192 ACCESSING AND GENERATING DATA
(TDP) planned protests against the construction of the dam on the Chitravati River, claiming it
violated an agreement AP had with the state of Karnataka concerning riparian rights and would
adversely impact the supply of water to AP farmers. The protests took place near the border and
involved dharnas that blocked the main interstate highway, rasta rokos that delayed trains, and a
near-total bandh in the Anantapur district of AP where the protests occurred.^17 Yet, as the demon-
strations developed, the TDP and the chief minister, N. Chandrababu Naidu, made the Congress
Party a target of the protests. They turned an AP versus Karnataka issue into an attack on the
Congress Party government in the state of Karnataka—and, by implication, the Congress Party in
AP.^18 None of the subtle impacts of the protest on within-state politics is conveyed by simply
numerating this event.
A third example is that of a statewide bandh called by the Samajwadi Party (SP) and the
Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) in the state of Uttar Pradesh (UP) in 1994, when they constituted the
ruling alliance. The purpose was to protest threats to their own reservation policy and the possible
imposition of President’s Rule in the state. An observer contended, “Both parties apparently have
an eye on consolidating their votebank by pitting the anti-reservationists against their own party
workers. In case of dismissal of the Government, the Scheduled Castes and Backward Classes
would rally behind the SP-BSP combine for they have projected themselves as ‘true champions’
of these classes.”^19 In Banks’s data set no distinction would have been made that this protest was
by those governing UP; it would instead have been equated with a protest against those governing
UP. As this case shows, a high frequency of protest does not necessarily mean great opposition to
the state government.
A fourth example is where the instigators may have objectives other than those they articulate,
as illustrated by a twenty-four-hour bandh called by the Congress Party three years ago in the
state of West Bengal to demand an end to killings of members of the Trinamul Congress Party in
Keshpur in Midnapore district. An observer claimed that “While the bandh is against the Com-
munist Party (Marxist) (CPM) and the state government for its inability to maintain law and
order, the preemptive strike... is a bid to upstage the Trinamul Congress Party and grab the
political initiative.”^20 In the end the Trinamul Congress Party did not support the bandh, claiming
that it opposed the violence often associated with such actions. All this information would be left
out when the events were numerated. Yet, it would be essential to an understanding of the politi-
cal impact of the protest.
Besides the loss of information on objectives, Banks’s protest frequencies do not provide any
information about who instigated the protest or who protested. The meaning and significance of
a protest event often are closely tied to the instigators. For example, there are high-profile people
like Medha Patkar of the Narmada Bachao Andolan, a significant environmental NGO, whose
involvement lends a protest greater significance than would be the case where no such person was
involved. Such people attract both domestic and international attention from the media and from
governments. A further example of the variety of instigators is the case of the state of Andhra
Pradesh Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu, who early in 2003 urged people to stage dharnas
against their representatives and “picket them at their houses every morning” if they failed to
resolve people’s problems.^21
Besides the instigators, the meaning and significance of protests, at least in part, depend upon
who participates, yet such information is lost, too, in frequency counts of events. Who does and who
does not participate is critical to understanding the twenty-four-hour state of West Bengal bandh to
which we have just referred. Both citizens and government officials sought either to keep Cauvery
river water in the state of Karnataka or to get it released to the state of Tamil Nadu in a series of
protest actions during the last half of 2002; and, as noted previously, government participated in the