The British Empire was, in many ways, contingent on trade and commerce. British merchants helped expand the empire into newer territories, while planters consolidated imperial hold over these newly acquired territories through settlement and commodity production. They played a particularly important role in procuring, employing and legalising the indenture trade. The continuation of indentureship for about a century, and the resumption of indentured emigration in 1842 after its brief suspension in 1839, was a direct consequence of relentless pressure from merchants and planters. Any understanding of the indenture debates, then, is incomplete without a thorough discussion of merchant and planter arguments in defence of indenture. Although there has been substantive work on the West India lobby and planter arguments in the context of slavery, pro-indenture arguments have remained peripheral to the histories of Indian indenture, and indeed to the histories of the British Empire.1 Most works on indenture debates focus on anti-indenture protest – a narrative that under-represents the voices of merchants and planters who decried prohibition and used their significant political and commercial influence to shape post-slavery labour regulations.

By situating merchant arguments in Calcutta within a global network of pro-indenture letters, petitions, publications and reports, this chapter inserts merchant and planter voices into the narrative. Abolition had created labour crises in plantocracies that ranged from permanent decline of the sugar industry in Jamaica, to decline and slow recovery in British Guiana, to fast and successful recovery in Mauritius. With the increasing strength of anti-slavery and anti-indenture lobbies, planters and merchants not only had to prove the need for an alternative source of labour but also demonstrate that Indian labourers were the most well suited for this post-slavery regime.

Prologue

Growing up in colonial bungalows with manicured lawns speckled with flowers and wide driveways amid Assam's verdant tea estates—a landscape that could easily have been mistaken for frames from a Merchant–Ivory film or passages from a Jane Austen novel—I luxuriated in the sensory pleasures of the natural world. My childhood spaces were peaceful and beautiful, where I could imagine adventures while remaining oblivious to the exploitation that had enabled their creation: the forced planting of tea by the British (a crop they privileged over any other) and the immense violence against indigenous communities that led to the making and functioning of tea plantations. Indeed, the tea plantations were tamed and romanticized in language by using the phrase tea gardens. When I left these scenic environs for the urban milieu of Delhi in the 1980s to meet extended family, I was ensconced once again within the green lawns, trees, and meandering roads—this time those of the Qutb mosque complex where my grandfather loved to take our family for picnics to enjoy the warm winter sun. Amidst the mosque's columns, I did not think it curious that a group of historical Islamic structures, built in the late twelfth to fourteenth centuries by the Afghan rulers of north India, should be surrounded by a quintessentially English picturesque landscape consisting of undulating green lawns, trimmed by neat hedges, a circular driveway, and trees strategically placed to frame the Qutb mosque complex. I did not give much thought to this landscape's provenance; at six years old and as a young adult, I simply delighted in it, blissfully enveloped in the enticingly pretty scenery, which took me back to my tea garden home.

In this chapter, I will present the results of the qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) and then interpret them to describe the configurations that constitute populism in India. I will then provide the results of the tests for necessary and sufficient conditions and discuss the parameters of fit in terms of consistency and coverage. Finally, I will cover the various solution terms that indicate the pathways to populism.

The Sets of Data

Table 5.1 presents the data, that is, the sets of data, comprising 37 cases along five conditions and a populist outcome. Describing the worksheet as comprising sets of data instead of a dataset seems more accurate because each of the columns in the sheet is a set and its members are points of data (as fuzzy scores or as percentage scores) along the rows as constituent parts of the unit of analysis. The unit of analysis is an instance of a party candidate contesting elections at the state or at the national level. The cases have been purposively selected by reviewing the scholarship that explicitly indicates that the cases can be identified as instances of populism. And the conditions described earlier—electoral invocation to their people (P), antagonistic boundary setting (B), populist political leadership (L), populist attitude (A), and anxiety about the future (F)—are some of the commonly accepted attributes in the comparative scholarship on populism. In set theoretic terms, we will explore if P, B, L, A, and F are the conditions that constitute the membership of the populist outcome Y.

In the early morning hours of Saturday, February 12, 1994, Liberation Panthers activists gatecrashed the Madurai Junction railway station. Waving colorful movement flags and hand-painted placards bearing political demands, they congregated on the tracks of the Chennai-bound Vaigai Express. As police constables struggled to detain this initial group of activists, dragging them off the tracks one by one and back atop the platform, a second squad of DPI cadre stormed the station and picketed the tracks of the Kanyakumari Express, delaying its departure by more than an hour. Soon thereafter, the railway junction descended into chaos when two more batches of activists swarmed the station, attempting to force their way onto the premises to disrupt the Pandian Express and Tirupathi Express. As additional waves of Dalit activists converged on the station, police constables summoned reinforcements, frantically locked the entrance gates, and improvised barricades to stall the advancing crowd, which the Indian Express estimated at an additional 200 persons.

DPI activists stood their ground and refused to withdraw from the station entrance, sparking a scuffle with the police. Amidst the ruckus, movement firebrand Arumugam “Theepori” Murugan seized a microphone and began chanting DPI slogans over the loudspeaker, exhorting activists to defy authorities: “Refuse to submit! Hit back!” Constables descended on the demonstrators, aggressively dispersing them with lathis (wooden batons). In retreat, Dalit activists defaced signboards as they were gradually beaten back from the station entrance, spurring nearby business owners to hastily shutter their storefronts as the mêlée spilled into the bustling West Velli Street, a major transit hub at the heart of Madurai's commercial center.

When we see data on a spreadsheet, concepts and methods associated with standard quantitative techniques inevitably come to mind. Usually and by default, we try to make sense of the data by deriving the summary statistics to understand what has gone up or down, we explore associations between factors by identifying correlations, and administer technical tests to see if the results confirm, reinterpret, or nullify our research questions and hypotheses.

But is it possible to look at a dataset “qualitatively”? And what would that imply? Is it possible to look at columns and rows and identify relations and configurations between them that are more than associational? At first glance, the possibility of this approach seems incongruous because we usually associate qualitative methods with text and quantitative methods with numbers.

This chapter introduces the reader to a qualitative approach by providing an overview of the set theoretic methodology and the QCA method. An introduction to the methodology and the method is important not just because it is mostly an unfamiliar method to many social scientists, particularly those who work in the Indian context, but also because, as a methodology, its philosophical and conceptual roots are somewhat distinct from standard social science approaches. And, equally important, because QCA relies on numbers and software codes for analysis, it misconstrues expectations since the use of numbers can inadvertently lead to interpretations based on quantitative reasoning.

Over the past 75 years, there have been at least 800 state government terms ruled by around 375 political leaders as chief ministers and counting. Populist leaders are a small but pivotal subset among these leaders. Scholarship on such leaders has necessarily been long on descriptive accounts because of their exceptional rise to and stay in political office. Such accounts are the basis upon which this comparative account is built.

The unit of analysis in this study is not a populist personality over a period of time, but a personality in a particular year that corresponds with either an assembly or a national election year. For example, a single case would not be “Kejriwal,” but would instead be cases like “Kejriwal 2015” or “Kejriwal 2020.” This chapter, therefore, does not aim to provide elaborate accounts of the leaders, but tries to strike a balance with the details and their relevance and, in doing so, provide a narrative of each that is tenable for comparative analysis.

This “case by year” approach seems justified for a couple of reasons. First, while almost all populist leaders come to power riding a wave, they inevitably routinize into the mainstream over successive elections. The fever breaks. Second, it may appear that the period of such long-term leaders is linear, that is, from the heights of riding a wave to come to power, and subsequently routinizing into a banal steady but sustained popularity over time. Breaking this narrative into multiple periods provides space for curvilinear possibilities because it allows for a closer look into the ups and downs of political life in that declining trajectory.

When John Gladstone wrote to Gillanders Arbuthnot & Company about procuring Indian labourers, the latter suggested labourers from eastern India as ideal for Gladstone's West Indian plantations. Speaking of their previous experience of sending Indian labourers to Mauritius, Gillanders Arbuthnot & Company wrote:

Gladstone's stipulations for labourers to replace enslaved labour in his plantations were clear – they needed to be active, able-bodied, experienced in hard labour, easily manageable in a plantation context and willing to travel overseas for work. The response to his stipulations, however, betrayed an essentialised understanding of the Indian labouring class. Gillanders Arbuthnot & Company's choice of men ‘from the hills to the north of Calcutta’ drew upon a combination of assumptions about docility, lack of ties to the land, physical fitness and climatic compatibility. Essentially, the labourer's purported ignorance, docility and eagerness to travel abroad were not seen as individual circumstances but as racial characters – common to the entire community and determined by race.

Such assumptions were not restricted to merchants and planters but were, in fact, a ubiquitous feature of the Calcutta public sphere. Spokesmen in Calcutta employed a similar language of racialisation when referring to indentured Indians, particularly when arguing for the need for spokesmen to intervene in the indenture trade.

This chapter makes a case for rethinking the early history of colonial Hong Kong – for seeing the young colony as an ambiguous juridical space, shaped and bounded by inchoate ideas of extradition. History has forgotten this feature of early Hong Kong because most studies have assumed, anachronistically, that the Opium War treaties of 1842–43 instituted ‘extradition’ between Hong Kong and China, in addition to British ‘extraterritoriality’ in China. In fact, these ideas took time to crystallise from fuzzier arrangements for dividing jurisdiction. This jurisdictional ambiguity coincided with the belated rise of territorial thinking in the British Empire. It also coincided with ongoing developments in the British approach to surrendering fugitives to foreign states – a procedure that legal actors were only starting to refer to as ‘extradition’. So, historicising the idea of extradition allows us to understand how British actors perceived their practices in Hong Kong and China in comparison to their practices elsewhere. This perspective reveals that the imperial origins of extradition involved crucial experiments in the colonial ordering of territory, people, and executive power.