THE NUMERATION OF EVENTS 191When the workers took the issue to the High Court, the highest court in the state, it ruled on
July 11 that the dismissals did not infringe on any fundamental right, though it urged the state to
reinstate most of the dismissed employees. The leaders of the strike, many of whom had been
arrested before the strike began, were released the next day and the strike essentially ended,
though the reinstatement of workers dragged out for some time.^11 The court did not rule on TESMA,
but based its ruling on Rule 22 of the Tamil Nadu Government Servant’s Conduct Rules, 1973,
which denied public employees the right to strike. Clearly, the strikers had assumed the rule
would not be employed. In order to get their jobs back, employees had to unconditionally apolo-
gize and promise to abide by that rule.
On August 6 the Supreme Court, the highest court in India, reaffirmed the High Court’s posi-
tion that government employees had no legal right to strike.^12 The decision was immediately
attacked, especially by political groups on the left throughout the country.^13 As one observer put
it: “Leaders of the Left parties are of the view that the judgment must be seen as part of an
increasingly unsympathetic and negative attitude to the rights of workers, which, in their opinion,
is but a natural corollary of the World Bank-driven neo-liberal regime, to which the governments
at the Centre and several States are committed.”^14
Soon afterward, the government of the state of Tamil Nadu filed charges under TESMA against
party leaders who supported the strike, including the leader of the Dravida Munnettra Kazhagam
(DMK), the main opposition party at the time, the Tamil Nadu Congress Party Committee work-
ing president, the state secretary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPM), and the state
secretary of the Communist Party of India (CPI).^15 The likely outcome, not only in the state of
Tamil Nadu, will be a diminution in the frequency of strikes—the cause of which is not an in-
creasingly satisfied workforce.
The legal environment is affected not only by court directives, but also by the determination of
governments and the police to enforce existing law. As noted above, the state of Tamil Nadu
government used a new law, rather than an existing rule, as the basis for its action against its
striking employees and those who supported them—though the courts acted on the basis of an old
rule. There are many other cases where laws have been invoked to make protests more costly to
protesters. None of the impact of this legal environment is embodied in the count of protests.
Actors and Motives
Frequencies do not distinguish among objectives of protest actions, yet the objectives are significant
aspects of such actions. Those involved in protest actions may have different purposes or different
priorities among the purposes they share, and they may change their objectives, or the priority
among objectives, during a protest action. None of this is reflected in the counts of protest actions.
The significance of objectives to the meaning of protest events can be illustrated by three ex-
amples. An August 2003 Mumbai bandh brought both the Shiv Sena, a Hindu nationalist party in
the state of Maharashtra, and Muslim organizations together in the protest, though for quite differ-
ent reasons. Shiv Sena’s formal reason for participating was to protest a series of bomb blasts in the
city that were blamed on Pakistan-inspired terrorists. On the other hand, Muslim participation was
attributed to their desire to differentiate themselves from Pakistani Muslims, to promote better rela-
tions with Hindus, and to show themselves to be loyal Indians.^16 This “cooperation” differentiates
the bandh from other Shiv Sena bandhs, but Banks’s data make no such distinction.
A second example illustrating both the complexities and the significance of purposes to an
understanding of protest is that of the demonstrations against the Paragodu dam in June of 2003.
Both the state of Andhra Pradesh (AP) branch of the Congress Party and the Telugu Desam Party