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ABSTRACT
Has the consolidation of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) as the dominant party at the national level since the 2014 Lok Sabha election affected internal security outcomes in India? This question assumes particular significance because of the primacy accorded to the use of force in the BJP’s counter-insurgency (COIN) strategy. Using sub-national data on insurgency-related fatalities from 2005–2021, I examine whether states where the BJP received the largest share of votes in the 2014 Lok Sabha election subsequently experienced any significant changes in the pattern of fatalities. Implementing a difference-in-difference econometric specification, I show that the BJP states experienced a relatively sharper decline in security force fatalities from pre-2014 compared to non-BJP states. However, there was no such effect on civilian fatalities or the total number of insurgency-related incidents. Taken together, these findings show that the greater thrust towards militarism in COIN strategy under the BJP, has, paradoxically, increased the security of military/police personnel involved in COIN operations, without commensurate changes in the security of those whom they are mandated to defend.
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Notes
1. Kothari had famously theorized about the Congress ‘system,’ the mode of party politics that prevailed between 1947–1967, when the Congress party dominated in both national and sub-national electoral spaces as the party of consensus. See Kothari, “The Congress ‘System’ in India,” 1162. For an empirical assessment of Palshikar’s thesis, see Chhibber and Verma, “The Rise of the Second Dominant Party System in India: BJP’s New Social Coalition in 2019.”
2. On the long-term buildup of the ‘security state,’ see Ganguly, “India’s Democracy at 70: The Troublesome Security State.”
3. Fidler, “The Indian Doctrine for sub-conventional operations”; Chowdhury, “Democratic processes in the context of separatism and political divergence: A analysis of 2014 Assembly Elections in Jammu and Kashmir”; Staniland, “Internal security strategy in India”; and Waterman, “Ceasefires and State Order-Making in Naga Northeast India.”
4. Fidler, “The Indian Doctrine for sub-conventional operations,” 208.
5. Staniland, “Internal security strategy in India,” 148.
6. Chowdhury, “Democratic processes in the context of separatism and political divergence: A analysis of 2014 Assembly Elections in Jammu and Kashmir,” 165–166.
7. Lacina, “Does Counterinsurgency Theory Apply in Northeast India?”
8. Ibid., 175–176.
9. Rajagopalan, Insurgency and counterinsurgency; Routray, “India: Fleeting attachment to the counterinsurgency grand strategy”; and Parashar, “Discursive (in)securities and postcolonial anxiety: Enabling excessive militarism in India.”
10. Rajagopalan, Insurgency and counterinsurgency, 5.
11. Routray, “India: Fleeting attachment to the counterinsurgency grand strategy,” 73.
12. Parashar, “Discursive (in)securities and postcolonial anxiety: Enabling excessive militarism in India,” 124.
13. Palshikar, “India’s Second Dominant Party System,” 15.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid.
17. For the purposes of this study, I adopt Parashar’s definition of militarism as an ideology that “thrives on the shared consensus between the state and citizens that security is a collective enterprise,” wherein “Citizens embrace military logics and military ethos … to confer legitimacy on the state and secure development benefits.” See Parashar, “Discursive (in)securities and postcolonial anxiety: Enabling excessive militarism in India,” 124.
18. Jain, Demonetization effect: Funds tap turns dry for terror Maoist groups.
19. Ibid., 3.
20. Chakravarty, How Modi Changed (and Changed) the Demonetization Narrative.
21. Business Today, Demonetisation and GST Adversely Impacted India’s GDP growth: Manmohan Singh.
22. Indian Express, Positive impact of demonetisation on theatres of violence: Govt, para 5.
23. In the case of the Kashmir insurgency, Kaila et al use a structural break analysis to show that there was a transition from a high violence to a low violence regime between 2003 and 2007. See Kaila et al, “Development programs, security, and violence reduction: Evidence from an insurgency in India.”
24. Sundar cautions against uncritical usage of the SATP since it draws its inferences from open-access sources, such as news reports, and thus under-records incidents of conflict. See Sundar, “Insurgency, Counter-insurgency, and Democracy in Central India,” 158–159. To guard against possible measurement bias along these lines, I also coded an alternative measure of insurgency-related fatalities using the Global Terrorism Database. The results with this alternative measure are discussed below.
25. The data used in the study covers the period 1 January 2005–21 December 2021.
26. The choice of the difference-in-difference framework for this study follows Basu, who uses a similar framework to study the effect of the BJP’s electoral victory in 2014 on the incidence of hate crimes against minorities. See Basu, “Majoritarian politics and hate crimes against religious minorities: Evidence from India, 2009–2018.”
27. Note, the GTD does not distinguish between civilian and security force fatalities in terrorist attacks. It records total number of fatalities and number of fatalities experienced by the attackers only. However, the database records the target of attacks i.e. whether military or civilian targets were attacked. Using this information, I identified the total of number of deaths, minus those sustained by the attackers, in attacks on military targets. I use this measure as my estimate of security force fatalities under the assumption that attacks on military targets will only lead to deaths of security personnel and attacks on civilians will only lead to civilian deaths. This measure clearly overestimates security force (and civilian) fatalities, but is the most plausible way of operationalizing the quantity of interest from the GTD.
28. The data for the unemployment rate (number of unemployed per 1000 individuals) is collated from the Reserve Bank of India’s Handbook of Statistics on Indian States. Note, this data is only available for the years 2005, 2009, 2011, 2017, and 2018. I imputed the values for the remaining years using the following rule: (i) for the years 2006–2008, I use the mean of the unemployment rates of 2005 and 2009; (ii) for 2010, I use the mean of the unemployment rates of 2009 and 2011; for 2012–2016, I use the mean of the unemployment rates of 2011 and 2017; and for 2019, I use the 2018 unemployment rate. I did not impute values for 2020 and 2021 due to insufficient information.
29. The data for this variable is collated from Basu, “Majoritarian politics and hate crimes against religious minorities: Evidence from India, 2009–2018.”
30. The data for this variable is collated from the Planning Commission, Report of the Committee to Study Development in Hill States arising from Management of Forest Lands with Special Focus on Creation of Infrastructure, Livelihood and Human Development, 15.
31. Following standard practice, 1000 bootstrap replicates were used. I implemented this method using the package clusterSEs in R. See Esarey and Menger, “Practical and Effective Approaches to Dealing With Clustered Data.”
32. Interestingly, for journalists covering the events, it did not feel like any other Indian election either. See, for example, Sardesai, 2014: The Elections that changed India.
33. My discussion is based on a report on the incident in Masoodi, In J&K’s ‘Pencil Village’, Locals Fear Loss Of Livelihoods.
34. Lalwani and Gayner, India’s Kashmir Conundrum: Before and After the Abrogation of Article 370, 6.
35. Ibid.
36. Ibid.
37. Roche, Govt walks the talk on Look East Policy, signs peace accord with NSCN(I-M).
38. For an analysis of how the NSCN(I-M) was ideologically encircled before the signing of the Framework Agreement by BJP-aligned and BJP-influenced civil society groups, see Ray, “The second dominant party system and India’s COIN strategy,” 141–144.
39. When the Right to Information activist, Venkatesh Nayak, sought detailed documents of the Agreement from the government, he was denied. He subsequently approached the Central Information Commission, but the Commission upheld the government’s decision. See Aggarwal, CIC upholds govt’s decision not to reveal details of 2015 Naga peace accord.
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Subhasish Ray
Subhasish Ray is an Associate Professor and Associate Dean at the Jindal School of Government and Public Policy of the OP Jindal Global University. His current research examines the political legacies of civil wars. He serves as an editor for the Journal of Genocide Research. His articles have appeared/are forthcoming in leading journals such as International Studies Quarterly, Political Psychology, Journal of Peace Research, Electoral Studies, Critical Asian Studies, and Contemporary South Asia.