Rethinking State Politics

in India
ii Re thinking Sta te Po litic s in Ind ia
Rethinking State Politics
in India
Re g io ns within Re g io ns

Edito r
Ashuto sh Kuma r

LONDON NEW YORK NEW DELHI

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 Co nte nts

List of Tables and Charts ix

Preface and Acknowledgements xiii

Introduction — Rethinking State Politics in India:

Regions within Regions 1
Ashutosh 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 31
Amit Prakash

2. Constitution of a Region: A Study of Chhattisgarh 76

Dharmendra Kumar

3. The Creation of a Region: Politics of Identity and

Development in Uttarakhand 107
Pampa Mukherjee

Part II: Quest for Territorial Homeland

4. Regions within Region and their Movements

in Karnataka: Nuances, Claims and Ambiguities 131
Muzaffar Assadi

5. Backwardness and Political Articulation of Backwardness

in the North Bengal Region of West Bengal 153
Arun K. Jana

6. Assertion of a Region: Exploring the Demand

for Telangana 197
Rama Rao Bonagani
vi Re thinking Sta te Po litic s in Ind ia

7. Region, Caste and Politics of ‘Reverse Discrimination’:

The Case of Harit Pradesh 220
Jagpal Singh

8. Regions Within but Democracy Without: A Study of

India’s North-east 246
Samir Kumar Das

9. Politics of Autonomy in a Comparative Perspective:

Punjab and Jammu & Kashmir 275
Ashutosh Kumar

Part III: Caste and Politics of Marginality

10. Garv Se Kahon Hum Lingayat Hain! Caste Associations

and Identity Politics in Maharashtra 307
Rajeshwari Deshpande

11. Emergence of Dalit Organisations in Tamil Nadu:

Causes, Forms of Assertion and Impact on the
State Politics of Tamil Nadu 329
Neeru Sharma Mehra

12. Affirmative Action, Group Rights and Democracy:

The Mala–Madiga Conflict in Andhra Pradesh 354
Sudha Pai

13. Caste and Marginality in Punjab: Looking for

Regional Specificities 384
Ronki Ram

Part IV: State Electoral Politics — Regional Variance

14. Subregions, Identity and the Nature of Political

Competition in Rajasthan 401
Sanjay Lodha

15. Regions within Regions — Negotiating Political Spaces:

A Case Study of Karnataka 432
Sandeep Shastri
 Co nte nts vii

Part V: Politics of Public Policy

16. Political Regimes and Economic Reforms: A Study of

Bihar and Madhya Pradesh 455
Ashok K. Pankaj

Note on the Editor 483

Notes on Contributors 484
Index 489
viii Re thinking Sta te Po litic s in Ind ia
 List o f Ta b le s a nd Cha rts

Tables
1.1 Demography of ST Population in Jharkhand 42
1.2 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) 48
1.5 Schools in Jharkhand 52
1.6 District-wise Number of Teachers and Pupil Teacher
Ratio (PTR) by Type in Jharkhand, 2002–2003 53
1.7 Enrolment of Scheduled Tribes in Primary Education
in Jharkhand 54
1.8 Work Participation Rate in Jharkhand, 2001 58
1.9 Estimates of Birth Rate, Death Rate, Natural Growth
Rate and Infant Mortality Rate in Jharkhand, 2002 61
1.10 District-wise Land Utilisation in Jharkhand, 1997–98
(Per cent) 64
1.11 Forest Cover in Jharkhand, 2001 and 2003
(sq. km) 67
1.12 Destruction of Forest Area for Developmental Projects
in Jharkhand, 1980–2003 69
1.13 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 Re thinking Sta te Po litic s in Ind ia

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 342
11.2 Electoral Alliances on the Eve of 2001 State Assembly
Elections in Tamil Nadu 345
11.3 Electoral Alliances in 2006 Tamil Nadu Assembly
Elections 346
11.4 Voter Participation Rates in Tamil Nadu in
Parliamentary Elections 349
11.5 Tamil Nadu 2009 Lok Sabha Election Results 350

12.1 Broad Categorisation of the Scheduled Castes —

Group Population 375

14.1 Geo-cultural Division of Rajasthan 404

14.2 Distribution of the Population by Languages 405
14.3 Distribution of Languages by Geographical Region
and Former States 405
14.4 Major Castes/Tribes and their Regional
Dispersion 408
14.5 Administrative Divisions, Districts and Subregions of
Rajasthan 416
14.6 Distribution of Respondents by Castes and
Subregions (Per cent) 417
14.7 Distribution of Respondents by Locality and
Subregions (Per cent) 418
14.8 Distribution of Respondents by Land Occupation and
Subregions (Per cent) 420
14.9 Distribution of Respondents by Occupation
Categories and Subregions (Per cent) 421
14.10 Distribution of Respondents by Monthly Family
Income and Subregions (Per cent) 422
14.11 Distribution of Respondents by Vote and Subregion
(Per cent) 425
14.12 Distribution of Respondents by Vote and Caste
(Per cent) 427
 List o f Ta b le s a nd Cha rts xi

14.13 Distribution of Respondents by Opinion on Type of

Government (Per cent) 428

15.1 Caste and Religious Composition of the

State of Karnataka 436
15.2 Karnataka Assembly Elections, 1978–2008 Region-
wise Seats won by Congress, BJP, Janata Party/Dal
(All Figures in Percentage) 448

Charts
2.1 Types of Collieries and the Land they Occupy 88

2.2 Reduction in Workforce in Bhilai Steel Plant 96

3.1 Road Transport 123

xii Re thinking Sta te Po litic s in Ind ia
 Pre fa c e a nd Ac kno wle d g e me nts

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 Re thinking Sta te Po litic s in Ind ia

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. TMy two chapters 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.
 Intro d uc tio n — Re thinking Sta te
Po litic s in Ind ia : Re g io ns
within Re g io ns
ASHUTOSH 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.
2 Ashuto sh Kuma r

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.
 Intro duc tio n 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 mobilization 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 realization
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 Ashuto sh Kuma r

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).
 Intro duc tio n 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 Ashuto sh Kuma r

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).
 Intro duc tio n 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 Ashuto sh Kuma r

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.
 Intro duc tio n 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, organization
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 Ashuto sh Kuma r

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).
 Intro duc tio n 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 Regions

Notwithstanding 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 Ashuto sh Kuma r

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).
 Intro duc tio n 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, Purvanachal, 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 Ashuto sh Kuma r

A Methodological Note
As 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 Volume

This 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.
 Intro duc tio n 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 Ashuto sh Kuma r

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.
 Intro duc tio n 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 Ashuto sh Kuma r

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
 Intro duc tio n 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 (RJD).
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 Ashuto sh Kuma r

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
 Intro duc tio n 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 Ashuto sh Kuma r

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
Telengana 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, due to
historical reasons between the coastal and Telegana and Rayalseema
regions, 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 equalization 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,
 Intro duc tio n 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 Ashuto sh Kuma r

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.
 Intro duc tio n 25

Summing Up
A reading of the articles included in the volume enable us to go
beyond states and look at the regions within the states as a distinctive
analytical category 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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