THE NUMERATION OF EVENTS 197policies or authority” for it to be counted. Many strike actions that are directed at other levels of
analysis impact the national government’s policies and/or authority or have multilevel impacts, yet
they may be excluded. Even if they were included, important information would be lost.
An example is the strike in the state of Andhra Pradesh against the state government–owned
Singareni Collieries Company Limited (SCCL) in January and February 2003. The mines em-
ployed about 96,000 workers at sixty-four mines.^51 The explicit purpose was to block privatization,
though government officials argued that the strike was “a ploy by unions to be in the limelight
and woo the workers in view of the elections due in February for identifying the majority union.”^52
The unions immediately claimed that the strike was total, while the management said it was
partial.^53 Five days after the strike began, a bandh was called in several towns in the coal-mining
areas and it was widely observed. In support of the strikers, opposition parties in AP, including
the Congress Party, the Left parties, the Telangana Rashtra Samiti party, and the Majlis-e-Ittahadul
Muslimeen party, tried to hold a satyagraha near the Secretariat in the city of Hyderabad, but it
was broken up by the police.^54 The president of the AP Congress Party Committee, M.
Satyanarayana Rao, verbally attacked the chief minister for his “abject surrender to the World
Bank and other international lending agencies” and for his support of privatization.^55 At this
point, the Union Coal Ministry formed a Crisis Resolution Group to arrange the transportation of
coal from other areas to provide several power-generating plants deprived of Singareni coal.^56
After a seventeen-day strike, the state government agreed to the miners’ major demands and the
strike was called off.^57 Although directed at the AP government controlled by the Telugu Desam
Party (TDP), this protest action targeted the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), which con-
trolled the national government of India, and its policy of privatization because the TDP was an
important part of that alliance. Banks’s definition of a strike requires that it be against more than
one employer, regardless of whether the employer is the state. Despite the political significance
of the strike, it might have been ignored for both reasons.
Further information is lost because protests against government or its policies at any level may
involve a series of events, all of which have a common purpose, that are contemporaneous or
sequential. Frequency counts may be capturing merely a difference in strategy of protest, al-
though it may appear as a difference in intensity of protest. That is, the frequency counts may
treat as separate protests several parts of a single protest. For example, early in 2003 the central
trade unions launched a “peaceful agitation” against the national government’s “anti-labor” and
“anti-people” economic policies. The action involved nearly two million workers and entailed
rasta rokos, jail bharos, and an array of other forms of “sub-protests.”^58 Shortly afterward, the
employees of “aided” degree and junior colleges in Andhra Pradesh initiated an agitation “to
protest against the Government’s alleged negligent attitude toward their problems.”^59 The protest
involved a protest day, followed by a mass dharna, followed by a mass rally, and culminated in an
indefinite strike. A third example would be a strike in Karnatika involving 40,000 officers affili-
ated with the All India Bank Officers’ Confederation. The strike was accompanied by “proces-
sions, rallies and demonstrations.”^60 Banks’s frequency counts may include each of these events
as separate demonstrations, provided they meet his 100-participants standard. Mere counts de-
prive us of information about the extent to which the protests are linked to each other.
Finally, it is often argued that protest actions “naturally” increase in the year prior to an elec-
tion. Such protest actions have a subtle, or not-so-subtle, objective of placing the state or national
government of the day on the defensive or of rallying support for a party or an issue. The formal
reason for the protest may be nonpolitical, but the informal reason may be political. The numeri-
cal frequency of protest, therefore, may be a result of factors unrelated to increased or decreased
discontent with the policies or authority of the government.