Conquest and Conflict: The Colonial Roots of Maoist Violence in India

• DOI: 10.1177/0032329218823120
• Date: 01 March 2019
• Author: Ajay Verghese,Emmanuel Teitelbaum
• Published date: 01 March 2019
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0032329218823120

Politics & Society

2019, Vol. 47(1) 55 –86

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DOI: 10.1177/0032329218823120

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Article

Conquest and Conflict: The

Colonial Roots of Maoist

Violence in India

Ajay Verghese

University of California, Riverside

Emmanuel Teitelbaum

George Washington University

Abstract

Does colonialism have long-term effects on political stability? This question

is addressed in a study of India’s Naxalite insurgency, a Maoist rebellion

characterized by its left-wing proponents as having roots in the colonial period.

The article highlights three mechanisms linking colonialism with contemporary

Naxalite violence—land inequality, discriminatory policies toward low-caste and

tribal groups, and upper-caste-dominated administrative institutions. It analyzes

how the degree of British influence relates to Naxalite conflict in 589 districts

from 1980 to 2011. A positive association is found between British influence

and the strength of the Naxalite rebellion across all of India, within both the

“Red Corridor” region and former princely states. The 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.

Keywords

colonialism, conflict, India, Maoism, political stability

Corresponding Author:

Ajay Verghese, Department of Political Science, University of California, Riverside, 2219 Watkins Hall,

Riverside, CA 92521, USA.

Email: ajayv@ucr.edu

823120PASXXX10.1177/0032329218823120Politics & SocietyVerghese and Teitelbaum

research-article2019

56 Politics & Society 47(1)

The era of European colonialism that began in the sixteenth century transformed 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 rebel-

lion. They achieved this dual objective not only through substantial investments in

infrastructure and administration but also by manipulating social divisions and hierar-

chies to promote buy-in among local elites and mitigate resistance by the masses. How

did policies that enhanced state capacity at the expense of social cohesion affect 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 ever faced by our country.”2 The movement is estimated to have

mobilized between 6,500 and 9,000 fighters, at one point operating in roughly 40 per-

cent of India’s districts, and has, according to the Ministry of Home Affairs, 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 “semifeudal” conditions that make India ripe for revolution.4

It is generally recognized that the Spanish undermined governance by setting up

extractive institutions,5 and that the French diminished state capacity by undermining

traditional forms of governance.6 However, scholars frequently portray British colo-

nialism as promoting bureaucratization, stronger state capacity, and better judicial sys-

tems because it was less direct and because the British tended to colonize the least

developed areas in any given region.7 British rule has been tied to a robust legal-

administrative capacity in Mauritius,8 higher levels of state capacity and cohesion in

Singapore,9 and strengthened rule of law and more robust democracy in Africa.10

British colonies became democratic faster than other colonies, and British colonialism

is positively associated with GDP per capita.11

At the same time, the long-term social effects of colonialism are known to have

been overwhelmingly negative. Numerous studies demonstrate how Europeans gen-

erated political instability around the world by disrupting native societies and encour-

aging antagonism between indigenous groups. Scholars have linked Belgian colonial

legacies to the Rwandan genocide,12 French legacies to ethnic violence in Mali and

Sudan,13 Portuguese legacies to civil war in Angola,14 and British legacies to the Mau

Mau uprising in Kenya.15 In such cases, the standard colonial “divide-and-rule” strat-

egy generated enduring horizontal inequalities between ethnic groups that have con-

tinually reemerged as the primary source of contemporary conflagrations.

In this article, 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.

Verghese and Teitelbaum 57

Over the past several years, scholars have analyzed the effects of colonialism in India

by leveraging the fact that the British governed the country through forms of direct

and indirect rule. Direct rule (by British administrators) occurred in the provinces,

whereas indirect rule (by native kings) occurred in the princely states. This system

emerged in the mid-nineteenth century when several native rulers initiated a revolt

against the British, who had been rapidly expanding their power across the entire

subcontinent. In the aftermath of the 1857 rebellion, Queen Victoria officially

renounced the policy of annexation. Consequently, 45 percent of the land in India and

25 percent of its population (in 1901, almost 60 million people) remained under the

rule of native kings, and after 1858 none of these territories were annexed.16 Scholars

have assessed the impact of colonialism by comparing outcomes across provinces

and princely states.17

From a governance standpoint, this divide between direct and indirect rule was his-

torically paramount. It was more consequential, for example, than the divide between

north and south India, or that between the large presidencies (Bengal, Bombay, and

Madras) and smaller British provinces, as evidenced by the fact that British censuses,

maps, and government data were all broken down by provinces and princely states.

Even more consequential, the British dealt with princely states as sovereign polities

with their own separate administrative entities and systems of government.

It is important to note that there is, nevertheless, substantial heterogeneity within

the categories of direct and indirect rule. By 1857, British rule had been established

much longer in some provinces than others, and colonialism had a greater impact in

areas that were ruled longer. Further, although the British stopped annexing princely

states after 1857, they continued to interfere in the internal affairs of many of them. In

this article, we focus on the degree of British influence across provinces and princely

states, a more sensitive measure of the impact of British colonialism. We measure

British influence in the provinces by counting the number of years a territory was

governed directly, and we measure British influence in the princely states through the

number of guns in British salutes, a proxy for how much colonial administrators inter-

vened in a princely territory.

We use a mixed method research design that combines historical analysis to show

how colonialism is linked to insurgent violence and statistical analysis that demon-

strates a robust association between the two variables. We draw on the rich qualitative

historical literature on colonial rule and peasant rebellion in India to identify three

specific mechanisms linking British rule to contemporary low-caste and tribal griev-

ances. First, the British exacerbated land inequality by granting property rights to

landlords and by commandeering forestlands on which tribal populations traditionally

relied for sustenance. Second, the British rigidified social inequalities by systemati-

cally categorizing and ranking caste and tribal communities. Third, the British installed

an upper-caste-dominated bureaucracy that cemented these inequalities through

administrative practice and ultimately fostered distrust of India’s law enforcement and

legal institutions among low-caste and tribal groups. We also draw on contemporary

census and survey data to show that the degree of British influence in former provinces