“Colonial Land Tenure & Communist Insurgency: Evidence from Sub-district Analysis in India.”
This paper investigates the effects of colonial-era land tenure systems on the incidence of communist insurgency in India. Of the two dominant systems of land tenure, the ryotwari system involving direct revenue settlement with the cultivators are generally considered to be better than zamindari system that relies on feudal intermediaries. The former is widely associated with better socio-economic and political outcomes in post-colonial India. This paper questions the frequently-articulated superiority of the ryotwari system over the zamindari system in the context of a ‘minimalist’ colonial state that seeks to maximize its revenue while minimizing the administrative expenditure. I contend that both of the systems were similarly repressive and extractive. Importantly, they differed in the existence of a localized, relatively decentralized and autonomous political authority in the zamindari area, which mitigated the vulnerability of these areas to armed insurgencies. I leverage the variation in land tenure within the dominion of the Nizam of Hyderabad in British India to help explain the incidence of the communist uprising in Telangana in the 1940s. Relying on archival and historical data, I demonstrate that the incidents of uprising were directly linked to the ryotwari settlement. This relationship holds when we analyze the contemporary Maoist insurgency in Andhra Pradesh, that embraced the bulk of the area of the princely state of Hyderabad.
“Crop Productivity, Institutional Legacies, and Attenuated Conflict in India.”
One concern about climate change is that it will increase the rate of armed conflict, especially in vulnerable tropical and subtropical states. While scholars dedicated ample to attention to studying impacts on accentuated manifestations of conflict, including civil wars, terrorism, and massacres, research on potential conflict dynamics occurring outside of African states, the role of political institutions in mitigating local impacts, and on attenuated conflict events, such as
murders and other sorts of crime, including arson, asset appropriations, public humiliation, and labor activities (hunger strikes, boycotts), has been limited. This note provide an illustration of the relationship between environmental stress and attenuated conflict from an ongoing data collection project. Its four key contributions are: (1) focusing on India, the world’s largest democracy, (2) identifying a clear causal mechanism linking environmental change to violence, namely variations in agricultural productivity, (3) incorporating the role of historical institutional legacies, and (4) providing new indicators of attenuated conflict. In contrast to expectations in past research, the results suggest general sensitivity to positive yields in high cropland areas in districts with strong institutional legacy, suggesting demand-based violence, and mild sensitivity to lower crop yields in these districts, as well as in districts with a history of princely rule across both high and low cropland areas, suggesting sensitivity to scarcity. Moreover, the results are robust across all conflict measures employed, including not only attenuated, but also “standard” armed conflict phenomena such as insurgencies, terrorism, and police violence.