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.

This chapter explores the role of Hong Kong in cementing, in British eyes, the distinction between extradition and the exercise of extraterritorial jurisdiction. The process of distinguishing these legal mechanisms unfolded through disputes about the Hong Kong government’s treaty right, or lack thereof, to request the surrender of fugitives who had taken refuge in Chinese territory. Taking place during 1843–65, these complex disputes caused British officials to conclude that, unlike other British arrangements with France, the United States, and several other countries, the Sino-British treaty regime for fugitive surrenders was not directly reciprocal. Rather, it gave only China a right of ‘extradition’ and only British Hong Kong a right of ‘exclusive jurisdiction’ over crimes committed within its territory. As such, there was ‘a kind of balanced one-sidedness’ between Britain and China. Retrospectively constructed from evolving ideas of British sovereignty and international reciprocity, this view of the Sino-British treaties influenced British imperial reforms in extradition. It also shaped the legal status of dual British–Chinese subjects in important ways.

This chapter shows how British sovereignty in Hong Kong was built on inchoate ideas of extradition: half-formed ideas of whether and how the colony would surrender Chinese criminals to China under the contested treaties that ended the Opium War. In 1841–44, these ideas were entangled with unstable ideas of jurisdiction, as British officials struggled to fit the conquered Chinese population of Hong Kong within recognised categories of British subjecthood. Events on the ground then short-circuited efforts to resolve this problem. In The Queen v. Lo A-tow (1843), Governor Henry Pottinger conflated his power to refuse Chinese requests for fugitives for lack of evidence (which China did not dispute) with the power of British courts to try Chinese subjects and sentence them to punishment (which China did dispute). Pottinger’s interpretation of Lo A-tow established a tenuous precedent for territorial sovereignty in a turn of events that would have far-reaching consequences.