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Abstract: Does colonialism have long-term effects on political stability? We address this question through
a study of India’s Naxalite insurgency, a Maoist rebellion that has been characterized by its left-wing
proponents as having roots in the colonial period. We highlight three mechanisms linking colonialism
with contemporary Naxalite violence–land inequality, discriminatory policies toward low-caste and tribal
groups, and upper-caste dominated administrative institutions. We then analyze how the degree of British
influence relates to Naxalite conflict in 589 districts from 1980-2011. We find a positive association
between British influence and the strength of the Naxalite rebellion across all of India, within the “Red
Corridor” region itself, and within former princely states. Our results are robust to a coarsened exact
matching analysis and a wide array of robustness checks. The findings call into question whether the
supposedly beneficial administrative and institutional legacies of colonialism can be evaluated without
reference to their social costs.
The era of European colonialism that began in the 16 th century resulted in major
transformations of state-society relations in many parts of the world. Colonial powers generally
sought to increase the colonial state’s penetration of society while minimizing the risk of
rebellion. They achieved this dual objective through substantial investments in infrastructure and
administration, but also by manipulating social divisions and hierarchies in ways that promoted
buy-in among local elites and mitigated resistance by the masses. How did policies that enhanced
state capacity at the expense of social cohesion impact levels of political stability over the long
run in the postcolonial world? Are former colonies more (or less) prone to political dysfunction,
violence, and armed insurgency than countries that were never colonized?
This article addresses the long-term effects of colonial rule through an analysis of India’s
Naxalite insurgency – a Maoist uprising largely supported by low castes and indigenous tribal
groups.1 The insurgency now dates back over half a century and was famously billed by Prime
Minister Manmohan Singh as “the single biggest internal security challenge facing our
country.”2 The movement is estimated to have mobilized between 6,500 and 9,000 fighters, at
one point operated in roughly 40 percent of India’s districts, and according to the Ministry of
Home Affairs has claimed more than 13,000 lives since its inception. 3 Moreover, the Naxalite
movement has clear historical antecedents in a sizable number of peasant uprisings that occurred
during the colonial era. Naxalite leaders themselves have cited Britain’s role in establishing
“semi-colonial” and “semi-feudal” conditions that make India ripe for revolution. 4
1
India’s Naxalite movement is named after the village of Naxalbari in West Bengal, where a small tribal revolt in
1967 against a local landlord sparked a major uprising throughout the region (Ray 2011).
2
The Hindu, May 24, 2010.
3
http://www.satp.org/satporgtp/countries/india/maoist/data_sheets/fatalitiesnaxalmha.htm, accessed November 13,
2017.
4
See, for example, Central Committee, CPI (Maoist), “Strategy and Tactics of the Indian Revolution,” Chapter 2.
1
While it is generally recognized that the Spanish undermined governance by setting up
extractive institutions (Acemoglu and Robinson 2012) and that the French diminished state
portray British colonialism as promoting bureaucratization, stronger state capacity, and better
judicial systems because it was less direct and because the British tended to colonize the least
developed areas in any given region (Lange, Mahoney, and vom Hau 2006). British rule has been
tied to a robust legal-administrative capacity in Mauritius (Lange 2009), higher levels of state
capacity and cohesion in Singapore (Huff 1994), as well as strengthened rule of law (Joireman
2001) and more robust democracy (Jensen and Wantchekon 2004) in Africa. British colonies
became democratic faster than other colonies and British colonialism is positively associated
At the same time, the long-term social effects of colonialism are known to have been
instability around the world by disrupting native societies and encouraging antagonism between
indigenous groups. Scholars have linked Belgian colonial legacies to the Rwandan Genocide
(Mamdani 2002), French legacies to ethnic violence in Mali (Keita 1998) and Sudan (Kanya-
Forstner 1969), Portuguese legacies to civil war in Angola (Birmingham 1966), and British
legacies to the Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya (Throup 1987). In such cases, the standard colonial
“divide-and-rule” strategy generated enduring horizontal inequalities between ethnic groups that
In this paper, we develop and test a theory that connects British colonialism in India to
grievances among low-caste and tribal populations. We hypothesize that these grievances in turn
led to these subaltern groups joining the Naxalite insurgency, which became concentrated in
2
former areas of direct rule. Similar to previous analyses of the effects of colonialism in India, we
leverage the fact that the British governed through a bifurcated system of direct rule in provinces
and indirect rule through native kings in the princely states (e.g. Banerjee, Iyer, and Somanathan
2005; Iyer 2010).5 Going beyond these studies, however, we note that the British ruled some
areas directly longer than others, and they continued to interfere in the affairs of some native
kingdoms even after they remained formally independent. We therefore focus on the degree of
British influence in a district, which we measure by the number of years a province was directly
governed by the British and the number of guns in British salutes to princely states.
We begin by drawing on the rich historical literature on colonial rule and peasant
rebellion in India to identify three specific mechanisms that link British rule to contemporary
low-caste and tribal grievances. First, the British exacerbated land inequality by granting
property rights to landlords and by commandeering forest lands that tribal populations
traditionally relied upon for sustenance. Second, the British systematically categorized and
ranked caste and tribal communities, which rigidified social inequalities. Third, the British
administrative practice, ultimately fostering distrust of India’s law enforcement and legal
institutions among low-caste and tribal groups. We analyze census and survey data to show that
the degree of British influence in former provinces and princely states is positively associated
with contemporary land inequality, caste conflict, and citizen distrust in the police.
We then test our argument with a statistical analysis of insurgent activity and violence
across 589 Indian districts over a 31-year period. We find that in both provinces and princely
5
Native kings were known by a variety of names. To the British they were princes, a diminutive title meant to
indicate their status relative to the colonial state. Hindu kings were known as rajas or maharajas, while Muslim
kings were known as nizams or nawabs.
3
states the likelihood and intensity of Naxalite violence is substantially higher today in areas of
greater British influence. These findings are robust to a variety of specifications as well as a
coarsened exact matching analysis that helps address the concern that the British annexed or tried
Our study of the Naxalite insurgency makes several important contributions to the
literature on conflict and political violence. Our analysis questions whether the supposedly
reference to their social costs. The very same agencies that served as the administrative “steel
frame” of the British Raj, and subsequently the Indian bureaucracy, also enacted policies that
generated the economic inequality and social divisions that fuel Maoist violence. By showing
how institutions that provided better administration and governance overall may have
concurrently given rise to long-term instability and conflict in some parts of India, we integrate
disparate literatures on the long-term administrative and social impacts of colonial rule. Further,
we provide historical context to the recent literature on horizontal inequalities and conflict by
demonstrating how colonial policies that attempt to order native populations and exclude
Weidmann, and Gleditsch 2011; Cederman, Gleditsch, and Buhaug 2013; Stewart 2008). Our
study also helps to fill a gap in our understanding by exploring the less-understood colonial
origins of peasant rebellion and conflict in the countryside (Kalyvas 2006). Finally, we
connection between historical factors and the more immediate causes of the rebellion that have
4
Colonialism and Patterns of Maoist Violence
Most studies of Maoist insurgent violence focus on the “Red Corridor,” a vast expanse of
territory in central and eastern India and have used a variety of contemporary political and
economic factors to explain the conflict. The prevailing view is that Naxalite violence has been
substantially fueled by poverty and horizontal inequalities structured by caste and tribal
identities. Naxalite violence is associated with unemployment and labor income shocks
(Dasgupta et. al. 2017; Fetzer 2014; Vanden Eynde 2017), the presence of mineral wealth and
mining operations that dispossess tribal populations of their land (Hoelscher et al. 2012), the
heavy dependence of the rural population upon renewable resources (Gawande et. al. 2015),
economic inequality structured by caste and tribal identities (Gomes 2015), and the political
exclusion of low castes and tribals (Chandra and García-Ponce 2015; Pasquale 2015). Poverty,
economic inequality, and political exclusion make low-caste and tribal populations uniquely
vulnerable to the appeals and recruitment strategies of insurgent leaders who promise to provide
justice and retribution against high castes and to provide short-term economic benefits ranging
While these explanations are no doubt compelling, there are reasons to suspect that
colonial institutions and policies also play an important role in explaining violence in the Red
Corridor. First, the British contributed enormously to the scope and severity of peasant and tribal
unrest during their rule (Gough 1974, p. 1392). Ranajit Guha (1999), compiling an
incomprehensive list, records 110 separate revolts during the colonial period. Furthermore,
Maoist leaders have consciously drawn connections between their movement and these earlier
uprisings against the British. Naxal ideologues view the history of India as one of “uninterrupted
historic struggles carried out by the Indian people against the British imperialists” and
5
subsequently “against feudal exploitation and oppression” stemming from the colonial period. 6
They argue that “British imperialism has been organically linked to feudalism from the very
beginning” as has the “comprador big bourgeoisie…that serves the capitalists of imperialist
countries and is nurtured by them.” 7 Naxal propaganda further states that independence from the
British was essentially “fake,” and although the British left India, colonialism never ended but
instead takes on newer and more insidious forms. In this way, they see their movement as the
climactic struggle in a long “series of peasant struggles and rebellions against the British
colonialists and their feudal props, such as the Santhal revolt of 1854-56” that marked the
support for the idea that colonial legacies contributed to the uprising. The Naxalite insurgency
has undergone three distinct phases that differed somewhat in terms of their geographic location
and social composition (Banerjee 2009). The first relatively short phase began in 1967 with an
uprising in the village of Naxalbari in a part of West Bengal that the British ruled for more than a
century. During this phase, Naxalite leaders pursued a “politics of assassination” and urban
warfare under the leadership of Charu Mazumdar with very little emphasis on mass mobilization
or the rural sector. As a result, this initial mobilization was crushed following Mazumdar’s death
in police custody and the arrest of other key leaders in 1971. Subsequently, the movement
underwent a long period of reorganization. During this second phase, a new consensus emerged
on a revolutionary line that emphasized mass mobilization around the concerns of low-caste
6
CPI (Maoist), “Party Programme,” Pt. 4.
7
CPI (Maoist), “Strategy and Tactics of the Indian Revolution,” Chapter 3.
8
Ibid.
6
sharecroppers and agricultural laborers in the plains regions of Bihar and Andhra Pradesh where,
in most districts, the British had ruled between 150 and 182 years.
The movement’s third phase, which is still ongoing, saw the reunification of the
movement under the banner of the Communist Party of India (Maoist) in 2004 and intense
mobilization and activity across the Red Corridor. Recently, the conflict has spread into the more
forested areas of the newly formed states of Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand, as well as tribal regions
of Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, and Orissa. There has also been a gradual shift among
movement leaders from a sole focus on mobilizing dalits (“untouchables”) against feudalism and
Throughout these three stages of conflict, insurgent activity has been greater in areas of
former British influence than in other parts of India. Figures 1.1 and 1.2 depict the spatial
breadth of the insurgency. The first map highlights the administrative districts in which Maoist
organizational activity was detected between 2008 and 2011 by the Government of India’s
Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA). The second displays a measure of insurgent violence that
codes whether a district experienced any Maoist attacks or casualties from 1980-2010. This
coding is based on two variables discussed in greater detail in the data and analysis section: the
number of attacks carried out by Maoist rebels between 2005 and 2009 recorded in the
Worldwide Incidents Tracking System (WITS) database, and the number of deaths resulting
from Maoist attacks for the period 1980-2010 recorded in a dataset compiled by Gomes (2015).
Figures 1.3 and 1.4 depict the degree of British influence during the colonial period.
Figure 1.3 illustrates the number of years that a district was governed directly by the British.
7
Many of the Maoist-affected districts in Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Orissa, and West
Bengal were governed by the British for 100 years or more while districts that were never
governed by the British in places like Gujarat, Rajasthan and northern Karnataka have not
witnessed any Maoist activity. Figure 1.4 illustrates the number of guns in the salutes granted by
the British to princely states. As we explain in greater detail below, gun salutes serve as a good
proxy for the extent of British influence in indirectly ruled territories because more independent
territories tended to receive higher gun salutes. With the exception of Hyderabad, the princely
states in today’s Red Corridor had either no gun salutes at all or very small gun salutes. The
princely states with the most stature and independence were mainly concentrated in the west
How did colonial policies generate horizontal inequalities and grievances among low
castes and tribals? And to what extent do the legacies of colonial rule persist into the modern
era? While the notion espoused in Naxalite propaganda that India continues to be ruled indirectly
by the British or other foreign powers is farfetched, the divergent histories of provinces and
princely states did lead to persistent differences in how citizens viewed and participated in
government institutions and the degree to which they incorporated or excluded low-caste and
tribal groups. We identify three ways that the British aggravated the types of horizontal
inequalities and grievances that frequently contribute to peasant unrest: 1) by instituting new
policies against low-caste and tribal communities; and 3) by facilitating the capture of
bureaucratic institutions by upper castes. Princely states were often insulated from many of these
divisive policies instituted in British India. As we show, the relationship between peasants and
8
rulers in the princely states also differed considerably from the relationship between peasants and
British administrators or landlords in the provinces.9 Following independence, the leaders of the
central government failed to change many of the key features of the colonial state that had
previously led to peasant unrest while former princely states continued to pursue policies that
were more egalitarian than those being imposed in the former provinces.
Land Inequality
The Maoist Party Programme states that “the British colonialists preserved the feudal
forces” by giving power to “Zamindars, who acted as their social props, through permanent
settlement.”10 Most historians would agree with this assessment. The British radically disrupted
precolonial landholding systems when they became the paramount rulers of the subcontinent by
empowering a new class of landlords. This process began in 1793 with the institution of a
zamindari system (the “Permanent Settlement”) in the Bengal Presidency (much of modern day
Bihar, Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh, and West Bengal). While zamindars were present in the
precolonial period, they served as intermediaries between peasants and the rulers of the Mughal
Empire – they were revenue agents who had no property rights over land. Drawing on English
conceptions of land ownership, British administrators enacted a system of land tenure that
abolished the top layer of property administration that existed under the Mughals (the jagir) and
gave ownership rights to zamindars in the hopes of incentivizing them to make productive
In reality, these “reforms” had the opposite effect, generating subinfeudation and
inequality rather than productivity and growth. Under zamindari tenure, peasants became
9
Lord Lytton, Viceroy of India, noted that “The Indian peasantry is an inert mass. If it ever moves at all it will move
in obedience, not to its British benefactors, but to its native chiefs and princes” (Copland 1973, 210).
10
Maoist Party Programme, pt. 2.
9
tenants-at-will and could be dispossessed for any reason. Consequently, land began to heavily
concentrate in the hands of landlords throughout north India: in the sprawling United Provinces,
all the land was owned by less than five percent of the population by independence (Stokes 1978,
205). Policies that increased land inequality were not unique to the north; when the British
brought central-eastern India under their control in the mid-19th century, they instituted the
similar malguzari system.11 Moreover, the areas that were held by the British for the longest
period of time were most likely to have landlord-based systems because British administrators
feared the peasantry more in the shadow of the French revolution but became more influenced by
Princely kingdoms utilized a variety of landholding systems, but in contrast to the British
generally treated cultivators on their lands as hereditary and did not displace them arbitrarily
(Singh 2003). Moreover, in the late 19th and early 20th century, many native rulers began to
establish ryotwari settlements in which land tributes were collected directly from cultivators
without the use of landlords. For example, Baroda in South India implemented several reforms
geared toward the peasantry in the late 19th century, lowering agricultural taxes and
incorporating cultivators into a more direct relationship with the government (Hardiman 1978).
Jaipur and Jodhpur in north India implemented ryotwari tenure, while Mysore, Bikaner, and
11
In the southern Madras Presidency, colonial administrators instituted a ryotwari system in which the revenue was
collected directly from cultivators without the use of intermediary landlords (Banerjee and Iyer 2005, p. 1195). The
decision to implement ryotwari in the South may explain why there was significantly less low-caste and tribal unrest
in directly-ruled areas around Madras and Bombay (Beaglehole 1966). The overriding tendency of the British,
however, was to enhance the power of landlords relative to peasants, sometimes even in areas where cultivator-
based systems predominated (Verghese 2017).
12 Peasant unrest over land was not completely unknown to the princely states. One battleground was the kingdom
of Hyderabad in the Telangana region, which experienced tenancy agitation and rural rebellion in the 1940s and
later became a hotbed of Maoist activity. Notably, however, this area was controlled by large landlords (deshmukhs)
that had been given individual property rights in the mid-19th century through reforms instituted by Salar Jung,
Hyderabad’s chief minister (Thirumali 1992). Thus, the Telangana region is the exception that proves the rule –
10
In addition to instituting zamindari tenure systems, the British colonial state
fundamentally altered adivasi land rights by declaring itself the conservator of forest lands where
tribals had lived without interference for generations. This policy was instituted throughout
central-eastern India (much of modern day Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, and Orissa) where the
country’s tribal population has historically been concentrated. Huge swaths of forest were
suddenly placed in reserve, especially areas that contained rich forest produce or mineral wealth.
The Indian Forest Act of 1878, as Gadgil and Guha note, “...by one stroke of the executive pen
attempted to obliterate centuries of customary use of the forest by rural populations all over
India” (Guha and Gadgil 1989, p. 145). Furthermore, forest lands became overburdened by an
influx of Forest Department officials, immigrants, moneylenders, and commercial firms, and
illiterate adivasi cultivators often unknowingly signed away their land to such encroachers.
Subsequent attempts to rectify the inequality generated during the British period mostly
met with failure. The results of ambitious land reforms in the 1950s were limited as large
landlords evaded new land ceilings through simple tactics like distributing title deeds among
family members (Metcalf and Metcalf 2001, p. 244). The failure of land reform following
independence led to the persistence of land inequality into the modern era. Figure 2.1 shows how
district-level land inequality, measured by the 1991 land gini index, is highly correlated with the
duration of British rule. Inequality and landlordism continue to have serious developmental
investment, yields, and public investments in health and education (Banerjee and Iyer 2005).
caste hierarchies were more rigid and relations between landlords and tenants more contentious because the policies
of Hyderabad’s rulers more closely resembled those of the British than those pursued by most other rajas.
11
Discriminatory Policies
Another major change during the British period was the introduction of several new
policies that discriminated against low castes and tribals and reified the social inequalities
inherent in India’s caste system. Though caste existed long before British rule, colonialism – and
more specifically, the desire on the part of colonial administrators to simplify and systematize a
complex and foreign society – led to an emphasis on caste that was previously unknown in India
(Cohn 1996). The first scientific census in 1871 attempted to place thousands of diverse jatis
(endogamous birth groups) into a four-tiered (varna) structure, a practice that helped rigidify the
caste system and increased the salience of caste in the administrative context (Bayly 1999,
Chapter 3). In the 1901 census, enumerators ranked jatis. L. Middleton, Director of Census
Operations for Punjab, laid out the deleterious results of these new policies:
Caste…was rigid among the higher castes, but malleable amongst the lower. We pigeon-holed
everyone by caste, and if we could not find a true caste for them, labeled them with the name of
an hereditary occupation. We deplore the caste system and its effects on social and economic
problems, but we are largely responsible for the system we deplore. (Ghurye 2008, p. 43).
This process of ranking castes led, in the short term, to the mobilization of thousands of
claimants from various castes who jockeyed for better positioning in the caste system and, over
the long term, the augmentation of caste identity in mainstream Indian politics (Dirks 2001).
The British likewise instituted new Criminal Tribes legislation that pertained to certain
tribes with a history of criminal behavior. This legislation criminalized every member of a
Criminal Tribe, including those who had never committed a crime. These tribes were heavily
stigmatized, prevented from traveling freely, and jailed for not reporting their movements. In
1949, A.V. Thakkar, a member of the Bombay Depressed Classes and Aboriginal Tribes
Committee, noted that “it may be said that a much larger percentage of these tribes were led into
12
criminality by giving them the stigma of criminal tribes” (Hasnain 2007, p. 237). The British also
disrupted tribal life in several other ways, such as the introduction of a monetary economy to
replace a barter system, and by allowing an influx of Christian missionaries into tribal areas.
Generally speaking, rajas and nawabs did not implement the same type of discriminatory
policies toward tribals and low castes. Most kings protected and gave ceremonial deference to
adivasis whom they regarded as the original inhabitants of India. Princely governments often
incorporated adivasis into the government apparatus: tribes in the northern region of Rajputana,
for instance, were employed as hunters and guardians of the royal treasury (Varma 1978). In
Travancore and Cochin, laws were passed that prevented outsiders from settling in adivasi
territory (Mohanty 2006, p. 178). Several kings were similarly noteworthy for taking the lead in
stipulating that 50 percent of all government jobs be reserved for non-Brahmin (priestly) castes
(Mendelsohn and Vicziany 1998, p. 129). In Travancore, maharaja Sri Chithira Thirunal adopted
the most liberal measure by allowing untouchables for the first time in Indian history to enter
Hindu temples, a policy that weakened the strict caste hierarchies of the kingdom (Jeffrey 1976).
Discrimination against low castes and tribals likewise continues as a major feature of
contemporary politics. While the postcolonial state technically “abolished” the caste system via a
modern liberal constitution, the legacies of policies first instituted under British rule did not
dissipate – caste is the “specter that continues to haunt the body politic of postcolonial India”
(Dirks 2001, p. 17). Despite affirmative action policies, low-caste and tribal communities still
suffer enormous discrimination (Narula 1999), and some scholars argue that government quotas
have only exacerbated discrimination against them (Shah 2002; Wilkinson 2000).
13
A brief analysis of survey data from the 2005 Indian Human Development Survey
(IHDS) suggests a relationship between British rule and long-term caste conflict (Figure 2.2).
The IHDS includes responses to questions on social relations from 44,000 randomly selected
individuals in about 320 districts. One questions asks: “in this village/neighbourhood, how much
conflict would you say there is between communities/jatis that live here?” In the original dataset,
responses were coded “a lot of conflict” (1), “some conflict” (2), and “not much conflict” (3).
We flip and truncate the scale so “2” reflects high conflict and “0” represents low conflict and
plot the variable against the number of years British. The analysis demonstrates a clear
correlation between the number of years a district was ruled by the British and the sense by
Elite Capture
The third way that British rule disadvantaged low castes and tribals was through the
introduction of a new centralized, Westernized bureaucracy. Among the new organizations they
constructed were the Indian Civil Service, the Imperial Police, and the Imperial Forest
Department. While these organizations are often considered to have promoted bureaucratization
and the rule of law, they were dominated by upper-caste elites who tilted the promulgation of
rules and their enforcement toward their own interests. This is essentially what Naxal ideologues
are referring to when they characterize the Indian government as a “semi-colonial state”
Three institutions have come under special scrutiny by historians and social activists for
their role in oppressing low-caste and tribal minorities – the police, courts, and the Indian Forest
Service. Sandria Freitag argues that the police and the courts formed “a colonial social order
designed to reinforce those at the top of the hierarchy of groups” (Freitag 1991, p. 261). The
14
British purposefully isolated police officers from low castes and adivasis, and over time the
police became an increasingly repressive instrument of social coercion (Arnold 1986). New
courts adjudicated land disputes against low castes and adivasis, codifying land dispossession.
And corrupt Forest Department officials were complicit in cheating adivasis out of their land.
W.J. Culshaw, a Christian missionary in India, wrote a contemporaneous account detailing how
British administrators allowed the Santhal tribe to be dispossessed by outside groups (Culshaw
1945). The Santhals, decades later, would instigate the 1967 rebellion in Naxalbari (Singh 1995).
Following independence, India’s new leaders made an explicit decision not to dismantle
the main institutions of colonial rule. All three of the main arms of the contemporary All India
Services – the Indian Administrative Service (IAS), Indian Forest Service (IFS), and the Indian
Police Service (IPS) – are direct descendants of British organizations. Postcolonial leaders
considered the IAS a pivotal tool for establishing political order, and in the ensuing decades the
institution has been incredibly resistant to reform (Potter 1986). Similarly, the IFS has not altered
colonial forest policy, failing to make substantive reforms after independence (Kulkarni 1983;
Haeuber 1993). The All India Services remain elite and largely undemocratic governing
institutions that derive their manpower primarily from the dominant groups in society.
Prior to independence, the princely states were governed quite differently from the
provinces. In princely states, the court of the raja or nawab was the center of government
activity, and the main administrative institutions of British India like the civil service and the
police extended only to the provinces (Ramusack 2004). While the Indian government imported
these institutions of British India into former princely areas following independence, differences
in styles of governance between British and princely India remained salient for some time. Many
former kings continued to govern their territories in the first decades after colonialism, and
15
policies in these areas often remained unchanged (Richter 1971). As late as 2004, the states of
Rajasthan, Punjab, and Himachal Pradesh had Chief Ministers from former princely families
(Madsen et al. 2011). Princely rulers also controlled the Civil Lists and managed to have their
princely states of Indore and Gwalior, for example, most of the new IAS force was simply
transferred from the princely bureaucracy, even though the law stipulated that they should be
selected from outside the state per the results of a competitive examination (Jones 1974, p. 100).
It is likely that such differences in the culture of state-society interactions would persist,
especially when it comes to institutions with clear roots in the colonial era. The Naxalites have
themselves pointed to the police as one institution that has aggravated tensions in rural areas by
consistently discriminating against low-caste and tribal communities. To explore the relationship
between colonialism and trust in the police, we looked at responses to a question from the IHDS
about how much confidence citizens have in the police “to enforce the law.” In the original
dataset, responses were coded as high confidence (1), moderate confidence (2), and low
confidence (3). We flip and truncate the scale so that “2” reflects high confidence and “0” low
confidence. As Figure 2.3 demonstrates, the length of British rule correlates negatively with
citizen trust in the police. Further analysis shows that this distrust extends to other colonial era
institutions like the courts but not democratically elected postcolonial institutions like
legislatures. For example, Figure 2.4 is based on a question about how much confidence citizens
have in the state government “to look after the people” and provides no evidence that British rule
16
Data and Analysis
In the previous discussion, we identified three ways that British colonialism contributed
to the economic and political exclusion of low-caste and tribal groups. We contend that
grievances associated with such exclusion then led to higher Maoist violence in areas formerly
ruled by the British. To test this argument, we analyzed Maoist organizational activity and
conflict outcomes in 589 Indian districts covering the period 1980-2011. We explore the
relationship between British influence and violence at an all-India level by asking “what makes
the Red Corridor red?” We also look at the relationship between British influence on levels of
violence within the Red Corridor region and within regions that were formerly governed as
princely states. In this analysis, we demonstrate a relationship between the level of British
influence and measures of insurgent organizational activity and violence that is robust to a
Our dependent variables consist of four measures of Maoist insurgent activity and
violence. First, we examine whether colonialism is correlated with the organizational capacity of
Maoists across India. The data on Maoist organizational activity in each district come from a
Right to Information (RTI) petition filed by the South Asia Terrorism Portal (SATP), an online
terrorism database. 13 The Ministry of Home Affairs response to the RTI request lists all districts
between 2008 and 2011 in which the MHA’s Naxal Management Division recorded Maoist-
related violence or organizational activities. From this list of Maoist-affected districts we created
a binary variable, coded “1” if the government detected Maoist activity between 2008 and 2011,
and “0” otherwise. This variable represents the most sensitive measure of insurgent presence at
13
See http://www.satp.org/satporgtp/countries/india/maoist/data_sheets/2008-2011.pdf. Accessed November 13,
2017.
17
the height of the Naxalite conflict. Maoist insurgents may engage in organizational activities in a
district, like disseminating propaganda and recruiting new cadres, without in fact executing any
attacks. Such activities would be recorded by the MHA’s Naxal Management Division, but
experienced any Maoist attacks or related casualties from 1980-2010 and “0” otherwise, based
on conflict data from the National Counterterrorism Center’s Worldwide Incidents Tracking
System (WITS) and Joseph Flavian Gomes’ Maoist conflict dataset (Gomes 2015). WITS is a
database of terrorist and conflict events derived from press reports that was compiled by the
National Counterterrorism Center between 2004 and 2012.14 The Gomes dataset covers the
period 1980 to 2010 and combines data from WITS and three other sources: the Global
Terrorism Database (GTD); the Rand-MIPT Terrorism Incident Database; and the SATP.
Our third conflict measure is the number of insurgent attacks recorded in the WITS
dataset. While available for a shorter period, the WITS data provide a more accurate reflection of
levels of insurgent violence than other publicly available datasets. They are just as accurate as
unpublished police data when we consider incidents with two or more fatalities.15 The WITS
data also provide a unique advantage in measuring the frequency of insurgent attacks.
Specifically, the WITS coding protocol includes an “intentionality requirement,” which says that
“there has to be no evidence in the incident that the event was started by someone other than the
group committing the attack” (Behlendorf et. al. 2016, p. 649). This coding requirement enables
14
WITS was discontinued in April of 2012 when its funding was cut by the U.S. Congress. We were able to obtain
and analyze data for the period 2005-2009.
15
Behlendorf et. al. (2016) compare events reported in GTD, WITS and SATP with official police statistics in the
state of Andhra Pradesh. According to the study, WITS reported 31 percent of leftwing terrorist events reported in
police data, whereas SATP reported 21 percent and GTD just four percent. The difference between WITS and
official police reports narrows with the increased lethality of attacks. WITS tracked 50 percent of fatal events listed
in police records, and 100 percent of events involving more than two fatalities.
18
the researcher to better distinguish between Maoist-initiated attacks and the infamous “fake
encounters” in which police initiate conflict with the intent to eliminate suspected Maoist rebels
The Gomes dataset includes counts of the number of dead and wounded in Maoist-related
incidents. Unlike the WITS dataset, the data in Gomes is not limited to insurgent attacks but also
includes casualties resulting from police actions taken against insurgents as well as
conflagrations in which it is unclear who initiated the violence. The obvious advantage of the
Gomes dataset is its comprehensiveness. By combining data from four separate sources, it covers
almost the entire duration of the insurgency’s most recent phase, and it records more events than
The data we use in our analysis offer distinct advantages over those used in many
previous analyses of Maoist insurgent violence, including datasets based on vernacular press
reports (Dasgupta et. al. 2017; Gawande et. al. 2015), machine-coded data (Fetzer 2014), and
government reports collected during field research (Mukherjee 2017). First, the datasets we rely
upon are all publicly available, thereby making our analysis easily replicable. Additionally, the
data cover all of India, rather than just conflict outcomes in a handful of districts in the Red
Corridor, making it possible to explicitly address the question of why Maoist conflict
concentrates in some areas and not others. Another advantage of these data is that they are based
on codings of reports found in the major English daily newspapers. While local language dailies
typically record more incidents than national English dailies, the journalistic standards of local
language dailies are not as high as the national English dailies, whose reporters are less likely to
19
accept bribes to report on an event unless it has been confirmed by multiple sources. 16
Additionally, by incorporating a wide variety of sources (MHA, WITS, GTD, Rand-MIPT, and
SATP), our data enable us to cover a longer timeframe than most previous analyses, which tend
to focus on a handful of years in the early-to mid-2000s. For example, Mukherjee’s (2017) study
is based on a coding of an unpublished MHA report pertaining to only 55 districts for the
Our analysis directly exploits variation in the extent to which British institutions
influenced or replaced local institutions. In the aftermath of the 1857 Rebellion, a widespread
revolt that took a full year for the East India Company to suppress, Queen Victoria officially
renounced the policy of annexing princely states. Consequently, 45 percent of the land in India
remained under the rule of native kings, and after 1858 none of these territories were annexed
(Jalal 1995, p. 32). During the colonial period roughly 25 percent of the Indian population (in
1901, almost 60 million people) lived under the control of native kings who frequently exercised
In this way, India remained officially divided between “provinces” and “princely states,”
but there is substantial heterogeneity even within these categories. By 1857, British rule had been
established for a much longer duration in some provinces than others. And while the British
stopped annexing princely states, they continued to interfere in the internal affairs of many of
them. To account for these contextual historical factors, we place special emphasis on a district’s
level of British influence (see Figure 1). Among provinces, we measure British influence with
the number of years the British controlled a district, based on the logic that colonial policies
16
Interview with Ajai Sahni, Director of Institute for Conflict in New Delhi, March 2015. For a good illustration of
the role of money in reporting on state and local politics, see Roberts (2017, p. 122).
20
became more institutionalized over the long term. This variable was constructed by referencing
To measure British influence in the princely states, we drew on data pertaining to gun
salutes taken from Iyer (2010). Many princely kingdoms were given a salute (ranging from zero
to 21 guns) that was a ceremonial marker of prestige (Jeffrey 1978). Higher gun salutes entailed
more deference in the eyes of the British – the 21-gun salute states were large, independent
kingdoms like Hyderabad, Mysore, Jammu and Kashmir, Gwalior, and Baroda. They were also
the most populous: the 24 kingdoms that received salutes of 17 or higher accounted for 70
percent of the total princely state population (Kooiman 2002, p. 18). Smaller states with lower
salutes (or no salute) often continued to experience British influence even after 1858. We use this
Conceptually, these two measures improve on the use of dummy variables to measure
direct and indirect rule (e.g. Iyer 2010; Hoelscher et. al. 2012), although our results are robust to
the use of dichotomous measures as well. Our measurements of British influence also differ from
Mukherjee’s (2017) coding scheme, which conceptualizes indirect rule as taking two discrete
forms: formal indirect rule (princely states) and an informal indirect rule (British zamindari and
historiography, and because in focusing solely on land tenure it ignores the many other
previously discussed aspects of colonial rule that negatively impacted Indian society, such as the
reification of the caste system and the privileging of high-caste elites in the colonial bureaucracy.
17
See http://districts.nic.in/
21
It also ignores the fact that the British were responsible for the establishment of the zamindari
Model Specification
We ran three sets of regressions to test the link between colonialism and Maoist conflict.
At an all-India level, we regressed our dichotomous measures of insurgent activity and violence
on the number of years a district was controlled by the British using logit models. This enabled
us to analyze the question of “what makes the Red Corridor red?” and explore whether British
rule is related to why some districts are more vulnerable to Maoist influence and violence than
others. Next, we analyzed the effect of British rule on violence outcomes within the Red
Corridor by regressing the number of Maoist attacks and related casualties on the number of
years a district was controlled by the British. For our analysis, the Red Corridor is defined as the
districts in which the Government of India reported Maoist insurgent activity in its response to
the SATP RTI request, or in other words, the districts coded “1” in our first measure of insurgent
activity. Finally, to test our argument about British influence in princely states, we regressed the
number of Maoist attacks and related casualties on the gun salute measure. For the second and
third set of regressions, we ran negative binomial models to account for the discrete, non-
negative nature of the counts of Maoist attacks and casualties. If our argument about the long-
term effects of British influence is correct, then we would expect the number of years a district
was ruled by the British to be positively correlated with Maoist violence but the gun salute
with Maoist violence. We included controls for poverty and levels of human development,
18
We present a more detailed discussion of our coding scheme in relation to Mukherjee’s in Appendix B.
22
measured as the percentage of the population that reports having “no assets,” and literacy rates
from the 2001 Indian census. 19 Since many analysts and observers point to mining as both a
major grievance and a source of revenue for the Maoist leadership (Miklian and Carney 2010),
we include an indicator variable coded “1” if bauxite, iron ore, or coal mining activity is reported
by the Ministry of Mines. We also controlled for the percentage of the population that is
comprised of Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Scheduled Tribes (STs), as these are the main
aggrieved groups who have taken up arms against the state, and we included squared terms to
test for a curvilinear relationship between SC/ST populations and insurgent activity (Gomes
2015). We controlled for the geographic area of a given district, forest cover, and population
density because the state is typically thought to have a harder time rooting out Maoists in larger,
forested, and less populated districts (Collier et. al. 2003). We also clustered all of our standard
Main Results
The results of our analysis, presented in Table 1, provide strong support for the argument
that contemporary Naxalite violence is related to colonial rule. Our logit models of insurgent
activity and violence at the all-India level are presented in columns (1) and (2). Our negative
binomial models of insurgent attacks and the number of dead and wounded within the Red
Corridor are presented in columns (3) and (4). The coefficients for the number of years of British
rule are positive and statistically significant at the .01 level in all four of these models. Mining
activity is also a significant predictor of Maoist activity in all four of these models, while district
size is statistically significant in models (3) and (4), suggesting that within the Red Corridor,
Maoists are more likely to concentrate their attacks in less administratively dense areas. Other
19
Assets include televisions, cars, access to banking, etc. See online Appendix A for detailed descriptions of the
control variables used in our analysis.
23
controls, including literacy, caste and tribal identity, forest cover, and population density are not
Columns (5) and (6) present our negative binomial models of insurgent attacks and the
number of dead and wounded within the former princely states, where British influence is
measured by the gun salute given to each kingdom. Gun salutes are negative and significant
across both models, meaning that lower salute states (those with more British influence) have
more violence. These results make sense in historical context, and constitute an important
rejoinder to the argument that because some former princely states experience Naxalite attacks
and violence, princely rule could be a cause of Maoist violence (Mukherjee 2017). Consider, for
example, a comparison of the kingdom of Hyderabad (the most populous and prestigious
princely state in India) and the princely state of Bastar (which requested a 9-gun salute but did
not receive it), both located within the Red Corridor. While the British generally avoided
meddling in Hyderabad State (Regani 1963), they governed Bastar directly (including, quite
notably, through Englishmen rather than native Indian officials) for 42 years between 1891-1947.
It was during this period that the British commandeered forests from local tribes and instituted
heavy land taxes, which led to a series of tribal rebellions (Verghese 2016). While there has been
serious violence in many of the districts that comprise the former Hyderabad State, Bastar has
become the epicenter of Maoist conflict – it is the single deadliest region for Naxalite violence in
India today.
In addition to their statistical significance, the models also predict a highly substantive
impact of British rule on Maoist insurgent activity. Figures 3.1 and 3.2 show the predicted
24
probabilities of insurgent activity and presence based on Models (1) and (2) of Table 1. The
predicted probability of insurgent activity triples from around 20% in a district that was formerly
part of a princely state to about 60% in a district that was governed by the British for 190 years.
The likelihood of Maoist presence increases six-fold from around 5% to more than 30%. Our
models suggest a similarly large substantive impact of British rule on insurgent attacks and
casualties within the Red Corridor and princely states. Models (3) and (4) predict that districts
within the Red Corridor governed by the British for the maximum number of years will
experience double the number of attacks and four times the number of casualties compared to
those with no history of direct rule, while Models (5) and (6) predict that princely states with full
21-gun salutes will experience close to zero insurgent attacks and casualties.20
One potential concern with our analysis is that the experience of colonization was not
randomly assigned across the subcontinent. The British never had a coherent master plan for
conquering India, and British officials were often conflicted on the objectives of empire.21 But
the territorial expansion of the Raj tended to be profit-driven. A chief consideration for British
administrators when annexing territory was thus the productivity and value of land. As Barbara
Ramusack notes, by the time “…Queen Victoria renounced any further British annexation, the
princely states were located mainly in less economically productive areas” (Ramusack 2004, p.
186). To the extent that enduring geographic features of some districts influence the
organizational capacity and behavior of Maoist insurgents but are not randomly distributed
20
See Appendix Figure D3.
21
Francis Wylie, Political Advisor to the Viceroy, alluded to this fact in 1970 by reminiscing that the empire in
India was “...surely the oddest political set-up that the world has ever seen” (Kooiman 2002, 17).
25
To address this threat to validity, we utilize coarsened exact matching (CEM) to create
better balance between “treatment” and “control” groups in the dataset. While there is no perfect
solution for dealing with endogeneity bias, studies show that matching performs as well as pure
experiments (Dehejia and Wahba 1999). Coarsened exact matching is less sensitive to
score matching (Iacus, King, and Porro 2012, p. 11), and helps to produce less model-dependent
For our analysis, we first divided districts into treatment and control groups based on the
number of years each district was ruled by the British. Districts that never came under British
rule were automatically categorized as control cases. For the remaining districts, we used the
implementation of the “Doctrine of Lapse” (DOL) in 1848 as a cutoff for distinguishing between
treatment and control cases – those the British annexed before the DOL was implemented were
categorized as treatment cases, and those that were annexed after the implementation of the DOL
fell into the control category. The DOL was an aggressive annexation policy, instituted from
1848-56, which allowed the British to annex any princely state in which a ruler died without a
direct male heir.22 From a theoretical standpoint, the implementation of DOL is a natural cutoff
because it radically changed the logic of conquest during the time it was in force. It is important
to note, however, that 95 percent of districts that were ever controlled by the British were
acquired before the implementation of the DOL and that our results are robust to other cutoff
22
Iyer (2010) uses the DOL itself as an instrumental variable for colonial rule. Iyer argues that since the law allowed
for the annexation of princely states where kings did not produce natural male heirs, annexation following the
implementation of the DOL was random – that is, based on the death of a ruler. However, several princely states that
should have lapsed were not annexed (such as Karauli and Chhatarpur), suggesting that annexation was not
randomized in practice. Moreover, only 5% of Indian districts were annexed under this policy. Consequently, we
think that the DOL is better leveraged as part of a matching strategy rather than an instrumental variable analysis.
26
points, including the average number of years that districts were controlled by the British, and
the 1857 Rebellion (after which the British halted their annexation of new territories altogether).
Next, we preprocessed the data to match treatment and control districts based on four
variables that we believe are consistent with the logic used by the British to annex economically
productive territories: coastal access, the existence of mineral rich alluvial soil, rainfall levels,
and the extent of forest cover. We expect that the British were more likely to colonize the
coastline, areas with more productive soil and higher rainfall, and agriculturally settled regions
as opposed to forests. Basic t-tests show statistically significant differences for each of these
variables between areas governed by the British and those that remained princely states, and
matching on these variables helped to improve the balance between treatment and control
cases.23 The CEM procedure left us with a dataset of 458 matched observations—230 districts
that were governed as princely states and 228 districts that were ruled by the British.
After preprocessing the data with CEM, we reran our analysis using the DOL cutoff as
the treatment and the two binary measures of Maoist presence (MHA and Gomes/WITS) as the
dependent variables. Table 2 reports models with no controls, to account for potential
multicollinearity and post-treatment bias, as well as models with a full set of controls. The results
of the models with full controls suggest that the odds of coming under Maoist influence are 4.8
times greater for districts that came under British rule before 1848 than those that did not. The
odds of experiencing Maoist-related deaths or casualties are 3.4 times greater for districts that
23
Table C2 in the online appendix contains the results of the t-tests. Balance can be summarized with the
multivariate imbalance measure, ℒ1 (Iacus, King, and Porro 2011). ℒ1 ranges from 1 to 0, with 1 indicating that the
distributions of the treatment and control groups exactly coincide, and 0 indicating no overlap of the two groups.
The CEM matching procedure reduces ℒ1 by about 30 percent, from .51 pre-CEM to .29 post-CEM.
27
came under the control of the British before 1848 than those that did not. These effects are
ensure that our results were not an artefact of any specific variables, measures, or cases. We
performed stepwise regressions to ensure that our results were robust to the inclusion or
exclusion of different sets of control variables.24 We reran our models using a number of
additional controls, including landlord tenure, land inequality, distance to state capital, an
substituted a dummy variable for British direct rule in our main regressions and the test of the
mechanisms, instead of the number of years British, to see if an alternative measure of our main
independent variable would matter.26 We examined whether our results regarding the effect of
colonialism on Maoist violence across all of India are robust to using a count variable with
negative binomial models rather than logit models.27 To ensure that the conflict dynamics of no
single state were driving our results, we reran our models of Maoist presence while dropping
each state in our dataset one at a time.28 We explored different model specifications for our
coarsened exact matching analysis, using additional soil types to preprocess our data, and by
dropping each of the variables used to preprocess the data in turn.29 Finally, we also ran
additional models using state fixed effects.30 Our results remained consistent across all of these
models.
24
See Appendix Tables C3-C8.
25
See Appendix Tables C9-C13.
26
See Appendix Tables C14 and C15.
27
See Appendix Table C16.
28
See Appendix Figures D1 and D2.
29
See Appendix Tables C17-C20.
30
See Appendix Table C21.
28
Conclusion
Social scientists have long debated the effects of European colonialism on political
stability across the postcolonial world. Colonizers faced the continual challenge of maximizing
their authority and control while minimizing the risk of inciting rebellion in the process of doing
so. While some scholars have emphasized the benefits of bureaucratization, infrastructure, and
the rule of law, others have focused on the disruptions that colonialism caused by engendering
movement, an insurgency of low castes and tribal groups that has been a major threat to Indian
political stability over the past several decades. We test three hypothesized mechanisms that we
argue link colonial rule to contemporary Naxalite violence: the favoring of landlords, the
implementation of discriminatory policies toward low-caste and tribal communities, and the
government institutions. We show that British direct rule is associated with contemporary land
inequality, distrust between castes, and citizen distrust in the police. Using conflict data
triangulated from three distinct data sources, we then analyze the strength of the Naxalite
insurgency across provinces and princely states in 589 districts over the period 1980-2011. We
find that Naxalites have been more active in areas where the British were more influential.
Whereas previous studies have approached similar questions by comparing the legacies
of different European powers (Blanton et al. 2001; Lange et al. 2006; Lee and Schultz 2012), our
contribution lies in comparing the long-term effects of British influence across areas of direct
and indirect rule within the same colony. Ours is also the first study to look at internal
heterogeneity within provinces and princely states in India, instead of assuming both kinds of
29
territories experienced the same level of British influence. These uneven effects of British
influence were enduring. In post-independence India, the policies that created rural insurgency in
regions of heavy British influence were mostly retained, while princely states with greater
independence remained under the control, often for decades, of princely families that largely
As one of the deadliest conflicts in the world’s largest former colony, the Naxalite
insurgency constitutes an important case in its own right. But the Indian case takes on added
importance because after the 1857 Rebellion, the British exported the “Indian model” of
combining direct and indirect rule to other cases across the Indian Ocean, such as Malaysia
(Emerson 1937; Zainal 1970) and Nigeria (Falola and Heaton 2008; Laitin 1986; Meek 1937).
Whether similar path dependencies linking colonialism and persistent horizontal inequalities that
generate armed conflict exist in other former British colonies is open to question, but would
30
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Vanden Eynde, Oliver. (2017). Targets of Violence: Evidence from India’s Naxalite Conflict.
Varma, S.C. (1978). The Bhil Kills. New Delhi: Kunj Publishing House.
Verghese, Ajay. (2016). British Rule and Tribal Revolts in India: The curious case of Bastar.
. (2017). Colonialism and Public Goods Provision: Qualitative Evidence from India.
Draft Manuscript.
Wilkinson, Steven Ian. (2000). India, Consociational Theory, and Ethnic Violence. Asian Survey
Zainal, Abdul bin Abdul Mahid, ed. (1970). Glimpses of Malaysian History. Kuala
39
Figure 1: Insurgent Activity and Violence in India’s Red Corridor
Notes: Figure 1.1 depicts the districts in which Maoist activity was detected by the Government of India
between 2008 and 2011 and is based on a Right to Information petition filed by the South Asia Terrorism
Portal. Figure 1.2 displays a dichotomous coding of Maoist violence based on events recorded in the
World Incidents Tracking System and the Gomes (2015) dataset. Figure 1.3 depicts the number of years
Indian districts were directly ruled by the British based on information found in gazetteers and other
official British documents. Figure 1.4 displays the number of guns in salutes given by the British to
princely states and is taken from Iyer (2010). See the text for further details.
40
Figure 2: Colonialism and Contemporary Grievances
Notes: Figure 2 depicts the relationship between the number of years of British rule and hypothesized
mechanisms in our analysis. For all of the figures, the number of years Indian districts were directly ruled
by the British is taken from information found in gazetteers and other official British documents In Figure
2.1 land inequality is measured by the 1991 land gini index taken from the Agricultural Census. The
measures of caste conflict and public confidence in institutions in Figures 2.2-2.4 are taken from the
Indian Human Development Survey (IHDS). See the text for further details.
41
Figure 3: Predicted Values
Notes: Predictions based on Models 1 & 2 of Table 1. The predictions and associated confidence intervals
depicted in these graphs were produced using the “marginsplot” post-estimation command in Stata 14,
holding all other variables in the model at their means.
42
Table 1: Colonial Rule and Maoist Violence
Notes: Models (1) and (2) are logit models of Maoist activity in all Indian districts. The dependent
variable in Model (1) is an indicator variable coded “1” if a district was identified by India’s Ministry of
Home Affairs as falling under the influence of ‘Left Wing Extremists’ between 2008-2011 and ‘0’
otherwise. The dependent variable in Model (2) is a dummy coded “1” if any attacks or casualties were
recorded in the districts between 1980-2010, as recorded by WITS and Gomes’ (2015) dataset. Models
(3) and (4) are negative binomial models in the Red Corridor. The dependent variable in Model (3) is the
number of attacks between 2005-9, as recorded by WITS. The dependent variable in Model (4) is the total
number of insurgents, police, and noncombatants killed and wounded in fighting between 1980 and 2010
respectively, as recorded in Gomes’ (2015) dataset. Models (5) and (6) are negative binomial models in
the princely states. The dependent variable in Model (5) is WITS attacks (2005-9), and the dependent
variable for Model (6) is Gomes’ recording of casualties (1980-2010). Robust standard errors, clustered
by state, in parentheses *** p<0.01, ** p<0.05, * p<0.1
43
Table 2: Coarsened Exact Matching Analysis
Notes: Logit models of Maoist activity in Indian districts run after preprocessing the data with Coarsened
Exact Matching (CEM). The CEM “treatment” and the main independent variable in the parametric
models is an indicator for whether the British ruled a district before 1848. See text for more details
regarding the models. Robust standard errors clustered by state in parentheses. *** p<0.01, ** p<0.05, *
p<0.1
44
APPENDIX A: DATA SOURCES
Dependent Variables
Indicator variable that indicates Maoist activity in any Indian district from 2008-11. The data
come from the Ministry of Home Affairs’ Naxal Management Division.
Indicator variable that records the presence of Maoist activity in any Indian districts. It combines
two things: Maoist attacks from 2005-9 and any individuals killed and wounded in fighting
carried out by Maoists from 1980-2010. The data come from, respectively, the Worldwide
Incidents Tracking System, which was built from local, national, and international press reports
by the National Counterterrorism Center; and, work published by Joseph Flavian Gomes, who
compiled information from several sources and then shared them with us: the Worldwide
Incidents Tracking System, Global Terrorism Database, Rand-MIPT Terrorism Incident
Database, and the South Asia Terrorism Portal.
Maoist Attacks
Count variable that records the number of attacks carried out by Maoists in India from 2005-9.
The data come from the Worldwide Incidents Tracking System, which was built from local,
national, and international press reports by the National Counterterrorism Center. The
Worldwide Incidents Tracking System was discontinued in April of 2012 when its funding was
cut by the U.S. Congress.
Maoist Casualties
Count variable that records the number of killed and wounded in fighting carried out by Maoists
in India from 1980-2010. The data come from work published by Joseph Flavian Gomes, who
compiled information from several sources and then shared them with us: the Worldwide
Incidents Tracking System, Global Terrorism Database, Rand-MIPT Terrorism Incident
Database, and the South Asia Terrorism Portal.
Count variable that records the number of insurgents, police, and noncombatants killed in
Naxalite conflict from 1980-2010. The data come from work published by Joseph Flavian
Gomes, who compiled information from several sources and then shared them with us: the
Worldwide Incidents Tracking System, Global Terrorism Database, Rand-MIPT Terrorism
Incident Database, and the South Asia Terrorism Portal.
45
Number Wounded in Fighting
Count variable that records the number of insurgents, police, and noncombatants wounded in
Naxalite conflict from 1980-2010. The data come from work published by Joseph Flavian
Gomes, who compiled information from several sources and then shared them with us: the
Worldwide Incidents Tracking System, Global Terrorism Database, Rand-MIPT Terrorism
Incident Database, and the South Asia Terrorism Portal.
Landlord Tenure
Indicator variable that records whether a district featured a landlord (zamindari or malguzari)
tenure system. The data come from Iyer (2010).
Land Inequality
Land gini per district in India for the year 1991. The data come from the Indian Agricultural
Census of 1991. The gini coefficient is calculated by looking at data on operational holdings of
agricultural land.
Response to a question amount of intercaste that exists in a district in India, for the year 2005.
The data come from the Indian Human Development Survey. Respondents were asked: “In this
village/neighborhood, how much conflict would you say there is between communities/jatis that
live here?” Responses of “a lot of conflict” were coded “1”, “some conflict” “2”, and “not much
conflict” “3”.
Distrust Police
A variable that records the amount of distrust for police that exists in a district in India, for the
year 2005. The data come from the Indian Human Development Survey. Respondents were
asked: “Would you say you have a great deal of confidence, only some confidence, or hardly any
confidence at all in…police, to enforce the law?” High confidence was coded “1”, moderate
confidence “2”, and low confidence was coded “3”.
Distrust Politicians
A variable that records the amount of distrust for politicians that exists in a district in India, for
the year 2005. Indian Human Development Survey. Respondents were asked: “…would you say
you have a great deal of confidence, only some confidence, or hardly any confidence at all
in…politicians, to fulfill promises?” High confidence was coded “1”, moderate confidence “2”,
and low confidence was coded “3”.
46
Distrust Panchayat
A variable that records the amount of distrust for panchayats (village councils) that exists in a
district in India, for the year 2005. Indian Human Development Survey. Respondents were
asked: “…would you say you have a great deal of confidence, only some confidence, or hardly
any confidence at all in…village panchayats, to implement public projects?” High confidence
was coded “1”, moderate confidence “2”, and low confidence was coded “3”.
Independent Variables
Years British
Count variable that records the number of years a district in India came under direct British rule.
All princely states are recorded as zero. The data were personally compiled. Information for the
coding comes from the Imperial Gazetteer of India, district websites maintained by the Indian
government, and other historical sources.
Gun Salute
The number of guns in a British gun salute given to any princely state. The data come from Iyer
(2010).
Province
A dummy variable that records whether a district in India came under direct British rule. The
data were compiled by the authors from the Imperial Gazetteer of India, district websites
maintained by the Indian government, and other historical sources.
Control Variables
% No Assets
Percentage of households per district in India that record no assets, for the year 2001. The data
come from the 2001 Indian Census, but were collected by IndiaStat, a private statistical firm.
Examples of assets include: radio/transistor, television, telephone, bicycle, scooter/motor
cycle/moped and car/jeep/van.
Literacy Rate
Literacy rate per district in India, for the year 2001. The data come from the 2001 Indian Census.
Mining
Indicator variable that records whether a district in India contains bauxite, iron ore, or coal
mining operations, for the year 2001. The data come from the Ministry of Mines.
47
% Scheduled Caste
Percentage of a district-level population in India that belongs to the Scheduled Castes, for the
year 2001. The data come from the Indian Census of 2001.
% Scheduled Tribe
Percentage of a district-level population in India that belongs to the Scheduled Tribes, for the
year 2001. The data come from the Indian Census of 2001.
Area (Log)
Logged area (in square kilometers) of a district in India, for the year 2001. The data come from
the Indian Census of 2001.
Population Density
Population density of a district in India, for the year 2001. The data come from the Indian Census
of 2001.
Log Rainfall
Logged average millimeters of rainfall per district in India from 2004 to 2009. The data come
from the Indian Meteorological Department.
Coastal Districts
Indicator variable that records whether an Indian district is coastal. The data were personally
compiled using information from district websites maintained by the Indian government.
Logged distance to the state capital per district in India, for the year 2005. The data come from
the Ministry of Rural Development, and were originally compiled and shared with us by Joseph
Flavian Gomes.
Alluvial Soil
Indicator variable for whether district in India has alluvial soil, for the year 1991. The data come
from the India Agriculture and Climate Data Set (World Bank), and were originally compiled by
Lakshmi Iyer (2010).
48
% Sandy Soil
Percentage of land in a district in India that has sandy soil, for the year 2005. The data come
from the Wasteland Atlas of India, from the Ministry of Rural Development, and were originally
compiled and shared with us by Joseph Flavian Gomes.
% Forested
Percentage of a district in India that is covered by forest, for the year 2001. The data come from
the Ministry of Environment and Forests, but were compiled from IndiaStat.com.
% Barren/Rocky Land
Percentage of land in a district in India that is barren and rocky, for the year 2005. The data come
from the Wasteland Atlas of India, from the Ministry of Rural Development, and were originally
compiled and shared with us by Joseph Flavian Gomes.
% Steep/Sloping Land
Percentage of land in a district in India that is steep and sloping, for the year 2005. The data
come from the Wasteland Atlas of India, from the Ministry of Rural Development, and were
originally compiled and shared with us by Joseph Flavian Gomes.
49
APPENDIX B: CODING DIRECT AND INDIRECT RULE
For the purposes of our analysis, we begin with the assumption that there existed two
basic forms of governance in British India: direct rule (by British administrators in the provinces)
and indirect rule (by native kings in the princely states). This dichotomy comports with the
perspective of British administrators and native rulers themselves, who viewed the main political
divide on the subcontinent as one between provinces and princely states. Maps from this period –
such as Imperial Gazetteer of India, Atlas from 1909, produced by Sir William Stevenson Meyer
– single out the boundaries between British provinces and princely states. Additionally, the
pioneering work of historians like Michael Fisher (1991), Karen Leonard (2003), Ian Copland
(1997), and Barbara Ramusack (2004) all contrast British provinces with princely states. Of
course, the reality of colonialism was much more complex than any simple binary coding
scheme: there was heterogeneity among both the provinces and the princely states.
Consequently, we code for the level of British influence in both provinces and princely states as
we describe in the paper. But our basic assumption is that there are fundamental differences in
how areas that were directly controlled by the British were governed compared to those that were
Mukherjee (2017) argues for a different conceptual approach. He codes one form of
direct rule (the British ryotwari land tenure system), a formal indirect rule (princely states) and
an informal indirect rule (British zamindari and malguzari tenure). For a variety of reasons, we
do not agree with the logic of this coding scheme. At the outset, coding direct and indirect rule
solely on the basis of the land tenure system ignores the presence of a significant amount of the
machinery of colonialism: military troops, police, elected officials, civil service bureaucrats,
courts, schools, etc., as well as the many long-term deleterious social effects of direct rule that
50
we outline in the paper. In addition, the coding scheme ignores the fact that the British were
directly responsible for the land tenure systems in areas that they governed.
Thus, Mukherjee’s coding of an area like West Bengal and Bihar (both of which were
part of the Bengal Presidency of British India) as indirectly-ruled is historically questionable, and
does not make intuitive sense. Calcutta, the capital city of modern-day West Bengal, was the
capital of India under the British until 1911, the Bengal Presidency was more powerful than the
Bombay or Madras Presidencies, the Governor-General of Bengal was the Viceroy of India, and
the Bengal Presidency was the cultural and educational capital of India (the site of the Bengali
Renaissance). Furthermore, data shows that the British had more of a presence in Bengal than
other areas despite Mukherjee’s claim that colonial rule was less penetrative there. For example,
statistics collected by the British government show that in 1840 (the first year for which data is
available), there were 16,303 European troops in the Bengal Presidency, but only 12,371 in the
Madras Presidency and 6,930 in the Bombay Presidency. 31 From the period 1840-65, there were
always more European troops in Bengal than either of the two other Presidencies that Mukherjee
31
See: http://dsal.uchicago.edu/digbooks/digpager.html?BOOKID=HA1711_1867&object=65
51
APPENDIX C: TABLES
52
Appendix Table C1: Summary Statistics
Dependent Variables
Indicator of Maoist Insurgency 589 .3616299 .4808808 0 1
Presence of Maoist Insurgency 589 .2207131 .4150799 0 1
Maoist Attacks 589 2.50764 12.67901 0 230
Maoist Casualties 589 11.80645 74.17164 0 1648
Number Killed in Fighting 589 8.066214 47.76111 0 1033
Number Wounded in Fighting 589 3.740238 26.92984 0 615
Landlord Tenure 462 .1645022 .3711325 0 1
Land Inequality 414 .4848257 .1751022 .1204489 .7999637
Trust Other Jatis 376 2.633006 .2916942 1.444444 3
Distrust Police 376 2.05618 .3451557 1.1 3
Distrust Politicians 376 2.462576 .2887472 1.25 2.983124
Distrust Panchayat 376 1.849526 .308006 1.073918 2.688889
Independent Variables
Years British 578 92.19031 71.89062 0 286
Gun Salute 589 5.139219 8.120331 0 21
Province 589 .6672326 .4716046 0 1
Control Variables
% No Assets 551 37.19476 15.62704 5.773482 77.36033
Literacy Rate 579 63.91472 12.7446 30.17 96.51
Mining 588 .1513605 .3587051 0 1
Land Inequality 414 .4848257 .1751022 .1204489 .7999637
% Scheduled Caste 579 .1487602 .0861906 0 .501128
% Scheduled Caste Squared 579 .0295456 .0288818 0 .2511293
% Scheduled Tribe 579 .1592917 .2563671 0 .9808581
% Scheduled Tribe Squared 579 .0909844 .2187103 0 .9620827
Area (Log) 573 8.261393 .9849279 2.197225 11.70212
Population Density 584 839.3185 2872.19 2 29468
Log Rainfall 502 6.975373 .482591 5.126936 8.272059
Coastal Districts 589 .1154499 .3198358 0 1
Log Distance to Capital 379 5.485511 .7963417 0 6.940222
Alluvial Soil 459 .496732 .5005349 0 1
% Sandy Soil 576 .755995 3.50985 0 68.83154
% Forested 574 21.99394 24.39197 0 95.66
% Barren/Rocky Land 576 3.089157 19.23952 0 316
% Steep/Sloping Land 576 .2840889 1.047981 0 12.92973
53
Table C2: T-Tests Illustrating Potential Confounders
Notes: For information on these variables, see Appendix A: Data Sources. *** p<0.01, ** p<0.05, * p<0.1
54
Table C3: Stepwise Regression of Table 1, Model 1
55
Table C4: Stepwise Regression of Table 1, Model 2
56
Table C5: Stepwise Regression of Table 1, Model 3
57
Table C6: Stepwise Regression of Table 1, Model 4
58
Table C7: Stepwise Regression of Table 1, Model 5
59
Table C8: Stepwise Regression of Table 1, Model 6
60
Table C9: Alternative Controls for Table 1 (Landlord Tenure)
61
Table C10: Alternative Controls for Table 1 (Land Inequality)
62
Table C11: Alternative Controls for Table 1 (Distance to State Capital)
63
Table C12: Alternative Controls for Table 1 (Gomes’ % Forested)
64
Table C13: Alternative Controls for Table 1 (Terrain Measures)
65
Table C14: Using Province Dummy Instead of Years British
Notes: Models (1) and (2) are logit models of Maoist presence in all Indian districts using a province
dummy instead of the number of years a district was ruled by the British as the main independent
variable. The dependent variable in Model (1) is an indicator variable coded ‘1’ if a district was identified
by India’s Ministry of Home Affairs as falling under the influence of ‘Left Wing Extremists’ between
2008-2011 and ‘0’ otherwise. The dependent variable in Model (2) is a dummy coded ‘1’ if any attacks or
casualties were recorded in the districts between 1980-2010, as recorded by WITS and Gomes’ (2015)
dataset. Models (3) and (4) are negative binomial models in the Red Corridor. The dependent variable in
Model (3) is the number of attacks between 2005-9, as recorded by WITS. The dependent variable in
Model (4) is the total number of insurgents, police, and noncombatants killed and wounded in fighting
between 1980 and 2010 respectively, as recorded in Gomes’ (2015) dataset. Robust standard errors,
clustered by state, in parentheses *** p<0.01, ** p<0.05, * p<0.1
66
Table C15: Colonial Rule and Grievance Mechanisms (Using Province Dummy)
Notes: Model (1) is an OLS analysis of landlord tenure (zamindari and malguzari systems) based on data
from Iyer (2010). Model (2) is an OLS analysis of the land gini index of ownership concentration that is
based on the results of the 1991 Agricultural Census. Models (3) – (6) are tobit regressions of responses
to questions about intercaste trust and trust in public institutions in the 2005 University of Maryland
Human Development Survey. Robust standard errors, clustered by state, in parentheses *** p<0.01, **
p<0.05, * p<0.1
67
Table C16: Using Conflict DVs for All India Regressions
Notes: Models (1) – (5) are negative binomial regressions of all Indian districts, and are meant to test the
effect of colonialism on Maoist conflict. The dependent variables in columns (1) and (2) are the number
of attacks and deaths carried out by Maoist insurgents as recorded in the WITS dataset between 2005 and
2009. The dependent variable in columns (3), (4), and (5) are the total number of insurgents, police, and
noncombatants killed, wounded, and killed and wounded (casualties) in fighting between 1980 and 2010
respectively, as recorded in Gomes’ (2015) dataset. Robust standard errors, clustered by state, in
parentheses *** p<0.01, ** p<0.05, * p<0.1
68
Table C17: Coarsened Exact Matching Analysis, Alternative Specification for MHA Maoist
Presence Measure
69
Table C18: Coarsened Exact Matching Analysis, Alternative Specification for
WITS/GOMES Measure
Notes: Logit models of Maoist presence (WITS/Gomes data) in Indian districts run after preprocessing
the data with Coarsened Exact Matching (CEM). The CEM “treatment” and the main independent
variable in the parametric models is an indicator for whether the British ruled a district before 1848. See
text for more details regarding the models. Robust standard errors clustered by state in parentheses. ***
p<0.01, ** p<0.05, * p<0.1
70
Table C19: Different Combinations of Conditioning Variables for CEM, MHA Indicator
Notes: Each column presents a logit analysis of a set of Indian districts matched using CEM. The
dependent variable is an indicator variable coded ‘1’ if a district was identified by India’s Ministry of
Home Affairs as falling under the influence of ‘Left Wing Extremists’ between 2008-2011. The data for
Model (1) were preprocessed with CEM using the original four variables (alluvial soil, forest cover,
coastal access and rainfall) plus two additional soil types (black and red). The data for Model (2) were
preprocessed dropping out soil type but including forest cover, coastal access, and rainfall. The data for
Models (3) – (5) were preprocessed including three of the four original variables (e.g. dropping forest
cover, coastal access, and rainfall one at a time). The main independent variable is a dummy coded ‘1’ if
the British annexed the district prior to 1848. Robust standard errors clustered by state in parentheses. ***
p<0.01, ** p<0.05, * p<0.1
71
Table C20: Different Conditioning Variables for CEM, WITS/GOMES Measure
72
Table C21: Using State Fixed Effects for Maoist Casualties (Gomes)
Notes: Negative binomial model of insurgent violence across all of India with state fixed effects. The
dependent variable is the total number of insurgents, police, and noncombatants killed and wounded in
fighting between 1980 and 2010 respectively, as recorded in Gomes’ (2015) dataset. Robust standard
errors clustered by state in parentheses. *** p<0.01, ** p<0.05, * p<0.1
73
APPENDIX D: FIGURES
74
Figure D1: Conflict Model 1, Sensitivity to Specific States
Notes: The dots represent coefficients for the logistic regression contained in Model 1 of Table 2, and the
bars represent 95% confidence intervals. The dependent variable is an indicator variable coded ‘1’ if a
district was identified by India’s Ministry of Home Affairs as falling under the influence of ‘Left Wing
Extremists’ between 2008-2011. The main independent variable is a count of the number of years the
British ruled the district. Each regression was run dropping out states one by one. All iterations were
significant at the .01 level or better.
75
Figure D2: Conflict Model 2, Sensitivity to Specific States
Notes: The dots represent coefficients for the logistic regression contained in Model 2 of Table 2, and the
bars represent 95% confidence intervals. The dependent variable is a dummy coded ‘1’ if any attacks or
casualties were recorded in any Indian district between 1980-2010, as recorded by WITS and Gomes’
(2015) dataset. The main independent variable is a count of the number of years the British ruled the
district. Each regression was run dropping out states one by one. All iterations were significant at the .01
level or better.
76
Figure D3: Additional Predictions
Notes: Predictions based on Models (3) – (6) of Table 1. The predictions and associated confidence
intervals depicted in these graphs were produced using the “marginsplot” post-estimation command in
Stata 14, holding all other variables in the model at their means.
77