194 ACCESSING AND GENERATING DATA
Finally, most numerated protest data exclude those cases where action is merely threatened.
Yet, the threat of a protest action may have as significant an impact as an action itself. Low
frequencies of protest may mean that the threat of protest action has taken the place of actual
protest in affecting policy and/or authority. Whether or not this is the case depends on an array of
factors including previous experiences with protest actions. Protest frequencies provide no infor-
mation on most of these factors.Impact and SuccessThere are many factors related to the context of a protest that can affect its impact and that are lost
in summary counts. Two examples are illustrative.
First, in some Indian states there is a long tradition of strikes and demonstrations and in others
that tradition is not as well established—yet, frequency counts would ignore the differences. For
example, to strike in the state of Kerala is a common occurrence and no “big deal.” To strike in
the state of Orissa, though, would be a more unusual event for cultural and historical reasons. In
other words, protest is more ordinary in Kerala than in Orissa. As a consequence, one might
expect similar types of protests of similar magnitudes to have different impacts. None of this
information is included in the numerical representation of a protest.
Second, if one were to envision the impact of certain protest actions in India and the same
protest actions in the United States today, the impacts of identical protests would be quite differ-
ent. An example is a form of yatra, called a padayatra in Andhra Pradesh (AP), initiated by the
Congress Legislative Party leader Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy (YSR), covering 1,500 kilometers
over a sixty-day period in April to June 2003. The objectives of this long march were several,
including to “expose the lackadaisical attitude of the government in tackling the drought condi-
tions in the state.”^27 Others saw it as an “‘empathy tour’ and aimed at infusing confidence among
people in facing adverse conditions.”^28 The aim was certainly to elicit political support for the
Congress Party, too. The Congress Forum for Telangana (CFT), a group of Congress Party mem-
bers of the state legislature from the Telangana area, viewed the padayatra as a means to further
its efforts to create a separate state in the AP region of Telangana.^29 The padayatra was considered
a means of getting all factions of the party together. Accompanying the padayatra was a van fitted
with a public address system, a doctor and paramedics, security guards, and others who were a
part of the entourage.^30 The padayatra began in Hyderabad, where YSR prayed at a temple and a
dargah (a tomb of a revered Muslim); moved to the Congress Party headquarters at Gandhi Bhavan;
and continued forty kilometers to Chevella in Ranga Reddy district, while thousands of support-
ers wished him well along the way.^31 As a good omen, “the skies started clouding up and the day
cooled somewhat for the Congress [Party] leader to start his pre-election padayatra.”^32 There
were problems along the way: Congress Party activists in some areas fought each other and at one
point YSR was affected by heat stroke, but the padayatra’s effectiveness was shown by the flow-
ering of copycat padayatras by other groups. As one commentator said, “Competitive padayatras
is the latest political funda [fad] in Andhra Pradesh.”^33 Fundamentally, it was a kind of antigov-
ernment protest that Banks might represent as a number, yet the number deprives it of much of its
meaning, and that meaning depends to a considerable extent upon the history and character of the
areas in which it took place.
The degree of success among protest events differs considerably, though none of this informa-
tion is available in the frequency accounts. The determination of whether an event is successful or
not is a complex task in itself. An example that illustrates this complexity, but one that would be
excluded in Banks’s index because it was directed at a state rather than the “national” govern-