Interpretation and Method Empirical Research Methods and the Interpretive Turn

190 ACCESSING AND GENERATING DATA

fast, Congress Party leaders launched relay fasts and staged a rasta roko, leaders of all parties

came to visit the fasting leaders, prayers were organized in churches and mosques, and religious

leaders came out to join the protests.^10 The potential power of the fast of one or a few people is

recognized by the concern of authorities. Fasts today are watched closely, and if the health of the

fasting person is threatened, the police will forcibly take him/her to the hospital. The activities

associated with the fast may or may not reach the threshold warranting its inclusion as a protest

action. Yet, the fasts themselves rarely reach the 100-participant threshold for inclusion as a

demonstration.

The same is true for other forms of individual protest like suicides by farmers or self-immolation.

There is a tradition in Indian culture that gives such acts a significance they would not have in

American or most other Western cultures. Their exclusion from the Banks index eliminates what

may be an important form of protest in India. Banks’s measures may cover major forms of protest

in the United States, but they ignore many of the forms protests take in Indian cultures.

Aside from the taxonomic problems, Banks’s categories leave out so much critical informa-

tion that quite different events are treated as though they were similar and quite similar events as

though they were different. Missing information kinds of categories:

The Magnitude of Protest Events

Banks’s definitions set minimum levels of participation, but make no differentiation among pro-

test events once the minimum levels are met. The “or more” stated in, or implied by, the defini-

tions means that Banks’s index equates a strike of several million with a strike of a thousand. The

same failure to differentiate magnitudes is an equally applicable criticism of the data on riots and

demonstrations. Thus, the riots in the state of Gujarat in 2002, where over 2,000 people lost their

lives, would be equated with the 2003 Marad riots in the state of Kerala, where nine people lost

their lives. The impact of the former on Hindu-Muslim relations throughout the country was

much greater than that of the latter. Similarly, there is no differentiation among events on other

measures of the magnitude of protest, such as the cost to the economy as a whole or to individual

participants in it—all are treated as though they are of equal magnitude.

Information on the Legal Environment of Protest Events

Likewise, the legal environment within which protests take place is treated as irrelevant to Banks’s

counts of frequencies. Court decisions, expectations of enforcement, and other legal factors may

affect both the likelihood of a protest occurring and the numbers who turn out. A protest that takes

place in a state where no penalties exist for taking part in it is equated by Banks’s taxonomy with

one where participants face severe sanctions. Thus, a lower frequency of protest may not mean

less opposition but rather a harsher legal environment.

An example is the 2003 public employee strike in the state of Tamil Nadu. Although its pri-

mary target was the state government, it had an impact on national policy. It was spurred by the

state government’s suspension of a variety of benefits to employees. On July 2, 2003, over a

million employees struck. In preparation for such strikes, the government, under Chief Minister

Jayalalithaa, had passed the Tamil Nadu Essential Services Maintenance Act 2002 (TESMA) the

previous year, and two days after the start of the strike the government passed amendments to the

act making it even more draconian. In the first four days of the strike the government dismissed

over 200,000 employees.