Varieties of Indirect Rule and Insurgency in India

• In Event: Legacies of Colonial Institutions in Contemporary Civil Wars

Abstract

How does British colonial indirect rule affect the insurgencies in India? Previous literature by Teitelbaum & Verghese (2018), Verghese (2016) suggest that areas in India which were under British direct rule tended to have more caste and Maoist conflict. In contrast, Mukherjee (2018a, b) finds that it is areas which has British formal indirect rule through princely states and informal indirect rule through zamindars that had more Maoist insurgency, and Naseemullah (2015) also finds that indirect ruled areas in NWFP in Pakistan later had the Taliban insurgency. What explains this contradictory results of colonial legacies in South Asia? Wilkinson (2017) has critiqued the literature on colonial land tenure (Banerjee & Iyer 2005) and indirect rule (Verghese 2016, Iyer 2010) for not sufficiently disaggregating the different types of colonial indirect rule and land tenure. In this paper, I build on this suggestion to disaggregate the different types of formal indirect rule through princely states, and test this typology to see if it has differential effects on conflict. Quantitative analysis shows that warrior states which had higher state capacity and more equal land tenure systems and had lower chance of Maoist insurgency. In contrast, challenger states and feudatory states had more despotic rulers and unequal land tenure systems, and lesser capacity to fight wars against British and create a centralized state, and so had higher chance of Maoist insurgency.

Author

• Shivaji Mukherjee, University of Toronto