Louise Tillin

Restructuring States, Restructuring Ethnicity: Looking Across Disciplinary Boundaries at Federal Futures in India and Nepal

India and federalizing Nepal represent distinct types of federal polity: their origins lie not in the unification of previously autonomous states, but in the devolution of power by a previously centralized state. The boundaries of their constituent sub-units are therefore open to debate, and settling their contours is central to the project of state-building. Written by a political scientist and an anthropologist, this paper presents a comparative exploration of the reciprocal relationship between state structuring and ethnicity in India and Nepal, with a focus on the effects of territorial versus non-territorial forms of recognition. It pushes against recent tendencies within South Asian Studies to see ethnic identity as called into being solely by state practices or ‘governmentality’ on the one hand, or as a newly commoditized form of belonging produced through neoliberal reforms on the other. Instead it argues that ethnicity must be understood as a multivalent concept that is at once embedded in specific histories of state and sub-state formation, and generative of them. Comparative in scope yet driven by qualitative data collected over years of engagement across the region, the paper charts a middle way between detailed ethnographic studies and large-scale comparative endeavours.

Questioning Borders: Social Movements, Political Parties and the Creation of New States in India

As the world’s largest multi-ethnic democracy, India has a federal constitution that is well-equipped with administrative devices that offer apparent recognition and measures of self-governance to territorially concentrated ethnic groups. This article analyzes how demands for political autonomy—or statehood—within the federal system have been used as a frame for social movement mobilization. It focuses on the most recent states to have been created in India: Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Uttarakhand, which came into being in 2000. These are the first states to have been created in India on a non-linguistic basis. Their creation has triggered questions about whether the creation of more, smaller states can improve political representation and help to make the state more responsive to diverse needs in India. This article draws attention to the processes which have brought borders into question, drawing social movements and political parties into alignment about the idea of creating new states. It ultimately looks at why the creation of states as a result of such processes may not lead to more substantive forms of political and economic citizenship on the part of marginalized communities. While the focus of the analysis will be on the processes that led up to statehood, the conclusions offer some insights into why pro-poor policy shifts at the national level in India have uneven regional effects. Despite the change in national political regime in India with the election of the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance in 2004, marginalized groups in India continue to experience the state through the refractive lens of multiple regional political histories. This article focuses on one part of the ever complex field of popular politics and resistance. It examines how, why and with what consequences some social movements in India have drawn on regional identity frames in electoral politics and demanded political autonomy in the form of statehood within the federal system. Explanations for the creation

Explaining Territorial Change in Federal Democracies: A Comparative Historical Institutionalist Approach

This article builds a framework drawn from historical institutionalism to analyse changes to the territorial composition of federal systems arising from the creation or admission of new sub-units. Despite the sustained interest among political scientists in the effects of federal design on ethnic conflict, economic development and prospects for democratic stability, there has been little sustained attempt to explain when and why territorial maps change over time. A historical institutionalist framework draws attention to the ways in which constellations of internal borders are underpinned by – and reproduce – patterns of power. The framework explains territorial change by studying the multiple layers that structure political life in federal settings and which through their interactions produce change. The article proceeds to explain territorial change in two countries with contrasting federal origins: India and the United States. In so doing, it questions the tendency within comparative politics to treat both countries as places of exception.

Inter-State Competition, Land Conflicts and Resistance in India

Literature on fiscal federalism has long debated whether inter-jurisdictional competition between subnational units encourages a “race to the bottom”, with competition to attract mobile capital leading to lower taxation and expenditure, and, consequently, the under-provision of public goods. The principal concerns of this literature have been taxation and expenditure, but the ability of state governments to acquire land for industry is also critical in the context of subnational competition. In this article, the authors ask how Indian state governments resolve the tensions arising from their dual role as both wooer and regulator of capital, as they simultaneously facilitate land acquisition and engage with movements that challenge it. The authors demonstrate that there is no simple “race to the bottom”. Inter-state competition has not produced a simple equation in favour of capital and a side-lining of the concerns of those displaced. Subnational approaches to land acquisition must be understood within local political, social and economic contexts.

National and Subnational Comparative Politics: Why, What and How

In this note, I present an overview of why comparative methods should be seen as useful for students of Indian politics. I suggest that there are four overarching reasons why comparison is important: (a) it helps to challenge ‘false’ exceptionalism; (b) it helps to challenge ‘false’ universalism (Rose, 1991; Halperin and Heath 2012, p. 203); (c) it can contribute to theory development better than single case studies; and (d) it helps to disaggregate the all-India picture in order to generate theories that are better able to capture the variation that exists within India without getting too lost in the detail of individual subnational cases. The note takes cognizance of the increasing primacy of the states as critical actors in both the arena of electoral politics from 1989 onwards (Yadav and Palshikar, 2003, 2008), as well as in the field of policy-making and implementation. Much of the focus in this piece is therefore on national and subnational comparisons, but this is not with the intention of reifying these political units as the sole or primary units of comparison. There are other units of analysis that can be just as fruitful, depending on the question under investigation: sub-regions of states (see, for example, Kumar, 2011); municipal governments (see Ruet and Lama-Rewal, 2009); or organizations within different regions (business associations, social movements, political parties, etc). The note will be organized around three questions: why compare, what to compare and how to compare.

Regional resilience and national party system change: India's 2014 general elections in context

For the first time in 30 years, a single national party has won a majority on its own in the Indian parliament, and does not depend on the support of regional party allies for a parliamentary majority. Yet it is too soon to pronounce the decline or marginalisation of regional parties in Indias national political life. The aggregate performance of regional parties remained resilient in the 2014 elections, even marginally improving over 2009. This article considers whether the 2014 elections mark a critical break in the position of regional parties at the national level. The principal argument is that the 2014 elections do not reflect a fundamental alteration in the dynamics of political regionalisation. Rather they suggest a new phase in the impact of regionalisation on the party system at the national level. In a landscape of continually increasing voter choice, electoral outcomes at the national level have begun to narrow to favour a smaller range of parties since 2004. The number of parties able to achieve influence via participation in cabinet governance or coalition has begun to decline. Political fragmentation has not gone away, but its consequences for election outcomes have changed.

States as laboratories: The politics of social welfare policies in India

ABSTRACT This article examines the role of India’s states in shaping the implementation and framing of social policy within India’s federal system. Since the 2000s, the central government has overseen a substantial expansion of social welfare policies partly through a new push toward rights-based social provision. Yet, it is India’s states that are both responsible for an increasing proportion of total public expenditure on social welfare provision as well as determining the nature and effectiveness of that provision across space. Drawing on a comparative research program across pairs of Indian states, three critical factors explaining how state-level political environments shape social policy are identified: the role of policy legacies in shaping policy frames; the role of social coalitions underpinning political party competition; and the role of political leaders in strengthening state capacity to achieve program goals.

Federalism, multi-level elections and social policy in Brazil and India

ABSTRACT Comparative studies often highlight the negative effects of federalism for welfare state expansion. We examine Brazil and India, which have both enhanced their welfare effort despite political fragmentation. We argue that federalism’s effects must be seen together with degrees of party system nationalisation. In Brazil, new social policies have reinforced a move towards greater party system nationalisation. Control over anti-poverty programmes has been recentralised leading to more even outcomes. In India, while the central government also introduced new social policies, expansion has been filtered by political regionalisation. The effectiveness of social provision relies on state governments, producing substantial territorial differentiation.

Institutional Performance and Vote Buying in India

Inefficient and corrupt institutions provide an incentive for citizens to focus on short causal chains, which prize instant benefits from direct, clientelist exchanges over the promise of uncertain and distant programmatic rewards. Drawing on a tightly controlled comparison arising from the bifurcation of a state within the Indian federal system into two units that have demonstrated marked differences in institutional development post division, and a survey administered across the new state boundary, we show that citizens are more responsive to small inducements in weak institutional settings where the delivery of basic goods by the state is less certain, but that these institutional effects weaken as the size of the inducement increases.

India’s Democracy at 70: The federalist compromise

The institutionalized recognition of diversity within India’s federal system has been crucial for democratic consolidation. Substantial decentralization since the 1990s has made state governments central actors in shaping economic activity and national-election outcomes. However, since his rise to national office in 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has projected an image of strong, central leadership. He has made political use of drama and crisis to reach a national audience, echoing a politics last seen under Indira Gandhi. As in that earlier period, federalism remains a critical arena for checks and balances in India’s democracy, especially as concerns grow about majoritarian nationalism.