One evening against the backdrop of a parliamentary campaign, D. Ravikumar elaborated on an enduring friction between minority representation and electoral reservations, and how they relate to a political constituency. Although electoral reservations were first conceived on the basis of community to ensure the presence of specific groups in elected bodies, elections are conducted on the basis of territory, in a geographically demarcated, socially segregated joint electorate, where Dalit voters are insufficient in number to elect their preferred candidates. As Ravikumar asserts, these representatives are rarely selected by Dalits—the presumed beneficiaries of reservation—but, instead, by an upper caste majority that often prefers Dalit candidates who will, to quote another longtime VCK leader, “take a soft corner on Dalit issues.”2 Ravikumar questions whether electoral reservations produce “genuine” representatives of Dalit communities or, alternatively, if these figures are simply individuals from Dalit communities, emphasizing that these classifications are not always mutually inclusive. Elections in a joint electorate generate contradictory pressures for Dalit politicians, who are expected to champion their community's interests despite their reliance on higher castes that may not share Dalit priorities. Stressing the longevity of this dilemma, Ravikumar guides our conversation to B. R. Ambedkar's well-documented concerns on how the institutional design of electoral reservations would impact the character of minority representation.

In his writings and speeches, Ambedkar grappled with electoral reservation at both theoretical and practical levels, deliberating over how to best ensure democratic institutions support substantive minority representation. Anticipating that caste would shape voting behavior, he predicted that Dalits, a permanent minority, would fail to garner sufficient imperative in joint electorates where representatives are elected by popular vote. Although Dalits, if politically consolidated, may possess the clout to impact election outcomes, they nonetheless lack the capability to select their own representatives. In his view, Dalits elected in a joint electorate would be accountable to a caste majority that selected them and, therefore, only “nominal” representatives of their community. Ambedkar anticipated that the mere presence of Dalits in elected bodies would be insufficient to ameliorate their condition. He argued that a handful of legislative seats would not suffice for India's Dalits because, he cynically asserted, “a legislative Council is not an old curiosity shop” but, instead, an institution that holds “the powers to make or mar the fortunes of society.”

The Calcutta investigative committee established in 1838 was, in many ways, the culmination of questions raised in the Town Hall meeting. Established as part of an empire-wide decision to set up investigative committees in port cities, the Calcutta committee aimed to investigate whether the indenture trade was exploitative and whether labourers were deceived into migrating overseas. As this chapter goes on to show, the Calcutta committee and its report became an important point of reference in indenture regulations, emerging as one of the most detailed official accounts of the early indenture trade. While the Town Hall meeting showcased voices from elite Calcuttans, the investigative committee became one of the first spaces where the voice of the indentured migrant was heard. With committee members local to Calcutta, and with interviews of migrants and those involved directly in the indenture trade, this investigative committee made Calcutta a key decision-making part of the British Empire.

While reports from Bombay, Madras, Mauritius and Sydney – the other sites of investigative committees – were either considered inconclusive, inadequate or never reached the parliament, the Calcutta committee thrived and succeeded in influencing emigration regulations. John Geoghegan's report of 1873 stated of these committees:

On a warm September afternoon of 1838, prominent Scottish watchmaker and philanthropist David Hare was passing through the streets of north Calcutta when he came upon a group of men shouting for help. In a later statement, he recounted:

On entering the building, he saw more than a hundred men confined behind bolted doors, guarded by police watchmen. The men had been kidnapped on their way to Calcutta and to nearby pilgrimage sites and were to be sent to Mauritius to work on sugar plantations. They complained of being held against their will, locked up, beaten and mistreated, and urged that they would sooner die than go to Mauritius. After a prolonged negotiation with the watchmen and the Calcutta police, Hare was able to help release the confined men. With detailed reports in newspapers, this incident – and the image of labourers being migrated overseas against their will – soon became the popular image of Calcutta's encounter with indenture migration.

On August 15, 1997, India celebrated its golden jubilee of Independence. In the capital city of New Delhi, organizers prepared lavish ceremonies to commemorate the occasion, beginning with a midnight program broadcast from the Central Hall of Parliament that reenacted prominent scenes from the freedom struggle and featured A-list vocals from Lata Mangeshkar and Bhimsen Joshi alongside audio recordings of founding figures such as M. K. Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Subhas Chandra Bose. In the afternoon, tens of thousands of spectators thronging the city's broad avenues near the historic Red Fort were treated to a flyover by the Indian Air Force that showcased its newly acquired Russian Sukhoi Su-30 fighter jets streaking across the sky with tri-colored contrails matching the Indian national flag streaming in their wake. Shortly thereafter, Prime Minister I. K. Gujral addressed the nation. His speech paid tribute to India's diverse mosaic of languages and cultures, extolled its commitment to secular values, and pledged to uphold its democratic traditions. As dusk fell, fireworks lit up the night sky as patriotic hymns hummed from loudspeakers late into the evening.

In the southernmost state of Tamil Nadu, Dalit activists sought to capture national attention with a radically different program. In the preceding weeks, Thol. Thirumavalavan, the firebrand leader of the state's largest Dalit movement, the Viduthalai Chiruthaigal (Liberation Panthers)—also known as the Dalit Panther Iyakkam (DPI; Dalit Panther Movement)—dispatched postcards to his deputies that praised their “successful uprising” in Chennai the previous week. On July 23rd, the DPI had conducted a massive procession that brought traffic in the state capital to a standstill.

To compare is to “assimilate” and to discover deeper or fundamental similarities below the surface of secondary diversities (Sartori 1970). This chapter will discuss the underlying conceptual attributes of populism and how they have been constructed as they provide the background for indexing the cases in Chapter 4. The intention behind parsing populism into its underlying conceptual attributes is to be able to identify how they configure with each other to constitute the various populisms in India. And since set theoretic analysis is the approach adopted here to understand these configurations, this chapter will also translate these attributes and their constructs as necessary and sufficient conditions.

At this point, it may be helpful to step back from populism and understand the construction and the kind of concept structure being used and why that justifies the need for sufficient and necessary conditions and the downstream analysis that follows. The description provided here is a simple adaptation of the framework outlined by Goertz (2006). The concept structure being used here is multilevel and multidimensional. A multilevel concept has a basic structure, reflected through the secondary level as visible attributes whereby each attribute in turn can be measured through indicators as membership scores (in this project) or as variables in projects with a quantitative design. A multidimensional concept has different dimensions that constitute the basic level of the concept. The nature of the relationship between the attributes and the basic level can be causal, ontological, and substitutable. In this project, the attributes share an ontological relationship with the basic concept, according to which the various attributes are not just the defining features of the basic concept but in fact are the elements that compose the basic level.

By creating a new category of unfree labour migrants, the indenture trade had opened up the question of subjecthood and citizenship. Some of the earliest Indian theories of modern polity and society were generated in relation to the rights of mobile peoples, such as seamen, traders, lascars and Indians soldiers.1 Both British officials and Indian liberals saw land rights as customary, but for mobile peoples, rights had to be created anew by the state.2 As indentured labourers began to push legal categories by moving abroad, it became necessary to consider their rights on ships, on plantations and in colonies that fell outside the remits of the British Empire (such as in French and Dutch colonies). The very movement of indentured migrants to serve in plantation colonies had raised them to the status of mobile subjects of the empire whose rights had to be upheld by the colonial state and whose well-being was the responsibility of the state. A new, nuanced understanding of subjecthood was at play here.

Although scholars of indenture have mainly focused on the labourer, the indenture trade had, in reality, created roles for both the labourer and the spokesman. In the process of debating the indenture trade and petitioning for the rights of mobile subjects of the British Empire, petitioners from Calcutta had emerged as vocal citizens of the empire. While the trope of the racialised labourer shaped the indenture experience by influencing recruitment practices, indenture contracts and allotments of food on plantations, petitions from spokesmen in Calcutta entrenched the latter further into the Calcutta public sphere as active participants.

Below are some clarificatory notes related to the dataset.

Populist Outcome Related

Clarifications on Electoral Data

A few additional clarifications, as background information, are necessary to understand some of the measures related to the electoral data.

• 1. Bal Thackeray had never contested an election. But it seemed unjustifiable to ignore him, as he was clearly a populist leader of some measure in Maharashtra. Thus, I took the first electoral victory of the Shiv Sena in the assembly elections of 1995 as the populist instance, because Bal Thackeray reigned supreme for many years prior to and after this victory. And I took the electoral statistics of the incumbent chief minister and loyalist, Manohar Joshi, as the proxy for Bal Thackeray, assuming that the party chief that has got the assembly majority for the first time in its history would have its most trusted loyalist as the chief minister.

• 2. Jayalalitha's elections in 2001, 2011, and 2016 also need clarifications. In 2001, Jayalalitha was disqualified from competing in the election in May 2001 but was acquitted in December 2001 and thereafter won the byelections from Andipatti in 2002. In 2011, even though Jayalalitha won from the Srirangam constituency (which was the constituency included in the dataset), she was convicted by the Karnataka High Court soon thereafter and acquitted subsequently. She then contested from the RK Nagar constituency and resumed her chief ministership and contested from RK Nagar again in 2016.

The beginning of the indenture trade was a pivotal moment in the history of colonial labour servitude. With the abolition debates of the early nineteenth century, and the subsequent outlawing of slavery in the British Empire, the assessment of labour movements was based on a complete and immediate revocation of the slave trade. Naturally, the labour regime created to replace slave labour was evaluated along the rubric of the recently condemned slave trade. Discussions around Abolition had created a new dichotomy of acceptable and unacceptable (exploitative) forms of labour regimes. Thus, provisions that had been discarded as unacceptable within the slave labour regime – such as the use of coercive and deceptive practices in the procurement of labour, mistreatment of labourers during passage and on plantations and the detention of labourers against their will – also had to be discarded in the labour systems that followed. Calcutta took centre stage in these unfree labour debates. By playing a vocal role in negotiating the indenture trade, Calcuttans contributed significantly to the rhetoric that christened the indenture trade ‘a new system of slavery’.

The implementation of Act V of 1837 had created a new emigration policy applicable exclusively to the indenture trade, in the process defining the indenture trade as separate from other migratory labour regimes. One of the provisions of the act stated that it did not apply to ‘native seamen’ (such as lascars) or domestic servants, thus implying a newly emerged legal status for indentured plantation workers that separated them from other workers in the eyes of the colonial state.