosh Kumar
castes (referred as ati pichda). ‘Sandwiched’ between the middle/
intermediate castes and the scheduled castes, these communities
have of late been rising steadily, as parties look towards them for
additional votes.16
Fourth, the state parties score over the national/polity-wide par-
ties like the Congress and the BJP also because the latter’s lead-
ership has remained largely with the upper/dominant castes due
to the lack of adequate institutional mechanism to facilitate the
intra-party mobility within the party organisations17 that could facili-
tate the entry of the lower/middle castes into a leadership role.18
This explains why a large number of the state parties have been
formed by the caste/community leaders, who prefer to launch their
‘own’ parties to exert infl uence as a coalition ally at the federal level
instead of playing an insignifi cant part in a national party. These
parties tend to gain in the inevitable process of ‘ethnic headcount’
by the numerically stronger middle and lower castes.
Fifth, there has always been an attempt on the part of the state
parties to claim that they can be trusted more than the polity-wide/
regional parties, in case of any confl ict of interests of the state they
represent with any other state, be it over the highways, airports,
trade or over river water/dams.19 Such claims have apparently
16 JD(U) in Bihar and SP in Uttar Pradesh have mobilised the lower OBCs
and lower Dalits by treating them as distinct social categories for state patronage.17 Weiner (1968a) has pointed out that the Congress leaders promoted
lower castes political leaders primarily to strengthen their position within the
factional fi ght within the Congress organisation.18 Realising the need to draft in the lower caste in the leadership role, BJP
has consciously drafted in leaders from the backward castes in post-Mandal
era with mixed results. Among the early appointments of lower castes leaders
to important positions were Kalyan Singh and Uma Bharati as chief ministers
from Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh, respectively. Both soon fell out with
the party, though now have been reinstated but not empowered. At present,
Shivraj Singh Chauhan, the two-term chief minister from MP, is the only promi-
nent face from the OBC category in the party, but he keeps a low profi le. The
party still does not have a Dalit leader of stature in the party and has to depend
on Dalit leaders from the allies like Ramvilas Paswan. Congress has not got any
prominent Dalit face after Jagjivan Ram.19 In March 2016, the Akali Dal government got the bill passed to terminate
the agreement between the then state governments of Punjab and Haryana to
build Sutlej-Yamuna link canal, and went ahead with the de-notifi cation of the
Introduction � xxiii
got increasingly more takers as the interstate competiveness have
increased over the years as the centre takes a backseat especially in
the economic arena. This explains as to why even the polity-wide
parties like the Congress and the BJP have started focussing more
and more on the issues concerning state/subregion during their
campaigns.20
Sixth, the emergent phenomenon of the ‘federalisation’ of party
system underlines the need to focus on the states for elections-/
parties-specifi c studies. The phenomenon refers to the emer-
gent distinctive character/growing autonomy of the state units of
the national/regional parties, as refl ected in the way state units
of national parties like the CPI and the CPM21 or even the Con-
gress have functioned, especially when they have been in the
government,22 or in terms of electoral alliances they seek.23
acquired land for the purpose. Since the 1980s, the AGP has raised the issue
of illegal migrants/immigrants in Assam. TDP gained by taking up the issue of
dignity of ‘Telugu Bidda’ under the leadership of NTR.20 Yadav and Palshikar (2009: 55) argue that electoral choices, even for the
Lok Sabha elections, are increasingly being ‘derived’ from ‘competitive for-
mat, electoral cycle, political agenda, participatory pattern and social cleavages
defi ned in state politics’. Nuclear issue hardly featured in 2009 elections as an
important electoral issue despite opposition effort to raise it in the run-up to
the election.21 CPI and the CPI (M) may not be dubbed as regional parties and much less
‘national/polity- wide’ parties, if we consider that they at present have support
base only in three states, i.e. Kerala, West Bengal and Tripura, which fall in
three different regions of India (Sr idharan, 2012: 339). This explains why even
these (and other) ‘national’/‘multistate’ parties are shaped by the specifi c social
composition, history and politics of the states they are based.22 The economic policies of the CPM-led left front governments formed in
the last decade in Kerala and West Bengal led by V. S. Achuthanandan and
Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, respectively, differed starkly. In party organisational
matters, also, there have been visible differences. One can also refer to the
divergence of opinion of the state units of the Congress in the neighbouring
states of Punjab and Haryana. Interestingly, the state leaders of the two neigh-
bouring states never campaign in each other’s states, whereas the INLD and
the SAD leaders do.23 The state units of the CPI and CPM had an electoral alliance/understand-
ing with the Congress, whereas the Kerala unit of Congress leading UDF had a
direct fi ght with the left parties in the forthcoming assembly elections, both held
simultaneously in 2016.
xxiv Ashutosh Kumar
Seventh, the pre-/post-coalitional arrangements across the
states and at the centre for electoral purposes as well as for the for-
mation of government have of late been much in practice due to
fractured mandates. As a consequence, the national/polity-wide
parties are increasingly becoming dependent on the state-level
parties for not only forming, but also running the government
smoothly at the centre, which in turn help the state parties to raise
their presence/stature and also bargaining capacity. In the states
like Bihar, Punjab, Jammu and Kashmir and Tamil Nadu at pres-
ent and in the recent past in West Bengal, Haryana and Orissa,
the state parties have been the dominant partners in the coali-
tional arrangements with national parties. In fact, this has been
the electoral ‘route’ adopted by the BJP to register its ‘presence’
in the states like Karnataka, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil
Nadu, West Bengal and Orissa, where the party had to start from
scratch, fi ghting its image of being essentially a north Indian party
of urban-/Hindi-speaking/upper castes electorates. As the Con-
gress continues to face steady decline due to the party’s inability to
continue to represent different and also confl icting socio-economic
interests, refl ected in the party’s dwindling electoral fortunes, it
has, of late, started adopting the same route in the states like West
Bengal, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, eschewing its pride in order to
remain electorally relevant.24
VWhat also underlines the rise of state as a distinct political unit is
the considerable power and infl uence being wielded by the state-
level political leaders in recent years.25 It is now these state-level
leaders, often belonging to the numerically signifi cant land-owning
peasant castes, who infl uence or make the policy decisions and
whose choices actually affect economic and political happenings in
24 Congress adopted this strategy earlier also, as it entered into an alliance
with the AIADMK in Tamil Nadu during the MGR phase as junior partner.25 Leadership as a subject has remained inexplicably under-researched, espe-
cially when it comes to the state-level leadership. The focus has been more on
the national leadership, mostly in the form of biographies of few of them like
Gandhi, Nehru and Ambedkar ( Price and Rudd, 2010: XVI).
Introduction � xxv
their respective states. These leaders, if they belong to state par-
ties, have been mainly instrumental in shaping the form and con-
tent of their party agenda/manifesto, tenor of election campaigns
and also deciding about the important matter of alliance building
and modes of distribution of patronage among the party’s social
constituencies. In post-1991 India, the state-level leaders, like
Chandrababu Naidu, Chimanbhai Patel, and S. M. Krishna, took
advantage of the new economic climate to think of innovative ways
to induce growth in the states under their command instead of
looking towards the centre for policy directions as well as for funds
like in the old ‘socialist’ days. Signifi cantly, it was in the 1990s that
the states under such dynamic leadership grew much faster than
others (Ahluwalia 2000).
Three possible explanations may be listed for the resurgence of
state leaders who have had national impact, besides of course hav-
ing their indelible imprint over the states’ politics they belong to.
First, with mode of democracy remaining ‘patrimonial’ in India,
‘patronage’ and ‘clientelism’ based on primordial identities reigns
supreme even after the election times (Chandra 2004, 2012).
The newly emergent state leaders ‘directly repre sent and ser ve the
needs, not only of territorial constituencies, but frequently the more
tangible ones of primordial groups’ (Wood 1984: 2). Patronage is
increasingly in the form of direct/visible transfer of resources to the
targeted voting constituency and is often identifi ed with not only
the party in power, but also the party leader as the benefactor. As
a result, castes/communities acting as ‘political/voting’ categories
tend to cling to the parties and leaders they consider as their ‘own’.
There is a ‘realistic’ hope among the supporters of being the benefi -
ciaries of the direct and indirect transfer of public resources as well
as protection, though the electoral choices may shift drastically in
case of ‘non-performance’ or ‘wave elections’.26
Second, given the ascendance of politics of ‘presence’ and dig-
nity, having their ‘men’ (hardly any women) in the seat of power
also brings ‘feel-good’ factor to the concerned community the
26 Linkage between patronage benefi ts or benefi ts from government policy,
voter turnout, and fi nal vote intention has been explored in Indian context by
Ahuja and Chhibber (2007).
xxvi Ashutosh Kumar
leader belongs to. It is more so if the community in question has
been historically on the margin in social terms.
Third, it also adds to the growing role of the winnable relevant
state-level parties and their bosses, even allowing them to take
on the formidable string of national leadership (Nitish Kumar and
Lalu Yadav taking on BJP national leadership in 2016 elections).
Here, one needs to consider the sheer size regarding the terri-
tory and population of some of the regional states the state lead-
ers lord over, which are comparable or even bigger than some
countries. It allows the state-level parties and their leaders, espe-
cially when they are in power, to gain access to massive ‘political
resources-organization, money, votes’. This partly explains as to
why ‘it is in the states . . . where many of India’s most ambitious
politicians concentrate their energies’, at least in the beginning of
their career, though they all aim at moving to the centre (Wood
1984: 2).27 Many of these state-level leaders manage to remain
even nationally visible, not because they are ‘national’ in their
orientation as was the case with the regional satraps in Nehruvian
India,28 but because of the coalitional arrangement at the centre
27 Unlike the political leaders of colonial India, who often ‘moved directly
into national politics’, politicians in postcolonial India have to ‘fi rst carve their
careers in state politics’. The states thus ‘are also training grounds for national
politicians’ (Weiner , 1968b: 3).28 The same argument held true even in the fi rst years of independence, as
successful state leaders (who were national, too) remained confi ned to a par-
ticular state and yet played a signifi cant role at the national level: whether it was
S. K. Sinha in Bihar, B. C. Roy in West Bengal, G. B. Pant in Uttar Pradesh,
Gopobandhu Chowdhury and BIju Patnaik in Orissa, Gopinath Bordolai in
Assam, Nijalingappa in Karnataka or Kamraj Nadar in Tamil Nadu. Like the
‘new’ state leaders, the older generation of had state-acquired national-reach
under the ‘Congress system’, though Sheikh Abdullah (National Conference),
E. M. S. Namboodiripad (CPI), respectively, from Jammu and Kashmir and
Kerala equally had national impact. This was due to their ‘skill to build coalitions
of factions or to place their own faction in a dominating position both in the
government and in the congress party simultaneously’ (Weiner , 1968b: 54).
It was also in case of some leaders on the basis of the issues they clamoured
for. With his fi rm social support base in Uttar Pradesh, Charan Singh quickly
became a national leader, presumably because he championed the farmer’s
issues across states which automatically created a space that hardly drew seri-
ous attention in the past; in a similar vein, Rammanohar Lohia’s articulation
Introduction � xxvii
and also because of the issues they champion, which receive trac-
tion in different socio-economic and political contexts, other than
the states to which they belong.
VIThere is another emergent political dimension that has started
drawing attention to the rise of states in a domain which was
hitherto reserved for the centre, as mandated by the constitution.
The borderland states’ governments, especially if led by the state-
level parties, have of late been taking keen interest in the matters
of external affairs concerning their own states. Dravidian parties
have been very vocal and have infl uenced India’s Sri Lanka policy,
even forcing the Union government to vote against Sri Lanka on
Tamil issue in the UNO. The Trinamool Congress government has
been blocking the signing of Teesta River water treaty with Ban-
gladesh. Even the treaties concluded much earlier, like the Indus
Water Treaty between India and Pakistan, has come under sharp
criticism by the state parties like the National Conference and
the PDP in Jammu and Kashmir. The emergent ‘federalisation of
foreign policy’/‘constituent diplomacy’/‘subnational diplomacy’
has been in evidence, like when then Prime Minister Manmohan
Singh visited Bangladesh, four chief ministers from northeastern
states travelled with him and more recently West Bengal Chief
Minister Mamata Banerjee accompanied Prime Minister Modi on
his trip to Bangladesh. The union government now has a sepa-
rate section for ‘liaison with state governments’ in the ministry
of external affairs (MEA) (Dossani, Rafi q and Srinidhi Vijaykumar
2006; Jenkins 2009).
of ‘anti-Congressism’ and saptakranti (seven revolutions) made him a national
leader, who was readily accepted by those seeking a political alternative to Con-
gress across various parts of India. They, thus, became ‘regional-national’ lead-
ers. It is clear that a state leader, however popular he/she is in the region, is
likely to create a national space on the basis of the issues that are likely to have
an appeal across states and social segments. The reason that state-level lead-
ers like Mayawati seem to have gained acceptance in states other than Uttar
Pradesh has to be located in the issues of social justice, she and her party raises
for the Dalits and other underprivileged sections of society, respectively.
xxviii Ashutosh Kumar
VIIEven while conceding that the constituen t states have become far
more important polit ically in the last three decades, a development
well recognised and refl ected in the burgeoning literature on state
politics, the puzzle remains as to how to explain the neglect of the
focus on states for a considerable period in the scholarly literature
on Indian politics?29 Apart from a few scholarly studies of specifi c
states, ‘the systematic studies of state politics in India remained
largely neglected’. After all, as Wood (1984: 2) has argued, ‘Political
relationship between the centre and the states was an interdepen-
dent one’ even when they were ‘regarded as little more than subor-
dinate components of a highly centralised governmental structure’.
As the essays in Wood’s (1984) volume show important political
changes happening during 1966–1984 in Indira’s India ‘occurred
fi rst at the state level and subsequently shaped political processes’
(Wood 1984: 2).
The oft-repeated argument that political analysts were deterred
by India’s enormous size and complex ity is not suffi cient to
explain the literature/analysis defi cit, as if it was so then it should
have made them hesitant to undertake broad-brush analyses
focussing on India as a unit that abounded during the period not
only in the book form, but also in journal articles. Thinking of
recent India, the ongoing processes of federalisation/localisation
of politics and economy have turned the politics of India at the
state level become far more dense and complicated. Ironically,
even as the states turn into ‘mini republics’,30 the state-specifi c
studies have surged.
Three possible explanations for the lack of focus on regional
states in the fi rst decades of independence can be discussed here.
First, the neglect of subnational-level studies in the 1950s and
1960s can be attributed to the spell of the area studies under-
taken for comparative study of ‘new’ democracies in ASAFLA
countries. Grand comparative analytical framework developed by
29 First volume on state politics in India was edited by Weiner (1968b).30 Arvind N. Das titled his classic book on the Indian state of Bihar as The
Republic of Bihar (Delhi: Penguin, 1992).
Introduction � xxix
the liberal schools of modernisation and political development
considered the ‘developing state’ as the unit of analysis. The lit-
erature neglected the fact that these countries had different histo-
ries, social structures and economies. As for the writings on Indian
politics from Marxist perspective, they remained fi rmly under
the infl uence of neo-Marxist literature that had emerged as a cri-
tique of the modernisation/development literature in the form of
underdevelopment/dependency/world systems theories. For the
dependency/world economic systems theorists, the ‘dependent/
peripheral/postcolonial’ state remained the unit for their analysis
of what they called ‘third world’.
Second, the politics and economy at the state level under the
‘Congress system’ was primarily guided by the ‘dominant centre’,
with the ‘high command’ pulling the key strings of power. Way
back then, states were ‘regarded as little more than subordinate
components of a highly centralised governmental structure’, and
there was little realisation then that they were ‘evolving as powerful
political arenas in their own right’ (Wood 1984: 2). State politics
thus appeared to the India analysts merely as ‘a poor carbon copy’
of the politics unfolding at the nation al level, dissuading them to
focus on state politics.
Third, in the then euphoria of ‘Nehruvian era’, when the whole
emphasis was on achieving ‘institution building/state building/
nation-building’, it was inevitable that politics at the state level would
be studied from the ‘national perspective’, even if at the cost of
missing the ‘esoteric details’ concerning the states.31 ‘Too much
attention to state affairs’ in the academic writings was considered
a ‘mark of parochial attachments’ (Yadav and Palshikar 2006), or
possibly a sign of academic incompetence or laziness.
31 Kothari (1970: 121) refused to ‘get lost in the esoteric details’ of India’s
constituent states, even as he aimed to study ‘the characteristic patterns and
interrelationships that inform(ed) the operation of the Indian political system as
a whole’. He, however, did refer to four factors that led to the emergence of
‘alternative patterns of regional politics’: ‘pre-independence political confi gura-
tion, the nature and strength of opposition to the Congress, kinds of intra-state
diversities that have informed the politics of the Congress party in each state,
and the differences in the social structure of various regions’.
xxx Ashutosh Kumar
VIIIThe defi ning moment for the discipline came in the form of th e
general elections held in 1967, which marked the beginning of the
drifting away of different states, at different intervals and through
different ways from the ‘Congress system’ (Kothari 1970). The
grudging recognition of the states, once considered the bane of
Indian unity, as the ‘mainstay of India’s democracy and the crucial
b uilding block of the Indian nation’ (Mitra 2006: 46) also facilitated
the emergence of state politics as a discipline in its own right.
First generation of state-specifi c academic literature c ame in
the 1970s and 1980s. Most signifi cant among them were the
publication of the academic volumes on state politics consisting
of state-specifi c chapters edited by Myron Weiner (1968b), Iqbal
Narain (1976) and John R. Wood (1984). The three volumes
included state-specifi c essays that were basically focussed on devel-
oping an analytical framework for state-level studies. F or the pur-
pose, the volumes essay writers enumerated the determinants of
the state-level political dynamics in great empirical details. For the
academics contributing to these volumes, states provided more or
less a self-contained universe (called ‘microcosm’ as well as ‘mac-
rocosm’ by Weiner 1968b: 4) within which their politics (mainly
electoral) were conducted and analysed. Based on state-specifi c
empirical details about the geopolitical l ocation, demographic
character in social terms, political history, politico-administrative
structure, changing patterns of political participation, the nature
of party system and the performance of the political regimes, the
volumes’ essays presented descriptive analyses of the nature and
dynamics of the political processes in the particular states. Employ-
ing political sociological approach, which was hugely inspired by
the modernisation/development theory literature on developing
societies, the essays in the volumes essentially privileged the ‘politi-
cal’ while completely ignoring the ‘economic’.
The essays in Rao and Frankel’s edited two volumes (1990) on
state politics focussed on the historical patterns of political trans-
formation taking place in particular states, as traditional power
structure in rural In dia started being contested by the middle castes
due to agrarian transition, both in terms of land holding pattern as
well as introduction of market. While adopting political economy
approach, the essays explored varying relationship between caste
Introduction � xxxi
and class in different states, especially trying to unravel the prob-
lematic of ‘the decline of dominance’ of the traditional elites in the
rural hinterlands.
Almost all the essays in the four edited volumes, though empiri-
cally very rich, studiously avoided employing a comparative inter-
state framework or developing a theoretical/analytical framework
that could be employed for their kind of empirical analyses.32 Com-
monalities, if any, discernable in the nature of emerging trends in
the state politics, were not taken up for much discussion, whereas
the distinctive features received attention in the studies.
The above volumes’ contributions lie in providing a wealth of
information and bringing about the hitherto hidden specifi cities of
the states that paved the ground for analytical studies that came
after. The essay writers in these volumes, while focussing on a sin-
gle state as a unit for their political analysis, also had an advantage
of controlling for institutional characteristics, which allowed them
to look closely into the way the processes of identity formation
had started taking place, though they were still in fl uid form. As
is evident from the frequent citations of these essays in the future
writings, their accounts/insights remained helpful as background
material for tracing the way these identities have surged over the
years and acquired solidity.
In defence of the editors of the above mentioned four path-
breaking and very ambitious volumes, it may be mentioned that,
though they invited the state specialists to write state-specifi c
papers, they did aim at developing a common theoretical frame-
work that could have helped in the comparative analysis. Weiner
(1968b: 30), in his introduction, had desired that the essays in the
volume though being state specifi c should have attempted to ‘ana-
lyze and compare the politic al processes of selected states within
32 Church (1984: 231) did contribute a comparative paper based on seven
states (clubbed in three pairs) comparison in Wood’s (1984) edited volume.
Writing about the ‘participation crisis’ in ‘Indira Gandhi’s India’, the Church
argued that the ‘small and widely dispersed’ lower castes comprising of the
‘marginal farmers, sharecroppers and landless labourers from low status agricul-
tural castes together with the traditional service and artisan castes’ were going
to be ‘the last stratum to be brought into politics’ — an observation that still
holds true.
xxxii Ashutosh Kumar
the Indian Union’. Narain (1976: xvii) was much more emphatic to
the need to explore the possibility of ‘evolving an analytic frame-
work for the study of state politics in India’, even when he recog-
nised the diffi culties related with such effort. What came in the way
of his effort to develop a ‘theory of state politics in India’, besides
the obvious limitation of the approach adopted, was in his own
words ‘the natural tendency among scholars to be drawn more to
the unique than to common aspects of political reality in the states
of India’ (Narain 1976: 591).
IXThe ‘second generation’ of scholarly works concerning state politics
have been defi nitely a step forward, as they are comparatively much
richer in terms o f not only providing empirical details, but also in
analysing the political processes that unfold at the state level. They
also show a defi nitive purpose as most take up one particular them
or a set of related research questions. Their concrete analysis is
used to underpin larger theoretical arguments that can be applied
elsewhere in India, something that was not even attempted ear-
lier. Some of the recent writings would include the ones authored
by Hasan (1989), Baruah (1999), Subramanian (1999), Chadha
Behera (2000), Kumar (2000), Singh (2000), Prakash (2002), Wid-
malm (2002), Yagnik and Sheth (2005), Kudaisya (2006), Desai
(2007), Pai (2010), Jha and Pushpendra (2014), Singh (2015b),
Chowdhary (2016).
Amon g the articl es , one can easily distinguish a s et of aca-
demic writings t hat have come rel ated to electi on studies b ased on
CSDS-Lokniti conduc ted national el ection studies (NES) survey
data, mostly published in the Economic and Political Weekly.33
These ‘theoretically sensitive studies’, neither in the genre of ‘mind-
less empiricism’ nor in the form of ‘impressionistic theorisations’
33 Refer three special issues of EPW. One was on National Election Study
2004, Vol. 39, No 51, 18–24 December 2004; Vol. 44, No. 39, 26 Septem-
ber 2009; Vol. 49, No. 39, 27 September 2014. Yet another was on State
Parties, National Ambitions, Vol. 39, Nos. 14 and15, 3 April 2004. These
essays after revision were subsequently included in two edited volumes (S hastri,
Suri and Yadav, 2009; S uri, Yadav and Palshikar, 2014).
Introduction � xxxiii
(Nigam and Yadav 1999), have been enabling in understanding
of the larger forces and long-term changes taking place in the
state party system and electoral politics (Palshikar 2004: 147 8).
A reading of these essays reveal not only the basic determinants
of electoral politics in the state like the demographic composi-
tion and nature of ethnic/communa l/caste cleavages as well as
other socio-political cleavages like the regional, rural-urban and
caste-class linkages, but also present an analysis of the electoral
outcomes highlighting differences in major issues raised in manifes-
tos, emergent trends, alliance formations, seat adjustments, selec-
tion of candidates and campaigns and so on. The survey data helps
the authors in explaining the opinions and attitudes of the elector-
ates having different age, sex, caste, community, class and educa-
tion profi les. Going beyond merely the journalistic task of ‘counting
the votes’/‘profi ling the electoral behaviour’/‘assessing the gain of
shift in support base’/‘predicting future political reconfi gurations/
realignments’, these essays do refer to the critical questions like: Do
the voters have any real choice? Does the electoral politics have a
real impact over public policies in relations to the substantive social
and economic issues?
The above articles, written over a period of one and half decade
covering different state elections, confi rm extreme fl uidity in the
nature of electoral permutations and combinations that come to
assume power at the central or state levels. They, however, also
reveal that despite the state-specifi c nature of electoral politics and
the emergence of distinct identities, emerging trends in Indian poli-
tics do reveal certain commonalities across the country, that is the
presence of electoral regions either as historically constituted or
merely administrative ones; the emergence of electoral bipolarities;
and last, the politicisation and mobilisation of the ‘old, received, but
hitherto dormant identities’ (Kumar 2003: 3146).
Besides the state-specifi c commentaries, there are also other
important volumes/essays which do attempt to develop a coher-
ent and a systematic theoretical framework based on N ES data to
make sense of the nature of electoral democracy in India in a com-
parative mode. Not only the social support base of polity-wide as
well as state parties came up for comparison, but also the evolving
nature of party systems in different states facilitating the typology
of the party systems in the context of India came up for discus-
sion underlining the exceptionalism of India’s electoral democracy
xxxiv Ashutosh Kumar
(Yadav 1996; Chhibber 1999; Mitra and Singh 1999; Varshney
2000; Palshikar 2004; Suri 2005; Heath, Glouharova and Heath
2006; Yadav and Palshikar 2006, 2008, 2009). In the same Lokn-
iti genre of st udies falls the volumes edi ted by Hansen and Jaffrelot
(2001) an d Roy and Wallac e (2003, 2007).
While individual state-specifi c studies, whether in for the b ook or
articles, are by themselves important and useful, there have not yet
been many efforts to adopt c omparative method.
XWh y the advantage of comparative method was not adequately
explored may be attributed to the ‘segmented nature of polity’ (sev-
eral patterns of state politics) as well as extreme fl uidity in the nature
of state politics.34 Terming any attempt to compare the states as
‘unviable task’, Wood argued that ‘all of the Indian states are special
cases, each possessing particular historical, geographical, cultural,
or economic conditions’(1984: 16, 6). Arguably, any attempt to
take up interstate analysis is much tougher in recent India as because
of the ongoing ‘de-centring’ of India’s polity and economy. Each
state is becoming like a ‘ mini democracy’ with political processes
taking distinct patterns, making it diffi cult to compare or develop a
general theoretical framework (Jenkins 2004: 3).
However, during the period, there was also a distinct view gain-
ing much traction, at least in the realm of ideas that there were
grounds on which the states in India could be considered co mpa-
rable. The need to contextualise state-level political developments,
larger cross-state and national contexts were recognised as power-
ful tools to understand and analyse the emergent political and eco-
nomic processes. The varied experiences of the states in terms of
level of political and economic processes and outcomes prompted
the need to look beyond the nation-state and focus on the states as
the units for comparative analysis. Narain (1976: xviii) had referred
34 Writing in the late 1970s, Narain (1976: xvi) referred to the fact that one
had ‘to deal here not with one pattern but with several patterns of state politics
which (were) emerging, if at all, through none too steady pull and swing of poli-
tics at the central and state levels’.
Introduction � xxxv
to the presence of an ‘integrated constitutional framework’ and also
the ‘federal system’ as providing for the ‘institutional determinants’
that could ‘serve as a basis of comparison between one pattern of
state politics and another’ and ‘lead to the emergence of a possibly
theory of state politics in India’ (Narain 1976: xvi)
Atul Kohli (1987), the trendsetter among the comparativists in
India, suggested that India constituted a ‘laboratory for comparative
political analysis’, in the sense that states are all within the same
‘framework of Indian federalism’, and therefore present ideal type
conditions for ‘controlled experiments’. Rob Jenkins (2004: 3) has
also referred to the ‘robust form of federalism’ that enables the
political analysts to undertake a comparative analysis of the politics
of India’s ‘mini democracies’ that have ‘almost identical i nstitutional
infrastructures’ and who operate under similar ‘economic policy
framework and the legal protections enshrined in the Indian consti-
tution’. Desai (2007: 22–23) has suggested that India presents ‘an
ideal ground for comparative analysis, for holding constant certain
factors such as its position in the sphere of international relations,
geography, ecology, religion and e arly political formations’. While
emphasising the autonomy of state politics from national politics,
Yadav and Palshikar (2008: 14–22) present a ‘preliminary frame’
for interstate comparative analysis by presenting the critical issues
for enquiry in the form of what they call the ‘ten theses’ on state
politics in India. Subsequently, Palshikar and Deshpande (2009)
refer to emergent common institutional characteristics post 73rd
and 74th constitutional amendment that allows for the studies
related to local rural and urban governmental bodies in terms of
understanding as to how local democratic politics works or how and
why these institutions have varying performances across the states.
How does making comparison help? What can be the support-
ing arguments in favour of comparative method? First, while con-
ceding the fact that studies focussing on a single state’s politics
that has been under the same administrative system, if taken up
seriously, have their distinct advantage in terms of allowing much
more controlled experiments, sifting through much thicker empir-
ical details and capturing the nuances of the given state’s politics
in all its social and spatial aspects. However, to learn about the
validity of the ‘exceptionalism’ argument that emerge due to the
spatially uneven nature of the processes having national impact
as they unfold across the states, one needs to compare the state
xxxvi Ashutosh Kumar
with other states (Palshikar and Deshpande 2009; Tillin 2013b:
235; Singh 2015b: 16).
Second, comparative method whenever deployed for the interstate
analysis has helped in looking for the commonalities and differences
in the politics of two or more comparable s tates, and then armed with
their fi ndings, refl ec t and theorise on a broader canvass to make them
relevant and much more useful for not only India studies, but also the
analysts focussing on different but comparable set of states.35 Since
comparative method allows for larger number of case studies to be
undertaken, the research fi ndings/causal explanations/theory building
exercises do receive greater credence/acceptance/legitimacy.
Third, any such theoretical framework that would emerge from
interstate or intra-state study would not only allow the comparativ-
ist, undertaking the study of a larger number of states, to reframe
the existing debate, but also interrogate successfully the cogency
of conventional formulations, often derived from an analysis that
took the nation-state as the unit of analysis, some of them going
back to the 1960s and 1960s, yet being considered relevant for
contemporary India. To suggest that cross-state study enables the
researcher to theorise about national politics, however, is somewhat
complicated because there are important nuanced ways in which
the whole is more than a sum of its parts. Nevertheless, it has its
methodological advantage over the analysis that is much more intui-
tive than based on concrete studies across the country.
Fourth, usage of comparative method naturally allow for usage of
multiple research techniques36 as well as involvement of analysts from
35 Comparativists in their studies have taken up varied research questions as
to why some political regimes are more successful in combating poverty or are
better governed or more successful in the implementation of MNREGA or how
movement politics makes a difference even in Left-ruled sates.36 Singh (2015b: 16–22), enquiring into the causal explanation of subnational
variations in the nature and outcome of social welfare policy with focus on educa-
tional and health within India in the 20th century, uses mixed method combining
qualitative and quantitative methods through ‘a nested research design in which
the intensive within and cross state case study analysis of fi ve states is nested in
a statistical cross-state analysis of all Indian provinces’. She argues that Indian
provinces/states that witnessed the ‘emergence of a shared sub-national solidarity,
or subnationalism, were more likely to institute and maintain a progressive social
policy and, relatedly, witness better developmental outcomes’ (2015b : 2, 5).
Introduction � xxxvii
different disciplines of social sciences, which helps as the compara-
tivists are most likely to stumble upon unexpected/hitherto unex-
plored research questions and fi ndings.37
Fifth, the assumption underlying comparative studies is that units
considered are selected in a manner that minimises biases and allow
for usage of more controlled variables. Most of the literature in this
category takes up the research questions related to one thematic area
and select purposely (and not randomly) the states as the sampling
units to keep the study focussed and also make comparison possible.38
XIWhat should be the focus of what may be dubbed as the ‘third gen-
eration of literature’ then? This is our argument – that there is a crit-
ical need for the comparativists to go beyond both the nation-state/
37 The essays written by the researchers from different disciplines in Tillin,
Deshpande, Kailash’s co-edited volume (2 016: 2) explore ‘the politics of wel-
fare across Indian states in the context of rapid economic growth, and against
the backdrop of new social legislation introduced by India’s central and state
governments led by many different political parties’. Using ‘a set of paired com-
parisons’, the essays show the linkage between the electoral politics and policy
processes as they unfold across the states (Tillin , 2013b: 238).38 The essays in Jenkins’ edited volume (2 004), for example, employ
two-state comparative method to take up four sets of thematic areas, namely
economic policy making, subaltern politicisation, civic engagement and political
leadership studies. D esai (2007: 1, 22) takes up the research question as to ‘why
did anti-colonial party-led movements, and later governments, despite the strong
promise of redistribution and justice attached to these movements, reach an
impasse in delivering substantive democracy’? To address this question, she takes
up a comparative analysis of Kerala as a ‘nominally successful case’, comparing
it with the princely states as well as post-independence states. Similarly, Pal-
sh ikar and Deshpande (2009) suggested a research agenda of studying the poli-
tics of Maharashtra while situating it in the ‘larger context of the all-India’. The
two routes suggested by them to do it was either to take up two-state analysis by
comparing ‘those dimensions that fi nd a comparable resonance’, or alternatively
to take up a theme of Indian politics that has relevance/comparability for both
Maharashtra as well as the state selected to compare with it. The writings, based
on interstate comparative approach that have come up since the momentous
decade of 1990s, include that of Kohli (19 87), Mawdsley (1998), Harriss ( 1999),
Chandra ( 2005), Sinha (2005), Yagnik an d Sheth (2005), Jayal (2006a), Mitra
(20 06), Singh (20 15b, 2015a) an d Tillin, D eshpande and Kailash (2016).
xxxviii Ashutosh Kumar
state-nation as well as states and to focus now on the subregions
within the states as relatively autonomous units of analyses. A com-
parative study may be undertaken to compare two or more com-
parable subregions within a particular state or/and in more than
one state, especially the ones which straddle the states’ boundaries
(Kumar 2011).
States in India, even if small ones or reorganised on linguistic/
cultural/ethnic basis, have always have had geographically, linguisti-
cally, culturally and historically constituted distinct subregions within
them. Invariably, a partic ular subregion has wielded more political
and economic power than others, a fact recognised by Narain in the
1960s itself (1976: 592).39
Over the years, the subregions have acquired much political
salience as democracy has widened and deepened in India (Cohen
and Ganguly 2014: 314–15).40 These subregions have started
showing sharpened ethnic/communal/caste as well as ot her
social-political cleavages like the regional and rural-urban ones,
unevenness of public and private investments, growth and de velop-
ment and unequal access to political power (Sathyamurthy 2000:
33).41 The emergent subregional consciousness from a perceived
sense of discrimination at the hands of the people and the leader-
ship from the stronger subregion that has been accentuated with
the growing spatial economic disparity under the market economy
that believes in ‘betting on the strong’ strategy have found expres-
sion in the demand for the new states, providing a fertile ground
for comparative research in studying the shifting bases of such
demands across the different subregions. Most of these subregions
have been ‘poorer with more deeply entrenched caste hierarchies,
39 Narain was hopeful about the emergence of secularised class politics as an
antidote to forces of social fragmentation.40 Arguing that the foundation of the regions are based on different criteria,
and hence they differ in their features, Cohn (1971: 35) suggests a typology
of regions, i.e. historical regions, linguistic regions, cultural regions, structural
regions.41 While arguing that states have taken the form of political communities,
Yadav and Palshikar (2008) concede that it ‘has not suppressed the rise of
sub-regional consciousnesses’ as ‘whenever economic grievance and availabil-
ity of a political instrument have combined, the sub-region constitutes a more
salient basis of local politics’.
Introduction � xxxix
a faster growing population and overall have fared less well in terms
of human development’ (Tillin 2013a: 3).
Yet another fallout of the new economic policies has been the
emergence of distinct ‘economic regions’ like national capital region
(NCR) straddling the state/union territories’ boundaries as well as
the emergence of the ‘happening’ c ities like Bangalore, Chennai
and Hyderabad as the economic mega centres, inviting the intercity
comparison within the country or beyond. Then, the sleepy mega
cities, like Kolkata with their huge population and culture, develop
their own distinct political culture and choices. Recently, in case of
assembly elections in West Bengal, one witnessed Kolkata being
treated by analysts as a distinct electoral region in its own right.
Advantages of focussing on subregions are apparent, when
we consider the fact that there is a dearth of academic research
employing interstate/intra-state regional perspective in a com-
parative mode. This may be due to the fl uid nature of these sub-
regions as many of these are more of administrative constructs,
like in Haryana where districts of late have emerged as political/
electoral regions and also many subregions are geographical and
economic but not yet political in nature, like the NCR adjoining Del-
hi’s neighbouring states. Thus, unlike states which have emerged
now as a stable political unit, with the people also identifying them-
selves with their own states (even in the case of a ‘left-over’ state
like Madhya Pradesh) after more than four decades have passed
since reorganisation, many subregions are steadily undergoing the
process of becoming closely identifi able political units. For address-
ing this challenge of dealing with different forms of subregions, the
researchers from across the social sciences discipline, as in the
case of interstate/two-state analysis, need to go for methodological
pluralism/innovation. In fact, in such kind of research lacking con-
trolling variables, experimenting with different traditions of research
methods may be considered advantageous in fi nally zeroing in on
the most appropriate combination to solve the substantive and con-
textualised puzzles that comparativists are bound to confront on the
ground. Particularities shall be too many compared to state-bound
frames of analyses that one adopt in state-level or cross-state/
two-state analyses.
The comparative advantage of this mode of research lies in the
fact that focus on subregions would allow the comparativists to
undertake a much deeper study of the micro-level mechanisms at
xl Ashutosh Kumar
work in a state as decentring process continues. Subregions becom-
ing distinctive analytical categories would automatically ensure that
the smaller pictures/narratives are not lost amidst the larger ones.
It is especially true for a large state like Uttar Pradesh or Rajasthan,
home to several subregions that can be traced to the Mughal period
or even before.
Reading different state-specifi c case studies in a comparative
mode (intra-state as well as interstate) does help in understanding
and explaining the variations in the state-level policies and the lead-
ership response besides capturing the emergent ‘big picture’ at all
India level. One can combine the interstate analysis to intra-state
comparative analysis for the study of state/regional politics.42 Inter-
estingly, there have been a few studies that compare the politics of
the specifi c regions in India with that of a region of another coun-
try, mainly focussing on the identity-based politics (Sumantra Bose
1999).
XIIHowever, a note of caution is required here. For a comparativist, the
task of comparing disparate political phenomena, while attempting
an interstate or intra-state analysis, in such a diverse and therefore
complex polity like in India i s always going to be a herculean task.
It is thus not suggested that one should take up comparisons for
the sake of it. Comparative research may be attempted only if the
research questions demand it. Adopting a highly localised approach
to bring out regional/subregional distinctiveness invariably involves
an in-depth study of an entire range of factors that make a political
situation in the way it exists. A study of the micro-level mechanisms,
which are shaping political actions and processes of mobilisation at
local level, has therefore now become imperative for an understand-
ing of the internal dynamics of Indian politics and economy as well
as for drawing the theoretical conclusions on a larger canvas.
42 Jenkins, Kennedy and Mukhopadhaya’s edited volume ( 2014) has essays
covering 11 states where SEZ have been established, and the essay focussing
on each state takes up the comparative study of two SEZ, which belong to two
different subregions of the state.
Introduction � xli
To avoid oversimplifi ed lazy generalisation, a comparativist work-
ing on states or subregions within them would do well to undertake
issue-particular concrete analysis of two or more subregions across/
within two or more states, and then look for the differences and
not merely to add up the similarities while theorising. This is our
argument that the time has come to take up comparative studies,
if the ‘million mutinies’ happening in the democratic space of India
have to be captured. To reiterate, this, however, does not mean
that one only focus on state/substate/cross-state-level comparative
studies and neglect the studies that focus on the nation-state or
attempt cross nation-states, which have their own advantages. The
basic objective of both kinds of studies, after all, is to explain the
national-level politics.
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Yadav, Y. and S. Palshikar (2006). ‘From Hegemony to Convergence: Party
System and Electoral Politics in the Indian States, 1952–20 02’, in
deSouza, Peter Ronald and Sridharan, E. (Eds.). India’s Political Parties,
New Delhi: Sage, 74–115.
Yadav, Y. and S. Palshikar (20 08). ‘Ten Theses on State Politics in India’, Seminar,
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yada v_&_s_palshkar.htm (accessed on 14 February 2016), 14–22.
Yadav, Y. and S. Palshikar (2009). ‘Principal State Level Contests and Deriva-
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Introduction — Rethinking State Politics in India: Regions
within RegionsASHUTOSH KUMAR
Recent India has been witness to the onset of the democratic processes that have resulted in the reconfiguration of its politics and economy. Among these processes, most significant has been the assertion of identity politics. There have been struggles around the assertiveness and conflicting claims of the identity groups, and of struggles amongst them, often fought out on lines of region, religion, language (even dialect), caste and community. These struggles have found expres-sions in the changed mode of electoral representation that has brought the local/regional into focus with the hitherto politically dormant groups and regions finding voices. Emergence of a more genuinely representative democracy has led to the sharpening of the line of distinction between or among the identity groups and the regions.
The process has received an impetus with the introduction of the new economic policies as the marginal groups as well as the peripheral regions increasingly feel left out with the centre gradually withdrawing from the social and economic sector and market economy privileging the privileged, be it the social groups or the regions.1 Coastal states, linguistic ‘minority’ states, mineral rich states along with the high income ‘progressive’ states have benefited much more from the flow of foreign as well as indigenous private investment in contrast to the ‘laggard’ states having peripheral locations, disturbed law and order situation, poor economic and social infrastructure, unmanageable dis-parate territory and huge population lacking in terms of cultural capital, more often than not, belonging to linguistic ‘majority’ (Kurian 2000; Ahluwalia 2000; Kohli 2006; Sengupta and Kumar 2008). Regional inequalities within the states in terms of income and consumption have been widening. Inter-state as well as intra-state disparities have grown
1 Few peripheral regions, which are the hotspots of economic reform, are in the throes of the people’s movement, as the locals feel they are being taken for a ride by both the government and the multinationals in the name of development.
Introduction to the First Edition — Rethinking State Politics in India: Regions within Regions
2 Ashutosh Kumar
faster in the post-reforms period.2 What may be called the ‘secession of the rich’,3 even the rich states, attracting huge private investments and registering impressive growth, have started resenting the continued de-pendence of relatively underdeveloped states on the central revenues transferred to them. While the relatively developed states complain of ‘reverse’ discrimination, the peripheral regions of the some of these states complain of being victim of ‘internal colonialism’.
The above processes have significantly contributed to the regional-isation of polity with the regional states emerging as the prime arenas where politics and economy actually unfold.4 There has been a marked increase in the capacity of the states to influence their own development performance as the idea of ‘shared sovereignty’ takes over (Bagchi 2008: 45). Development or not, it is now the state level vernacular elites, more often than not belonging to the hitherto dor-mant identity groups in post-Mandal India, who influence or make the critical policy decisions and whose choices actually affect economic and political happenings in their respective states and also at the centre while participating in the coalition governments that have become regular feature in the last seven Lok Sabha elections. This has led to the decline of the politics of patronage, prevalent during the ‘Congress system’. Regional/state level parties now negotiate with the dominant coalition-making national party for crucial portfolios that allows them to bring in investments in their regions or they simply
2 Calling the post-reform period ‘a period of growth with inequality’, Nagaraj has observed that the so-called growth of the Indian economy ‘has favoured urban India, organised sector, richer states and property owners, against rural India, unorganised sector, poorer states and wage earners ... India’s growth process during the last two decades does not seem to have been a virtuous one — it has polarised the economy’ (Nagaraj 2000: 2831).
3 ‘If the growth prospects of the nation get tied to the degree of success in enticing direct foreign investments, then the richer regions feel that they would be better placed in this regard if they acted on their own, unencumbered by the burden of belonging to the same country as the poor, violent, crime-infested regions’ (Patnaik 2000: 153).
4 In electoral terms, there have been two indicators that stand out among others, in the context of the regionalisation argument. One, the representation of the state-level parties in the legislative bodies has increased to the level that it appears that the national polity is little more than the aggregation of the regional. Two, the national parties have increasingly adopted state-specific electoral campaigns and policies.
Introduction � 3
bargain for the better financial altlocation for their own states/regions in return of their political support even when they impart outside support. The electorates, therefore, do not hesitate any longer to vote for the parties pursuing aggressive regional agenda for fear of neglect of their region.
A study of the micro-level mechanisms, which are shaping political actions and processes of mobilisation at local level, has therefore now become imperative for an understanding of the internal dynamics of Indian politics and economy as well as for drawing the theoretical conclusions on a larger canvas. There has been a growing realisation that it is at the state level that the ‘future analyses of Indian politics must concentrate’ (Chibber and Nooruddin 1999).
Greater level of recognition of state as the primary unit of analysis has led to the emergence of state politics as an autonomous discipline, whose study is now being considered essential for a nuanced under-standing of Indian politics. Ironically, the newfound exalted status of the discipline is in sharp contrast to its earlier dismal state not long ago when it was treated merely as an appendage of the discipline of Indian politics (read ‘national politics’).
The lack of autonomy of the discipline of state politics at the time could be primarily attributed to three factors.
First, within the grand comparative analytical framework developed by the liberal schools of political modernisation and political development to study the developing societies that dominated the ‘third world’ political theory, the newly independent nation states were considered as the prime movers in terms of economy and politics and therefore were taken as the fundamental units of analysis. In the quest of reaching about a general theory that would have near universal application (recall stage theory of growth), the constituent units within the nation state and their historical specificities were completely ignored. Quite a few Indian political theorists, under the spell of the American Political Science Association, followed suit. As for the Marxist writings on Indian politics, it remained under the spell of neo-Marxist critique in the form of underdevelopment/dependency/world systems that again undertook the ‘post-colonial state’ as the unit of analysis (Chatterjee 2010: 6–7).
Second, due to the prevalence of what used to be called the ‘Congress system’, the politics and economy (refer the development planning model) at the state level at the time was very much guided by the ‘dominant centre’, with the ‘high command’ pulling the key
4 Ashutosh Kumar
strings of power. State politics thus appeared merely as ‘a poor copy’ of the politics unfolding at the national level.
Third, in the then euphoria of ‘Nehruvian era’, when the whole emphasis was on achieving ‘institution building/ state building/ nation-building’ under the leadership of a nationalist and modernising state elite that commanded tremendous degree of confidence and legitimacy, it was inevitable that politics at the state level would be studied from the ‘national perspective’ even if at the cost of missing the ‘esoteric details’ concerning the regional states (Yadav and Palshikar 2006). Arguably, there was an all-pervading feeling shared by the intelligentsia of the time that ‘too much attention to state affairs’ was a ‘mark of parochial attachments’.5
The defining moment for the discipline came in the form of the general elections held in 1967 which marked the beginning of the veering away of different states, at different points of time and through different ways, from the ‘Congress system’ (Kothari 1970). The grudging recognition of the states, once considered the bane of Indian unity, as the ‘mainstay of India’s democracy and the crucial building block of the Indian nation’ (Mitra 2006: 46), also facilitated the emergence of state politics as a discipline in its own right. Consequently, the next two decades that followed saw the publication of the volumes on state politics edited by Weiner (1968), Narain (1976), Wood (1984) and Frankel and Rao (1990).
Falling in to what one may consider now as belonging to somewhat ‘outmoded’ genre of writings, the first three edited volumes, mentioned above, included state-specific articles that were basically focused on enumerating the determinants of the state level political dynamics in great empirical details. For the scholars contributing to these volumes, regional states provided more or less self-contained universe (called ‘microcosm’ as well as ‘macrocosm’ by Weiner 1968: 4) within which their politics (mainly electoral) were conducted and analysed. Based on state-specific empirical details about the political history, the politico-administrative structure, changing patterns of political participation, the nature of party system and the performance of the political regimes; the articles presented descriptive analyses of the nature and dynamics of the political processes in the particular states. Employing a political
5 Significantly, Weiner justified the need to undertake ‘political research’ on Indian states by suggesting that it was at the state level that the ‘conflicts among castes, religious groups, tribes, and linguistic groups and factions are played out’ and which hampers efforts ‘to modernize’ (Weiner 1968: 6).
Introduction � 5
sociological approach, which was hugely inspired by the modernisation theory literature, the articles essentially privileged the ‘political’ while relatively ignoring the ‘economic’.
The two volumes edited by Rao and Frankel, however, belonged to a somewhat different genre, much more in tune with the then emer-gent trend in the study of state politics, as the articles focused on the historical patterns of political transformation taking place in particular states. The varying relationship between caste and class in the states, especially in terms of land question, came up in several articles for theoretical inquiries while trying to unravel the problematic of ‘the decline of dominance’ of the traditional elites in the rural hinterlands. Limiting their analysis to a specific state, the articles in the two volumes could not explore the variation in intensity of the caste-based cleavage structures across the states as the other backward caste (OBC)/middle peasant caste coalition had emerged more powerfully in some states in comparison to other states, especially in the northern Indian states at the time of writing those articles. About the pattern of politicisation and mobilisation of the peasant and the OBC castes across the regional states of India, an edited volume by Omvedt (1982) again has state-specific articles that fail to take advantage of systematic comparative analysis.
In tenor with the then prevailing trend, all the edited volumes, men-tioned above and others, contained articles that focused on one state. There was hardly any effort on the part of the contributors to use their state-specific studies for building up a larger argument about the emergent nature of Indian politics across the states. Almost all of them studiously avoided employing a comparative inter-state framework or developing a theoretical framework for their empirical analyses.6
6 The volume edited by John Wood (1984) did have a comparative article by Roderick Church. Based on a study of the emergent caste politics of the states of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, West Bengal, Kerala, Karnataka, Maharashtra and Gujarat, Church came up with an argument that is relevant even today. He argued that at the time, among the different landowning twice-born upper castes, the farming middle/intermediate castes, the landless agricultural as well as the service and artisan lower castes and the Scheduled Castes, it was the lower castes, numerically weak and dispersed and sandwiched between the middle and the ex-untouchable castes which were facing resistance and even an attempt at co-option of their leadership by the upper and middle ‘dominant’ castes whenever they sought a larger share in political processes. Church argued, with a sense of prescience, that the ‘lower castes are the last stratum to be brought into politics’ (Church 1984: 231).
6 Ashutosh Kumar
How can one explain the marked reluctance on the part of the political analysts to employ the comparative framework while under-taking the study of state politics? The ‘segmented nature of polity’ and variegated nature of society besides extreme fluidity in the nature of state politics were often cited as the two main reasons as to why the advantages of comparative studies across the states could not be adequately explored (Pai 2000: 2).7 Also, compared to national politics, local politics was considered as limited in nature. Commonalities, if any, discernable in the nature of emerging trends in the state politics, were ignored as only the distinctive features received attention.
Attempts to employ comparative method in the arena of state politics could gain some momentum as late as in the late 1980s. Kohli (1987), one of the earliest comaparativists, argued that India constituted a ‘laboratory for comparative political analysis’ in the sense that despite having many states with quite diverse politics, the fact remains that these states are within the same ‘framework of Indian federalism’ and therefore present ideal type conditions for ‘controlled experiments’.
The burgeoning literature that has come up on the subject since then can broadly be categorised into three categories. The first category would include studies that focus in depth on a single state, but use the concrete analysis to underpin larger theoretical arguments that can be applied elsewhere in India, something that was not attempted earlier. Most of these studies, however, are not comparative in nature. The writings that stand out include those of Singh (1992), Subramanian (1999), Hasan (1998), Baruah (1999), Kumar (2000a), Behera (2001), Prakash (2002), Jaffrelot (2003) and Kudaisya (2006).
Studies on the nature of electoral politics at the state level based on CSDS–Lokniti- conducted national election studies (NES) survey data would fall into second category. These ‘theoretically sensitive studies’ are distinguishable from most of the writings on state electoral politics, which are either in the genre of ‘mindless empiricism’ or are in the
7 Writing in the late 1970s, Narain referred to the fact that we had ‘to deal here not with one pattern but with several patterns of state politics which (were) emerging, if at all, through none too steady pull and swing of politics at the central and state levels’ (Narain 1976: xvi).
Introduction � 7
form of ‘impressionistic theorisations’ (Nigam and Yadav 1999). These academic efforts have been enabling in the sense that they aim at an understanding of the larger forces and long-term changes taking place in the state party system and electoral politics during the ‘third phase of democratisation in India’ (Palshikar 2004: 1478).
A reading of the state-specific articles in this genre, written by the Lokniti network members for Economic and Political Weekly,8 reveal not only the basic determinants of electoral politics in the state like the demographic composition and nature of ethnic/communal/caste cleavages as well as other socio-political cleavages like the regional, rural–urban and caste–class linkages, but also present an analysis of the electoral outcomes highlighting differences in major issues raised in manifestos, emergent trends, alliance formations, seat adjustments, selection of candidates and campaigns and so on. The survey data9
helps the authors explain the opinions and attitudes of the electorates having different age, sex, caste, community, and class and education profiles. Going beyond merely the journalistic task of ‘counting the votes’/‘profiling the electoral behaviour’/‘assessing the gain of shift in support base’/‘predicting future political reconfigurations/realignments’, these articles do refer to the critical questions like: Did the voters have any real choice? Did the electoral politics have a real impact over public policies in relations to the substantive social and economic issues?
8 Refer two special issues of Economic and Political Weekly: one on the ‘National Election Study 2004’, 39 (51), 18–24 December 2004 and the other on ‘State Parties, National Ambitions’, 39 (14 & 15), 3–9 April 2004. Some of these articles have been included in an anthology of political parties (deSouza and Sridharan 2006) and in an edited volume that includes updated and revised versions of the articles along with three general articles providing the context of the analysis of state politics in India (Shastri et al. 2009). Economic and Political Weekly, in a special volume on the state elections, 2007–2008, published a set of state-specific commentaries on the Assembly elections accompanied by an article by Yogendra Yadav and Suhas Palishkar that sets the context and provides an overview for comparative analysis (XLIV [6], 7–13 February 2009).
9 Some of the key information and analysis from the CSDS-NES data collection and surveys, in particular, appeared in a special issue of the Journal of Indian School of Political Economy, XV (1 & 2), 2003.
8 Ashutosh Kumar
The articles mentioned above, written over a period of one and half decades and covering different state elections, confirm the extreme fluidity in the nature of electoral permutations and combinations that come to assume power at the central or state levels. They, however, also reveal that despite the region-specific nature of electoral politics and the emergence of distinct identities, emerging trends in Indian politics do reveal certain commonalities across the country, i.e., presence of electoral regions either as historically constituted or merely administrative ones; the emergence of electoral bipolarities; and the politicisation and mobilisation of the ‘old, received, but hitherto dormant identities’ (Kumar 2003: 3146).
Besides the state specific commentaries, there are also other im-portant volumes/articles which do attempt to develop a coherent and a systematic theoretical framework based on NES data to make sense of the nature of electoral democracy in India (Yadav 1996; Chibber 1999; Mitra and Singh 1999; Palshikar 2004; Suri 2005; Yadav and Palshikar 2006, 2008, 2009;10 Heath et al. 2006; Varshney 2007). In the same Lokniti genre of studies falls the volumes edited by Hansen and Jaffrelot (2001) and Roy and Wallace (2003 and 2007).
In the third category would fall the studies that employ the inter-state comparative method to look for the commonalities and dif-ferences in the politics of two or more comparable states, and then armed with their findings, reflect and theorise on a broader canvass. These studies are based on the assumption that the regional states in India ‘provide an ideal environment for the purpose of a comparative analysis, provided that the units are autonomous and homogeneous for the purpose of the study and the cases are selected in a manner that minimizes biases. Most of the literature in this category takes up the research questions related to one thematic area like the issue of governance or ethnicity and select purposely (and not randomly) the states as the sampling units to keep the study focused and also make comparison possible. The writings, based on inter-state com-parative approach that have come up since the momentous decade
10 While emphasising the autonomy of state politics from national politics, Yadav and Palshikar (2008: 14–22) present a ‘preliminary frame’ for inter-state comparative analysis by presenting the critical issues for enquiry in the form of what they call the ‘ten theses’ on state politics in India.
Introduction � 9
of 90’s include that of Kohli (1987),11 Mawdsley (1998), Harriss (1999),12 Varshney (2002),13 Jenkins (1999),14 Singh (2000), Chandra (2005), Yagnik and Sheth (2005), Sinha (2005),15 Mitra (2006),16 Jayal (2006) and Desai (2007).17
The widely acclaimed volume on state politics edited by Jenkins (2004), falls in the above genre of the studies, as the volume includes articles that employ the two-state comparative method to take up four sets of thematic areas, namely, economic policy making (Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu; West Bengal and Gujarat); subaltern
11 Atul Kohli undertook an extensive field-based research to gauge the effectiveness of different party regimes in undertaking the anti-poverty measures. Based on the principle of purposive selection, Kohli selected three case studies where poverty alleviation policies had achieved the maximum (West Bengal governed by the Left Front) or the minimum success (Uttar Pradesh governed by the Janata coalition), and the third one that fell into the middle category (Karnataka governed by the Congress with Devraj Urs as the Chief Minister). The difference of the ‘regional distributive outcomes’ in terms of pro-poor measures were ‘function of the regime controlling political power’, as party-dominated regimes in India ‘closely reflects the nature of the ruling political party. The ideology, organisation and class alliances underlying a party dominated regime are then of considerable consequence’ (Kohli 1987: 10).
12 Like Kohli, Harriss also employed a comparative framework to take up a policy study seeking to explain differential poverty reducing performance across states. For the purpose, Harriss revisited the state-specific articles in the Frankel and Rao volume after a gap of a decade to show as to how the differences in terms of balance of caste/class power and also in terms of the party systems in different states influence the policy process and the performance of the states. He argued that that in the states where the ‘power of the locally dominant castes/classes has been challenged to a great extent’ or where ‘stable, relatively well-institutionalized parties compete for their votes’ have done comparatively better in terms of poverty reduction (Harriss 1999: 3367–3376).
13 Varshney (2002) combines an inter-state focus with an advocacy of taking up city as his unit of analysis for the study of communal riots involving the Hindus and the Muslims as he argues that the communal riots are urban phenomena in India. In the following years, Brass (2003) and Wilkinson (2004) also analysed episodes of ethnic violence in post-colonial India using city as the unit of their analyses. While Varshney had worked with three sets of paired cities, Brass took only one city and Wilkinson cities/constituencies for their field studies.
14 Jenkins, while making a comparative study of the politics of economic reforms in the states of Rajasthan and Maharashtra, offers valuable insights in the pol-itical management of the reform process by virtue of employing India’s federal
10 Ashutosh Kumar
politicisation (Bihar and Orissa; Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Rajasthan); civic engagement (Kerala and Uttar Pradesh); and political leadership studies (Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka, West Bengal and Tamil Nadu). Picking up threads from Kohli’s notion of India as a ‘laboratory of democracy’, Jenkins refers to the ‘robust form of federalism’ that enables the political analysts
structure as an institutional framework for a quasi-laboratory of competing policies and as an enabling structure aiming at providing incentives for policy innovation.
15 In her study of the politics of economic policy in the ‘large and multileveled polity’, Sinha focuses on the ‘dominant puzzle’ of the ‘failed developmental state’ in India, namely as to why despite supposedly following a uniform develop-mental trajectory marked by uniform central policy interventions and regulations under the development planning model for so long, whose remnants are still visible, the regional states in India have come to reveal very different developmental outcomes. More intriguingly, why there has been an uneven regional pattern of investment flow in those regional states even where historical and economic explanations might suggest convergence (she selects Gujarat and West Bengal as case studies). Why has West Bengal, unlike Gujarat (and Tamil Nadu that had none of the initial advantages), failed to attract a higher share of investment on the basis of its initial strengths as a private capital-intensive state? The explanation, Sinha suggests, lies in the form of the differing ‘institutional and political capacities’ of the states. See Sinha (2004 and 2005).
16 Subrata K. Mitra (2006: 43). In another instance of purposive sampling Mitra, for his comparative study that aimed at measuring the level of governance in India, selected six states from the ‘four corners of India’ as the research sites where either the level of governance was perceived as low (Punjab and Bihar), high (West Bengal and Maharashtra) or the ones that fell into the middle category (Tamil Nadu and Gujarat).
17 Desai, while using a two-state comparative perspective, raises the question as to why despite being ruled by the same left parties, Kerala has experienced much better success than Bengal in bringing about most substantive anti-poverty reforms. The explanation, she suggests, after comparing the historical state legacies, the role of the left-party formation and mode of insertion in civil society in the two states, is that Kerala has fared better due to its relative advantage in terms of greater ‘strength of subordinate class mobilization and associationalism combined with a strong left presence, both parliamentary as well as extra –parliamentary’.
A formulation which would have wider implication for development studies in a vibrant democracy like India, Desai argues, is thata ‘dynamic, synergistic relationship between parties and movements’ can only ‘sift political power in ways that substantially reduce poverty or achieve comprehensive development’ (Desai 2007: 19, 23).
Introduction � 11
to undertake a comparative analysis of the politics of India’s ‘29 mini democracies’ that have ‘almost identical institutional infrastructures’ and that operate under similar ‘economic policy framework and the legal protections enshrined in the Indian constitution’. Desai, another comparativist, also views India as an ‘ideal ground for comparative analysis’ as it holds ‘constant certain factors such as its position in the sphere of international relations, geography, ecology, religion and early political formations’ which, in turn, provide ‘a range of variations in key social, political and economic pre-conditions and outcomes’ in its different regional states (Desai 2007: 22–23).
Assertion of Regions within RegionsNotwithstanding the impressive range of studies on state politics that have come up in the last decade, there has been a dearth of literature that focuses on the regions within the states or employs an intra-state or inter-state regional perspective in a comparative mode. This is despite the fact that cultural heterogeneity of the regions within the states over the years has been sharpened as a result of the unevenness of development and unequal access to political power in a centralised federal political economy (Sathyamurthy 2000: 33).18
As a consequence, India’s federal ideology has registered a marked shift as regional identity, culture and geographical difference now appear to be better recognised as a valid basis for administrative division and political representation. No wonder then that the recent decades have been witness to the assertion of well defined geographically, culturally and historically constituted distinct regions that have emerged within the states, showing sharpened ethnic/communal/caste as well as other social-political cleavages like the regional and rural-urban ones.19
The newly found assertion of the regions received an impetus in the wake of the creation of the three new states of Chhattisgarh, Uttaranchal and Jharkhand carved out from the parent states of Madhya Pradesh,
18 While asked to prioritise their loyalty in the NES conducted by CSDS-Lokniti in 1996 and 1999, 53.4 and 50.7 per cent of the respondents respectively expressed their first loyalty to region rather than to India whereas only 21.0 and 21.4 per cent respectively put their loyalty first to India than to region.
19 Interestingly, there are a few studies that compare the politics of the specific regions in India with that of a region of another country, mainly focusing on the identity-based politics (Bose 1999).
12 Ashutosh Kumar
Uttar Pradesh20 and Bihar respectively in November 2000 (Jayal 2000; Krishna 2000; Kumar 2000a).21 Significantly, this new wave of reorganisation was supported by all parties, in particular, by the two parties with nearly all-India presence, i.e. the Congress and the BJP, which could be attributed to the interests of the two parties in the highly competitive political environment, marked by the declining ability of any one party to win power at the centre on its own in the last seven general elections and also the concomitant rise of regional/state level parties in the ‘post-Congress polity’ reflecting the regional concerns about language, cultural identity, political autonomy and economic development. What also helped the cause was the fact that ‘ethnic communities in the three new states were unconnected with foreign enemies or cross border nationalities’ (Chadda 2002: 46–47).
The qualitative shift in the thinking about the territoriality of a region is visible in the way demand for a ‘homeland of one’s own’ has become a ‘permissible’ issue for party agendas creating a new ‘field of opportunities’ for regions demanding statehood (Mawdsley 2005). Debates over territorial reorganisation have re-entered ‘mainstream’ political discussion after remaining a taboo for a long period, especially during the centralising and personalising leadership that took over after Nehru when assertions of regional identity were essentially viewed with suspicion and were stigmatised as parochial, chauvinist and even anti-national. Arguably, such apprehension is not evident in the Constitution which provides for a great degree of flexibility given to the Parliament under Article 3 to decide the bases on which new states are to be created, i.e., geography, demography, administrative convenience, language, ethnicity (read tribalism) or culture. Such constitutional flexibility has not only allowed for the accommodation
20 Holding the creation of Uttaranchal as a positive step, Kudaisya has gone to the extent of suggesting further break-up of UP into regional states as due to its self-image of being ‘a buffer to contain the linguistic principle as the basis for statehood’, the state has ‘failed to develop a regional identity of its own’ (Kudaisya 2006: 411–14).
21 Significantly Ambedkar, one of the architects of the Indian Constitution, had long argued in favour of the creation of present day Uttarakhand, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh in his writings. Ambedkar’s consistent support for the creation of new states emanated from ‘his democratic impulse to accord political and cultural recognition to the term region, otherwise defined predominantly in a geographical spatial sense’ (Sarangi 2006: 151).
Introduction � 13
of regional aspirations in the past but has also provided an incentive for ongoing political projects aimed at looking for the exit options for the regions within regions.
Apart from much greater acceptance of the ‘demos-enabling’ feature of the Constitution (Stepan 2001: 315–61), yet another kind of shift is visible in the way the new states are now being proposed on the grounds of good governance and development rather than on the language principle that has, ostensibly, guided state formation in the past (Brass 1994). Even the dialect communities have been asking for their own state while underlining the cultural and literary distinctiveness and richness of the dialect.
In a changed mode of electoral representation that has ushered in the ‘third wave of democracy’, newer and smaller states are also being viewed as more suited to provide for better representation of the electorates’ preferences in the composition of government as when they are part of the same state, the smaller regions’ electorates tend to vote strategically to elect representatives with preferences more closely aligned to the bigger region. The electorates no longer have to make a trade-off.
With the centre agreeing in principle to consider the demand for the creation of a separate Telangana state in December 2009, old and new demands for redrawing the boundaries of the states have been coming up thick and fast with increased intensity including those of Coorg in Karnataka, Mithilanchal in Bihar, Saurashtra in Gujarat, Gorkhaland and Kamtapur in West Bengal, Vidarbha in Maharashtra, Saurashtra in Gujarat, and then Harit Pradesh, Poorvanachal, Braj Pradesh and Awadh Pradesh in Uttar Pradesh, Maru Pradesh in Rajasthan, Bhojpur comprising areas of eastern Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Chhattisgarh, Bundelkhand comprising areas of UP and MP, and a Greater Cooch Behar state out of the parts of Assam and West Bengal.
Under the emerging political landscape, there has been an impera-tive need to analyse the politics and economy of these newly asser-tive regions as they aspire to emerge in the near future as the arena where the political and economic choices and decisions would be made and unmade. Taking up the regions within the states as a dis-tinctive analytical category and employing of a comparative method for in-depth analysis would thus ensure that the ‘smaller’ but significant pictures/narratives are not lost amidst the larger ones as happened not long ago within the discipline of Indian politics.
14 Ashutosh Kumar
A Methodological NoteAs a note of caution, for a comparativist, the task of comparing disparate political phenomena represented by the mushrooming regions in a complex diverse society like India would not be easy. Adopting a highly localised approach to bring out regional distinct-iveness invariably involves the in-depth study of an entire range of factors that make a political situation in the way it exists. To avoid oversimplified generalisation, a comparativist working on India would do well to undertake concrete analysis of specific situations in two or more regions that are highly localised and issue-specific (say the regional movements demanding separate statehood in different parts of India) and then look for the differences and not merely adding up the similarities. In a major advantage of employing a region-based approach, it would not only enable the comparativists to re-frame the whole debate but to interrogate the cogency of conventional formulations, often derived from an analysis that took the regional state as the unit of analysis.
As regions within the states, to re-emphasise, are not merely politico-administrative instituted constructs but are also imagined or constituted, among others, in historical, geographic, economic, socio-logical or cultural terms, any meaningful comparative study of the regions would naturally straddle the disciplinary boundaries of social sciences. An amalgamation of political sociological and political economy approaches would thus encourage social analysts from different disciplines and not merely from political science to unravel the complexity of the emergent nature of regional politics.
About the VolumeThis volume has been inspired by the idea mentioned above to attempt micro studies of the politics and economy of the states/regions in terms of their specificities. With the focus on the twin issues of identity and development that are often signifiers of the unravelling politics in the federal polity, the articles in the volume make a concerted attempt to look at and also beyond the states by exploring the particular-ities of the regions within these states in a comparative mode from the vantage point of democratic politics as it unfurls in recent India. The same agenda guides the articles that employ two-state comparative framework.
Introduction � 15
The first three articles in the volume take up the study of the three newly created states of Jharkhand, Uttarakhand and Chhattisgarh. The three states have been products of the identity-based regional movements for separate statehood masking their heterogeneity primarily due to the shared nature of popular perception about their ethno-cultural and geographical marginalities — Uttarakhand because of its mountainous topography and pahari identity, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh because of their large tribal population. The three states, despite being rich in terms of natural resources, were also victims of the neglect and discrimination by their parent states’ governments and the state elites belonging to other regions of their parent states. The three articles underline the critical need to take into consider-ation, while formulating developmental policies, the complex reality of the process of identity formation and the continued and growing presence of the regions within what was supposed to be a culturally homogeneous territorial homeland of the agitating masses.
Seeking an alternative assessment of developmental imbalances, Amit Prakash, in his article on Jharkhand, argues for a critical need to undertake a socio-political redefinition of a ‘region’ rather than relying on the traditional spatial/geographical definitions. Based on an analy-sis of the available datasets for the tribal population in Jharkhand, Prakash observes that despite concerted public policy efforts for ‘devel-opment’ of the tribal population spanning over more than half a century, for the tribal community, realisation of right to socio-economic development remains still a distant dream. Part of the reason behind such abysmal levels of development outputs, he suggests, is privileging the spatial definition of the region, which conceals gross disparities at the local level in the realisation of these goals.
Besides, the spatial definition of the region also leads to a rather homogenised development policy in which the socio-cultural require-ments of the different social groups concerned have found no space. For instance, the questions of rights to land, forest, displacement and rehabilitation (in addition to the issues of literacy, health and employment) are central elements for the realisation of the socio-economic rights of the tribal community but the mainstream devel-opment theory considers violations of rights to land, water, forests and displacement as costs of ‘development’. The essential characteristics of a particular socio-cultural societal group have come under threat. This, in turn, poses a challenge to the legitimacy of the state, hence defeating part of the purpose of ‘development’.
16 Ashutosh Kumar
The need to rethink the notion of region at a theoretical level recurs in the article on Chhattisgarh by Dharmendra Kumar. His article suggests that a region is not a static but a dynamic entity, which tends to constantly evolve and whose forms change in accordance with the human activities. These evolutions are a dialectical product of the socio-geographical reality and its interactions with material processes (such as those related to modernity and most recently to globalisation), under whose influence the region becomes a concrete reality at a particular historical juncture. In this way, region gets integrated with its own socio-geographical specificities. Such integration may also lead to the beginning of a movement politics of resistance and stretch a thread of integration at that level as has happened with Chhattisgarh with the arrival of the global capital in the region. While referring to the working-class movements in Chhattisgarh, Kumar suggests that the specificities of a region may result in development of a common ground for transformative politics with radical potential in the region.
The limitation of the policies of development also figures in the third article of this section. Pampa Mukherjee, in her article, traces the movement for the separate statehood of Uttarakhand to the historical experiences of discrimination and exploitation of the local pahari communities by the parent state of Uttar Pradesh. The neglect of the hilly regions of Kumaon and Garhwal helped in bridging the divide of mutual conflict and hostility between the people of the two regions and prepared the ground for a concerted movement for Uttarakhand.
Mukherjee’s essay is divided into three parts. The first part introduces the region and while doing so also provides the backdrop in which assertion of regional identity took place in Uttarakhand region. In this context, she refers to the stark insensitivity and neglect to this hilly region displayed by policy planners. The second part deals with the movement politics for separate statehood, which created an appropriate environment for the forging of a common Uttarakhandi identity. This identity, in turn, was instrumental in crystallising the idea of a separate state at the popular level. Drawing upon her study of the Uttarakhand movement, Mukherjee, in the third part of her article, suggests that demands for statehood in various regions of India indicate a growing political consciousness and assertion of hitherto marginalised and discriminated sections of the population for autonomous political space to articulate the needs and concerns of their respective regions.
Introduction � 17
The second section of the volume includes the articles that refer to the regions that have been witness to the identity based demands for separate statehood/territorial homeland or autonomy, as mentioned above. Region-specific articles are complemented with a two-state comparative article that takes up an analysis of the politics of autonomy in the two borderland states of Punjab and Jammu & Kashmir.
A reading of the region-specific articles reveal as to how there has been a shift in the bases of demands for the separate statehood in recent India. Once based primarily on the cultural–linguistic basis, now the mobilisation and subsequent assertion of an identity group for separate statehood or grant of regional autonomy emerges out of the aspiration for greater share in political and economic powers in a resource-scarce economy. Despite the democratic promise on the contrary, cultural heterogeneity of the regions within the states over the years has been sharpened as a result of the non-fulfilment of the federal promise of evenness of development and equal access to political power. In this context, we can add that colonial patterns have not only persisted but have got intensified in post-colonial India. The trend has received an impetus under new economic policies that put one state against another and even one region against another within a state clamouring for investments in a competitive mode.
While referring to the separatist/subregional movements in different parts of Karnataka, their social composition, nature and the larger politics, the cultural nuances and differences among them, Muzaffar Assadi, in his article, focuses mainly on the movement for separate statehood for Coorg in the Kodagu region. In a comparative mode, Assadi argues that the demand for separate statehood for Coorg draws from the meta-narratives of history and contemporary political economy of binary oppositions of development and deprivation. He refers in this context to the contradictions prompted by the changes in the local economy due to the process of globalisation and also the self-articulation of the Coorgis as a culturally dislocated and de-ethnicised category.
The argument that the regional imbalance in terms of development and sharing of political power triggers on the demand for a separate political space occurs in Arun K. Jana’s article. Jana refers to the ethnic demand for separate statehood in the regions of Gorkhaland in the predominantly hill district of Darjeeling and the concurrent demand for a separate state of Kamtapur comprising of the six northern districts in
18 Ashutosh Kumar
the plains of North Bengal. He attributes it to the economic neglect of the indigenous communities of the North Bengal region, which enables local ethnic organisations like the Gorkha National Liberation Front, the two factions of the Kamtapur People’s Party and, more recently, the Greater Coochbehar People’s Association to mobilise the people around the separate statehood agenda.
The local resentment, Jana argues, gets exacerbated also because of three other reasons. First, it is because of the difference in terms of language and culture between the marginal indigenous ethnic groups and the dominant Bengali settler community. Indigenous ethnic groups are marginal also in social terms as they largely belong to the category of Scheduled Castes and Tribes. Second, the erosion of democracy due to the usage of the aggressive tactics for capturing and controlling institutions within the region by the CPM led Left Front has further alienated the indigenous groups. Moreover, the left has moved away from class politics, the politics that brought it to power in the state in 1977. Third, the absence of an organised kind of opposition that can aggregate and articulate the interests and demands of these disparate ethnic groups in the formal legislative forum has pushed the people towards the movement politics bordering on violence, which is gaining in terms of stridency.
Rama Rao Bonagani, in his article, evaluates and analyses the role of socio-economic, cultural and political factors, which have rekindled the demand for separate statehood in the Telangana region in Andhra Pradesh. He refers to the process of economic reform undertaken in recent years that has accentuated the process of regionalisation of identity politics in a relatively underdeveloped Telangana, as regional imbalances increase with investments going to the prosperous coastal Andhra region. Significantly, the statehood demand is also entwined with the popular demand for the redressal of the social and cultural grievances of the people like the rewriting of a separate history of the region so that the cultural distinctiveness of the region may be recognised. The political opportunism resorted to by the parties for short-term electoral gains, especially in the present era of coalition politics, has been another contributory factor.
The uniqueness of the movement for separate statehood for Harit Pradesh, as Jagpal Singh argues in his article, lies in the fact that unlike the other regions in Uttar Pradesh, namely Bundelkhand, Poorvanachal and Ruhelkhand, from where similar demands for separate statehood keep cropping up intermittently, it is not the underdevelopment but
Introduction � 19
the comparative prosperity of the region that is being projected as the basis for the region being a victim of ‘reverse discrimination’/‘internal colonialism’ at the hands of the successive state governments. The movement’s leadership claims that the north-western region is not only being neglected but, what is worse, its resources are being exploited for the betterment of the other regions of the state. The movement has received an impetus as the region grapples with its own set of agrarian and social crises that can respectively be attributed to the implementation of the WTO regime and the assertion of the subalterns against the dominance of the Jat landed peasantry. Ironically, in the absence of a visible mass movement, it is the electoral factor that gives a semblance of hope at the moment to the protagonists of the movement like Ajit Singh, leader of the Rashtriya Lok Dal.
Writing in the context of India’s northeast region, consisting of the ‘seven sisters’ states (and now joined by Sikkim), Samir Kumar Das situates identities in the newly emergent terrain of democratic politics in India and discusses the question with particular reference to the ongoing demand for the creation of linguistic states like Bodoland in the region. In order to push his argument, Das refers to what he calls a democratic paradox, namely, while identity plays a role in broadening the country’s democratic base and making it part of the public agenda of rights by way of trying to disperse the hegemony of identity of the constituent states, it too has its own limits, especially when it comes to the question of reproducing and sustaining democracy. For one cannot stick to one’s identity beyond the threshold while seeking democracy and justice.
It follows that identity politics is a necessary but not a sufficient condition of democracy building although there is no denying that continuous non-recognition of injustice and deficit of democracy only create and complicate problems for it. Das shows as to how the social divisions based on such identities as gender and ethnicity have been getting incorporated into the public agenda of rights and justice in the struggle against the accretion of identities, aided and facilitated by the linguistic reorganisation of states growing apace in the northeast region since the early 1960s.
Taking up the issue of identity politics in a comparative manner in the two neighbouring borderland states of Punjab and Jammu & Kashmir, Ashutosh Kumar suggests that the assertion of identity politics based on religion or ethnicity, particularly in conjunction with territorial bases, has erroneously long been considered as posing a threat to the
20 Ashutosh Kumar
Indian nation state. The reckless pursuit of the ‘hegemonised’ and ‘homogenised’ politics by the centralising and personalising political class in India, which refuses to acknowledge and accommodate the competing national and quasi-national identities and their demands, has been largely responsible for the politics of autonomy/azadi in the two states in recent times. As to why the movement in Kashmir continues unabated and Punjab remains ‘peaceful’ but disgruntled, Kumar attributes it to the kind of lopsided politics, pursued by the political class in ‘dealing’ with the autonomist/secessionist movements. It is a politics that is characterised by resort to coercion, economic populism, ad hoc-ism and cooperation (read co-option) with the ‘nationalist’ leadership (often locally discredited) in the form of accords, which are doomed to fail.
The third part of the volume refers to articles that take up identity politics in relation to caste politics in a particular region within a state or across states.
Reflecting on post-Mandal India, Rajeshwari Deshpande takes note of the rise and assertion of many new caste organisations representing numerically weak or hitherto dormant castes in state politics. She draws her evidence from her study of the nature of organisations of the ‘Lingayat’ caste in select towns of south Maharashtra and north Karnataka regions. Her article argues that Lingayat caste associations have gradually acquired a complex social identity as they oscillate between being a separate sect detached from Brahminical Hinduism and claiming the status of a dominant caste within the established caste hierarchy. The caste as a social group is differently placed in the political context of the two regions. It is in the context of these regional variations and also in the context of the complex social identity of the group that the Lingayat caste associations try to develop their own politics at the local level.
Deshpande’s account of the region-specific politics in the two neighbouring states reveals aspects of the changing role of caste associations that have wider implications. Her article provides insights into how a caste, both as a social and a political category, gets con-textualised in the prism of the region, the various strategies that caste groups adopt for their effective mobilisation in the emergent competitive regional party systems and also how the changing political and social context at the regional level introduces serious limitations on caste-based identity politics. Two sets of larger issues are latent in the discussion carried out in the article. While an understanding of the
Introduction � 21
working of the caste associations gives us an opportunity to revisit the debates about the contemporary location of caste and its interaction with politics, at another level, it also raises important issues about the complex nature of patterns of identity politics shaping up across states and their regions.
In her article on the politics of the Dalit organisations in Tamil Nadu, Neeru Mehra primarily focuses on three related themes: the emer-gence of a separate Dalit consciousness and identity as distinct from the Dravidian identity; the form of assertion by Dalits in the state and their relation to the electoral politics; and the impact of the emergent Dalit organisations on state level politics.
Mehra underlines the fact that the caste system in Tamil Nadu has region-specific distinctive features. The varna system, for instance, is not relevant in Tamil Nadu as there is negligible presence of inter-mediate castes such as the Kammas and Reddis in the Andhra Pradesh or the Vokkaliggas and the Lingayats in Karnataka. As a result, the caste hierarchy in the state is very steep in the sense that the social distance between the Brahmins and the untouchable castes has traditionally been very wide. In a state where untouchability in its most virulent form has been a widespread phenomenon since the 8th century AD, recent decades have witnessed an upsurge of democratic consciousness among the Panchamas, as the Dalits are called, who have been critiquing the colonial construction of Dravidian identity on the plank of the non-Brahmanism. Mehra argues that non-Brahmanism as such was not aimed at the destruction of the caste system but was essentially a struggle for political power among the various social groups, which is still continuing and is reflected in the shifting contours of the party system.
With the increasing consciousness and changes in the configuration of the caste relations, both in the north and south Tamil Nadu regions Dalit self-assertion has taken varied forms, leading to greater caste conflict. In the domain of electoral politics, a two-fold phenomenon has manifested itself, which is fragmenting the state level party system. The first is the emergence in the late 1980s of the lower backwards led by the Vanniyars who have carved out a non-Brahmin identity distinct from the upper backwards, leading to the formation of the PMK. The second is the emergence of the large number of Dalit organisations, some of which now seem to be coalescing towards the formation of the party under the leadership of Krishnaswamy.
22 Ashutosh Kumar
The democratic upsurge among the Dalits as a result of the wid-ening and deepening of democracy has not only resulted into them taking on the upper and middle castes but also fighting it out among themselves. Sudha Pai’s article, grounded in Andhra Pradesh, refers to the conflict between the Malas and the Madigas — two Dalit caste groups — over the sharing of the benefits of the governmental affirmative policies outcomes, and the demand by the latter that they should be provided separate quotas to safeguard their interests.
The Malas are found to a greater degree in the Circars or seven coastal districts that experienced colonial rule as part of the Madras Presidency, while the Madigas are more numerous in the nine Telangana districts that were part of the erstwhile Princely state of Hyderabad. In four districts of Rayalseema region, the proportion of both groups is about the same. The regional unevenness has relevance in Dalit politics. The Dalits of the coastal areas have experienced a number of social reform movements such as the non-Brahmin, Adi-Andhra, Christian missionary reform, rationalist and nationalist movements and as a result are ahead of the Dalits of Telangana. Significantly, the relative advance has acquired a caste dimension also as it is the Malas within the coastal districts and not the Madigas who have really benefited from colonial policy and activities of social reformers in the region and from ruling class politics of patronage and co-option after independence.
The Andhra case study, Pai argues, shows how the social and eco-nomic contexts in which the policies are implemented determine their impact. Contrary to the expectation of the constitution makers of India, who thought of creating a civil society by extending substantial citizenship rights to a vast section of historically deprived and marginalised groups, inequality of opportunities and ascriptive identities have failed to disappear. In actual practice, Pai suggests, these identities have become more marked with the appearance of new social and economic divisions between Dalits and non-Dalits and also among the marginal groups. The removal of discrimination and exclusion through equalisation of opportunities, the principle on which affirmative actions were envisaged, are no longer significant today. Social groups are more into demanding division and extension of specific quotas to smaller groups.
Ronki Ram, in his article, has also made an attempt to bring out the regional specificities of the caste system in the context of Punjab while arguing that caste, though prevalent throughout the country,
Introduction � 23
has never been monolithic and unilinear in its practice as every region has its specific and unique characteristics that closely impact upon its socio-political and economic structures. What distinguishes the Doaba, Malwa and Majha regions of Punjab from other parts of India, Ram argues, are three-fold: first, the material factor of the caste-based discriminations in Punjab as against the purity–pollution syndrome that prevails in other parts of India. Second, Punjab is distinguished from other regions due to the near complete landlessness among the Dalits and the ‘absolute monopoly’ of the Jats (a dominant peasant caste) on the agricultural lands in the state. Third, the social measurement scale in Punjab is not based on the purity/pollution principle of Brahminical orthodoxy. Instead, it is based on the landholding, martial strength and allegiance to Sikhism, a comparatively new reformist religion that openly challenges the rituals and dogmatic traditions of Hinduism and Islam.
What connect the Dalits of Punjab having different religious alle-giance to their counterparts in other regions of India is their continued marginality and also the beginning of their resistance against the structures of social oppression and economic deprivations. The spread of deras in recent times across the three regions, especially in Doaba and Malwa, should be viewed in this context.
The fourth part of the volume includes the articles that refer to the state electoral politics in India while emphasising the regional specificities of the politics of identity based contestation and representation. The common argument in these articles is that the states are essentially ‘instituted regions’ and not the ‘natural regions’, comprising of the numerous regions having their distinctive historical specificities, which continue to influence the political attitudes, party politics and electoral outcomes even in the modern times of ‘democratic upsurge’. In a way, the electoral politics has accentuated regional consciousness combining with other identities like caste and religion.
Sanjay Lodha’s article argues that Rajasthan is an artificially created geographic entity comprising of as many as nine regions rooted primarily to their traditional identities as princely states dating back to the colonial era. These regions retain their distinctiveness in terms of their social and developmental profiles. Drawing on the CSDS-NES data, Lodha argues that these regional identities still impinge upon the people’s perception about the political issues and also largely influence the nature of electoral competition and electorate’s choice in the state.
24 Ashutosh Kumar
Karnataka, since its inception, has been witness to as many as nine Lok Sabha elections and seven Assembly elections, each one ushering in a new trend and triggering off a series of political developments of far reaching political significance. Sandeep Shastri, in his article, refers to a clear caste matrix, which impacts upon the nature of political competition and the expression of political choices across the regions in the state, namely, Old Mysore region, Hyderabad-Karnataka region, Bombay-Karnataka region and Coorg. Such a study enables us to understand the nature of political competition and the expression of political choices across its regions. Presenting empirical evidence, Shastri argues that the nature of electoral verdicts in Karnataka come across as a by-product of the regions-specific trends at the time especially in the form of the social coalitions that emerge in a particular region and the nature of the electoral context (bipolar or tri-polar) in the regions.
The fifth and last part of the volume includes an article that refers to the politics of the economic policies and their outcomes in the context of specific states.
Despite having experienced similar economic and demographic development features in the pre-reform period (pre-1991), Bihar and Madhya Pradesh, the two states of India have witnessed divergent trends in the post-reform period. Why? Ashok K. Pankaj, in his com-parative article, attributes it to the different political (policy) responses to (reforms in) governance and development by the anti-reform regime of the RJD in Bihar and the reform-friendly Congress government of Digvijay Singh in Madhya Pradesh.
Pankaj argues that the RJD’s attitude towards reform was conditioned by its ideological and political positions, its regional character, political agenda of governance, political–electoral constituency consisting largely of the Other Backward Classes (OBCs), Dalits, Muslims and the poor, absence of popular pressure and weak and divided opposition. On the other hand, economic and governance related reforms in Madhya Pradesh were facilitated by a political regime (the Congress), which had to work under the leadership and policy guidelines of the pro-reform central authority of the party (high command). Moreover, the then Congress regime was also under constraint to reform under pressure from a strong opposition that was supportive of the new economic policies. It helped the process that the state unit of Congress was desperately trying to regain its Dalit and OBCs vote banks by attractive packages.
Introduction � 25
Summing UpA reading of the articles included in the volume enable us to go beyond states and look at the regions within the states as distinctive categories for an in-depth study of the democratic politics of identity and development that is unfolding at the state levels. It is our argument that such micro-studies aimed at capturing the nuances, though somewhat challenging in nature, would further enrich the discipline of state politics in India.
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