Critical Asian Studies, 2015

Vol. 47, No. 1, 24–43, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14672715.2015.997075

Clientelism, Trust Networks, and India’s Identity Politics:

Conveying Closeness in Gujarat
Ward Berenschot

Royal Netherlands Institute for Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV), Leiden, The Netherlands

ABSTRACT: With an election campaign for a seat in Gujarat’s state parliament as its backdrop,
this article relates India’s persistent forms of identity politics to the evolution of trust networks.
Political scientists and anthropologists have adopted highly divergent approaches to account
for the ways in which India’s politicians use social identities to mobilize support. A point of
convergence, this article argues, lies in the social networks through which people solve
everyday problems and organize access to state resources. Discussing the ever-changing
salience of social divisions in Gujarat’s politics – from class to caste to religion and region
– this article argues that two characteristics of such trust networks – the extent to which
these networks are organized along social divides and the extent to which they lend
themselves to facilitating clientelistic exchanges with politicians – can foster or impede the
political salience of these social divisions. The particular historical development of trust
networks and their entanglement in patronage networks impacts the likelihood of the
emergence of divisive political discourse.
Keywords: identity politics; clientelism; caste; trust networks; India; Gujarat

Introduction: The Pamphlet

In election time a festive mood pervades the otherwise drab streets of Isanpur, a poor locality with
a mixed population of Dalits and Muslims in eastern Ahmedabad, Gujarat’s main city. The main
roads are illuminated by the lights coming from the many karyalay, the small offices that candi-
dates have set up to attract supporters. There party workers spend enjoyable evenings feasting on
the free snacks and chai while exchanging the latest political gossip. Three nights before the state
elections, veteran party worker Anand Rathod sits outside one of the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya
Janata Party’s (BJP) karyalay with the much younger Dinesh and discusses the chances of their
candidate Shailesh Macwana against the Congress candidate Manoj Parmar. Reflecting on how
the massive Hindu–Muslim violence that took place in 2002 had helped Shailesh Macwana to
win the previous elections, Anand and Dinesh express their worries about how this time the div-
isions within the local Dalit community can undermine Shailesh’s electoral prospects:

There is only one chance that Manoj wins: if the Muslims do one-sided voting [i.e., all vote for Manoj
Parmar]…but then Shailesh will get a riot done. The last time [i.e., at the time of massive Hindu–
Muslim violence in 2002] Shailesh had already lost…but he had done that last riot and…[sub-
sequently] the percentage of Muslims voting decreased drastically.

Correspondence Address: Ward Berenschot, Royal Netherlands Institute for Southeast Asian and Caribbean
Studies (KITLV), Leiden, The Netherlands. Email: ward.berenschot@gmail.com

© 2015 BCAS, Inc.

 Critical Asian Studies 25

Dinesh seems less sure of Shailesh Macwana’s chances: “Even then he only won by a margin of
2200 votes!… And now BJP has been in power for five years and still people are using abusive
words against us.” Rathod: “There are reasons for it. First, Shailesh has not done anyone’s work
without talking money, right? [shocked reaction from the others] – look I speak the truth, I don’t
know how to be like others.… And the second reason is his dad, his father’s tongue is so harsh. He
uses abusive language against the Muslims and against the Vankars.”1 Dinesh: “I did not know
that! He has destroyed the votes!”
At that moment the conversation is interrupted by a passing worker from a third party, the
Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP). He is distributing a pamphlet that reads:

Even after sixty years of freedom we North Gujarat and Central Gujarat voters are poor, miserable,
and helpless in spite of being more that 80 percent in numbers. How long should we tolerate this con-
dition?… I have faith and trust that, today, in this moment of the great war you people will elect and
send our North Gujarat and Central Gujarat candidates to the Legislative Assembly.

Rathodbhai sighs and waves dismissively at the pamphlet. “The thing with us is: two divisions
always take place.” By that time the pamphletist has walked off to the Congress’s karyalay.
Rathod looks worried when he adds, “Shailesh will not get votes just like that.”
With this election campaign in 2007 for a seat in Gujarat’s state parliament as its backdrop,
this article relates India’s persistent forms of identity politics to the evolving capacity of trust net-
works to facilitate clientelistic exchanges. As the moans from these party workers about the “div-
isions that always take place” illustrate, identity politics in India involves not just the political
instrumentalization of one social division. Identity politics involves the manipulation of the
importance that voters attach to different identity dimensions – from class and religion to caste
and region – as politicians combine their emphasis on one social division with attempts to attenu-
ate the public awareness of other divisions. How can we account for resulting waxing and waning
of the political saliency of different social divisions? When and why do politicians fail or succeed
in bringing social divisions to the fore?
Such questions have inspired a large and multifaceted literature. A remarkable characteristic
of this literature on India’s identity politics is the marked contrast between the approaches adopted
by political scientists and anthropologists. Political scientists have tended, unsurprisingly, to
prioritize politics, as they attribute the political saliency of social identities to the opportunities
that these social identities offer to produce electoral majorities and improve access to state
resources. Political strategizing is what brings social divisions to the fore: where “an activist
state dominates political life and associational life is weak, the emergence of a cleavage-based
party system can result primarily from party strategy and competition.”2 Such arguments go
back to the 1960s when scholars discussed the “politicization of caste” or a “democratic incarna-
tion of caste,” pointing out that caste turned out to be a valuable instrument for political parties to
mobilize support.3 Caste organizations often function as vote pooling instruments that serve to
maximize the benefits that their members can extract from politicians in return for their political
support.4 Kanchan Chandra has been a particularly vocal representative of this approach, arguing
that in India’s “patronage democracy” voters see a high number of co-ethnics in a political party as
a reassurance that their vote will translate into access to state resources. Voters invest in a social

1
A subcaste of, traditionally, weavers. Vankars, like Chamars, are Dalits, the lowest rung in India’s caste
system.
2
Chhibber 2001, 20.
3
Kothari 1970; Rudolph 1965; Rudolph and Rudolph 1960; Bailey 1970, 2001; Weiner 1967.
4
Shah 2004; Kohli 1990.
26 W. Berenschot

identity when this is likely to yield benefits: “[r]egardless of the good they seek, Indian voters are
instrumental actors who invest in an identity because it offers them the best available means by
which to obtain desired benefits, and not because such identification is valuable in itself.”5
This image of “a billion profiteering voters wielding the abacus of rational choice”6 has met
with considerable opposition from, mainly, anthropologists who have faulted this “political
approach” for, first, having taken social identities as pre-constituted, permanent social givens
and, second, for adopting a very one-sided and materialistic interpretation of the kind of goods
that voters seek. Studies of anthropologists have tended focus on the socioeconomic processes
and discursive acts that bring an awareness of social divisions to the fore.7 In particular, propo-
nents of such a constructivist approach to identity politics argue that India’s increased integration
in a global economy and the resulting changing social hierarchies have created a “need for an
image of shared anchorage and a theory of collectivity.”8 This desire for recognition and orien-
tation about one’s place in the world, it was argued, attracted people to the promises of order
and belonging that a politics of caste and religion had to offer.9 With their focus on symbolic rep-
resentation and discourse, such arguments linked up with a larger aversion among anthropologists
toward the rational choice perspectives adopted by political scientists. This aversion has led pol-
itical anthropologists like Jonathan Spencer to entirely dismiss the calculative dimensions of poli-
tics as “banal” because it “makes politics look the same” – to the apparent dismay of his
informants.10 With its focus on the expressive, symbolic dimensions of politics, this approach
is engendering studies of, for example, Hindu–Muslim violence11 that hardly contain any refer-
ence to political calculations.
This division is unhelpful for political anthropology in general and the study of Indian politics
in particular. As Christophe Jaffrelot remarked, a focus on either calculative or symbolic dimen-
sions at the expense of the other is simply empirically untenable as they so obviously represent
two sides of the same coin.12 In this article I attempt to develop some common ground between
political and anthropological approaches by bringing in (relational) sociology. As I delve into the
machinations driving an election campaign for a seat in Gujarat’s state parliament, I will relate the
changing political salience of social divisions to the evolution of informal trust networks through
which people solve everyday problems and arrange social security. Trust networks are, in Charles
Tilly’s definition, “ramified interpersonal connections, consisting mainly of strong ties, within
which people set valued, consequential, long-term resources and enterprises at risk to the malfea-
sance, mistakes, or failures of others.”13 Trust networks comprise the social connections that
people draw on to gain access to resources and solve the challenges of life – from securing a
job to financing hospital treatment to organizing migration. These trust networks can be formal
organizations like labor unions or caste organizations, as well as informal support networks orga-
nized around communalities like residency, caste, or regional background.
I will focus on the integration of these networks into public politics, i.e., the way in which
such problem-solving networks facilitate the interaction of people with power holders and state
institutions and the way in which they (sometimes) lend themselves to political mobilization.

5
Chandra 2004, 11.
6
Piliavsky 2014, 16.
7
Veer 1994; Pandey 1992.
8
Nandy et al. 1995, 112.
9
Hansen 1999; Shani 2007.
10
Spencer 2007, 89.
11
Ghassem-Fachandi 2012.
12
Jaffrelot 2012.
13
Tilly 2005, 12.
 Critical Asian Studies 27

These networks come with patterns of authority that can facilitate a clientelistic exchange of elec-
toral support for access to state resources. The extent to which these networks are organized
around social divisions are not just, as the above-mentioned “political approach” suggests, a prag-
matic response to opportunities provided by high-level politics. The way in which (competition
for) state access gets bound up with ethnic or religious identities also develops from the ground up
by the way socioeconomic developments strengthen (or impair) identity-based trust networks that
lend themselves to organizing clientelistic exchanges. I will develop this argument by, first, con-
sidering the character of local election campaigning and the way in which politicians make use of
social divisions. The second part discusses the ways in which the character of trust networks in
Isanpur shape this mobilizational capacity of social divisions. The article is based on fieldwork in
November and December 2007 on Gujarat’s state elections and builds on a previous fifteen-month
fieldwork stint in the same area in 2005 and 2006.14

Election Meetings
The election rally was finally organized on the last day of the official campaign period. Daalsa-
niabhai, the local worker of the Congress party, had been attempting for weeks to get Congress
candidate Manoj Parmar to come to his chali (housing block). Now the narrow streets are filling
up and young and old are sitting down on the carpets that Daalsania had laid out on the ground.
The people I spoke to were skeptical about Manoj Parmar and expressed the importance of prac-
tical results:

What is important is that he does good work. There is water shortage here. If he [the candidate] lives
far away, or if he cannot arrange water, what use is the candidate? And he should be from the Vankar
community. If he is from our community he will do our work better.

Or another:

I look at three things: he should be a residential candidate, he should not be a goonda [i.e., criminal]
type, and he should be doing work for people.

And a third:

If they have done good work, then we give the vote. If they have done electricity connections, if they
solved power problems, then we know that they do the work. What they have done before, that is
important. We are not interested in speeches.

These considerations have become all the more prominent after the collapse of the once-thriving
textile industry in Isanpur after the 1980s: lacking much alternative stable sources of income, the
access to governmental jobs and resources has become a vital lifeline for many households. For
this access Isanpur residents depend on political intermediaries who pressurize the local bureauc-
racy on their behalf in exchange for electoral support. This clientelistic interaction between voter
and politician impacts the self-presentation and discourse of politicians during elections. In a cli-
entelistic political arena, voters face a strong incentive to neglect policy proposals and instead
base their vote on perceptions about how forthcoming a candidate will be in interceding in official
procedures on their behalf to access to public services, jobs, welfare benefits, admission in a
school, etc. The dependence of poorer voters on political mediation to access state resources

14
See Berenschot 2011.
28 W. Berenschot

engenders a style of campaigning that focuses on conveying closeness, both in the sense of being
socially connected and feeling a concern for the personal welfare of voters. Candidates need to
find ways to assure the voter that after elections he or she will really be accessible to listen to
demands of voters and willing to act on these demands. As Daalsaniabhai’s election meeting illus-
trates, social identities and their associated networks serve these purposes.
When Daalsania takes up the microphone, which was connected to a rather creaky sound
system, he does not seem to command much respect as he struggles to make himself heard
above the constant chatter. He welcomes Shailesh Parmar to his chali in the following manner:

As you all know, in the hospitals you have to run from this window to that and from that window to the
other [to get treatment].… Some years ago [people] from our chali…[rented] a [bus] and went on a
journey. This bus met with an accident. People from our chali were struggling in pain, and we
admitted them to Vadilal [hospital].… Our candidate Manojbhai [heard about it] and the party
workers asked him: “Sir, come, there has been an accident, and so you come.” So, Manojbhai
came…and after he saw [their] pitiable condition…he instantly put his hand in his pocket. I
thought, “What will Manojbhai do? He has put his hand in the pocket.” But he told me, “Dalsaaniab-
hai, take 10,000 rupees [approximately US$180]. First get them immediate treatment and bring the
medicines.” From 10 in the morning to 7 in the evening he remained seated right opposite the hospital.
We have to give our votes to such a [person].

Such an election rally is not just a chance for voters to meet a candidate. These rallies are also
occasions to demonstrate to voters that they have a network that connects them with the candidate.
The capacity of a local worker to bring a candidate to his locality, the ritual of garlanding this
candidate, and the respectful words between candidates and local workers all serve to show to
voters that some of their neighbors are actually really close to the candidate. That was also the
purpose of Daalsania’s speech: he did not discuss policy proposals but instead told a story of
how Manoj Parmar responded to his plea for help. By conveying the strength of the network
that connects a candidate with the audience, these election meetings serve to convince the
voter that after the elections they will have the necessary connections to approach the winning
politician for help.
Manoj Parmar is dressed like a typical politician, with his white dhoti under a black vest. His
well-groomed hair and his big, well-fed body betray his wealth – he is a builder and deals in real
estate. This made him one of the richest businessmen in the area. His success contrasts sharply
with the unemployment and destitution found in this chali where he is speaking. Furthermore,
Manoj Parmar’s family originally hails from Rajasthan and belongs to the Vankar caste, while
he is addressing an audience of the Chamar caste who are mainly from Saurasthra – a peninsula
in the southern part of Gujarat. As he speaks he subtly tries to downplay the importance of these
divisions:

Brother Dalsaaniabhai, all the leaders of this place, brothers and sisters and young friends… Dalsaa-
niabhai and all [others] had a strong feeling that “Sir, come to do a meeting in the chali once.”…
Shailesh Macwana has spread rumors in this area that Manoj Parmar is going to build eleven-story
towers in Topi mill. And in these towers Muslim brothers and sisters will come to live. And when
communal riots happen, [they will] throw bombs and stones from the top of these towers.… Now I
want to ask you. A tower was made, [and it was] Shailesh Macwana’s. [He] has made a bungalow
like the Taj Mahal.
The BJP government has not, in five years [when it was in control of the municipality and the state],
[even] talked of giving money to the workers. The way we went to work in the [textile] mills, do labor,
dig pits, go for construction work, drive lorries, so that our sons and daughters will not have to do the
work that we are doing today. But you will not get a single boy or girl in the chali…that boy or girl
who has, in the last five years, gotten a government job.
 Critical Asian Studies 29

I need your support and cooperation. The leaders have come out of the chalis and they talk about Saur-
astra-ism and Uttar [North] Gujarat-ism, and if I say more than that: they talk of someone being a
Vankar and that another being a Chamar. I want to say to all of you: When Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar
had given reservations [i.e., seats in colleges and jobs in state departments for Dalits]; it was not
written that this is the Vankar’s reservation and that is the Chamar’s reservation.

In his short (abridged) speech, Manoj Parmar invokes no less than four different social divisions.
Some of them he attempts to play down: he implies that Muslims have not been a threat and argues
that his audience of Chamars from Saurasthra should not lend much weight to such divisions. One
might assume that Manoj’s hesitance about holding an election meeting in this chali might have to
do with his perception that this particular audience was biased against him – since his opponent,
Shailesh Macwana, is also a Chamar from Saurasthra. In an attempt to smooth over these divisions
Manoj Parmar used the word “we” for those doing laboring work. That might seem odd given his
real estate activities, but it fits the overall strategy of the Congress party: throughout the campaign
Parmar and other Congress politicians attempted to present the election as a contest between the
poorer lower castes and the rich upper castes – tainting BJP as an upper-caste party.
Manoj Parmar’s play with these different identity dimensions illustrates how the invocation of
social identities enable politicians to make promises of future support appear more convincing. The
use of different identity symbols and the invocation of antagonisms between voters help politicians
convey the message that they will be more forthcoming than their competitors. A clientelistic pol-
itical arena engenders this kind of identity politics: diverse aspects of a political campaign – ranging
from the clothing of politicians and the content of speeches to the invocation of social divisions and
the involvement of neighborhood leaders – can be interpreted as attempts of politicians to make
promises of personal support appear credible. The invocation of social divisions serves to make
campaign promises appear more credible and more convincing: using these different divisions to
present themselves as “their man,” candidates can create the impression that they will privilege
their audience members after the elections. A candidate who would forego any form of identity poli-
tics would be very vulnerable to “ethnic outbidding”15 as other politicians can present themselves as
a better defender of the interests of a community by promising to privilege that community.
The difficulty for candidates – and the fascination for researchers – lies in the availability of
different social divides for political use. Like Manoj Parmar, his opponent Shailesh Macwana
struggled with the social divisions present among his electorate. A Chamar from Saurasthra, Shai-
lesh Macwana does not have this businessman-like air about him and is very much perceived as a
local. He used to be a youth leader in the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), a Hindu-nationalist organ-
ization affiliated to the BJP, where he gained notoriety and fame for his stringent anti-Muslim views.
He failed to win a seat in the municipality in 2001, but his fortunes turned during the Hindu–Muslim
violence in 2002. In March 2002 Shailesh Macwana was leading mobs on violent raids throughout
Isanpur. He encouraged mobs to attack Muslim localities, he set fire to several houses, and, accord-
ing to some residents, he personally killed a few Muslims. He was briefly jailed for exhorting vio-
lence. In the polarized atmosphere of 2002, his brief spell in jail made him very popular as he was
hailed for his outspoken “defense” of Hindus. He became BJP’s candidate for the state elections,
and ten months after the start of the violence, Shailesh Macwana managed to beat Manoj Parmar
and capture a seat in the state assembly.
In this rerun of the 2002 elections, however, the atmosphere is no longer gripped by Hindu–
Muslim tensions. As the threat of Muslims might this time not be enough to unite Hindus, Shai-
lesh Macwana faces the challenge that many voters from one of the largest castes, the Vankars,

15
See Horowitz 1985.
30 W. Berenschot

might now prefer their caste-fellow Manoj Parmar, while his party, the BJP, is tainted as an upper-
caste party. While the estimates varied, Isanpur consists of about 50 percent Dalits, 25 percent
Muslims, and 25 percent upper castes. Vankars and Chamars together make up about two-
thirds of the Dalit community, with the Vankar community being slightly larger.16 As Muslims
were expected to vote for Congress, Shailesh Macwana needs to make inroads into the Vankar
community to stand a chance of gaining a majority of the votes. In the following extract from
a speech made during one of his election meetings (Photo 1), Shailesh Macwana aims to
smooth over these damaging divisions while subtly suggesting that a Hindu–Muslim division
shapes the provision of public services.

Water is the biggest problem of this area. In five years water should be going up to the second floor [of
the houses]. In 2001, I talked of making a water tank behind the school. And I lost the elections. [Con-
gress politician and Muslim Ahmed Faraz won against me] He stopped the plan for [building] the
tank. Do you know the reason behind stopping the plan? Listen. If that tank is made then the roofs
and shops of Muslims would be demolished. Go and ask those people from Congress [if this is
true].… [But] I will tell you of joyful tidings. Gas pipeline connections have been set up in Maninagar
[an upper-caste area nearby]. I told Narendrabhai Modi, “Maninagar is of crorepatis and lakhpatis
[i.e., rich people], give the gas connection to the families of Isanpur.” He said yes. He called his offi-
cers [and said] provide gas [connection] to every house in Shailesh Macwana’s area.…
The opposition candidate is Manojbhai Parmar. Tell me, who has seen Shaileshbhai Macwana’s
house? [Crowd: I have seen it!]. But where is Manojbhai Parmar’s house? Where is it located?
[Crowd: in Vadaj!]. In a rickshaw it costs 300 rupees to go there and come back. So if you want to
get something done [you have to go there]. I am the son who lives amongst you; you will not
[only] get to see him walking, you will get to see him at some events. I’d just wear half pants. I’d
come to your house wearing shorts. Because this is my thought, listen: this is my house, this is my
family.… I do not want money, understand? I am not old, my dad is just retired. [We have] 40–50
lakhs from that. We are just two brothers, so there is no [financial] worry. We are satisfied eating
dal-roti [simple food, signifying a simple lifestyle] and I do not want to go out of the area.

Shailesh Macwana’s invocation of a shared lifestyle – invoking similarities in terms of clothing,

housing, and food – conveys loyalty, suggesting that the candidate empathizes with the needs of
his audience. The closeness of his house – compared to Manoj Parmar’s – was a particular center-
piece of his campaign speeches: if the intercession of a politician is needed to deal with a state
institution then the distance to the house is indeed an important consideration. Furthermore, Shai-
lesh Macwana attempts to link the provision of resources – water and gas – to the Dalit and Hindu
identity of his audience. He creates the impression of a competition for water with Muslims – who
did not want a tank on top of their houses. In addition, in reaction to Congress’s strategy to focus
on a division between upper castes and lower castes, Shailesh Macwana illustrates how these div-
isions do not matter when providing gas connections.
Shailesh’s suggestion that the provision of water is at risk because of the involvement of
Muslims should not be seen merely as an attempt to tap into existing anti-Muslim prejudices.
The clientelistic interaction between voter and politician generates incentives to employ this
kind of divisive discourse. A divisive discourse raises the credibility of the candidate’s promises
to voters who are looking for indications of the candidate’s future usefulness. In these speeches
the suggestion of a conflict of interest between Hindus and Muslims (or, implicitly in Shailesh’s
speech, between upper castes and lower castes) serves two important purposes: it conveys a sense
a loyalty (“I am on your side”) and it helps the politician to convince the voter that he will be more
useful in delivering public goods or in dealing with the government machinery.

16
This is based on estimates provided by several informants.
 Critical Asian Studies 31

Photo 1. Shailesh Macwana delivering a campaign speech. (Credit: Ward Berenschot.)

Being reliant on political actors to gain access to public services, voters are discouraged from
voting for a politician who promises an equal distribution of government resources to all. As
voters cannot rely on a universal, policy-based provision of public services, they try to maximize
their access to these resources by supporting a politician who promises to privilege them and their
community (or, similarly, for a politician who promises to end the perceived advantages of
others). Invoking these divisions makes campaign promises appear more credible and more con-
vincing: using divisions to present themselves as “their man,” candidates create the impression
that they would privilege the audience members after the elections. Furthermore, in a first-
past-the-post electoral system social divisions help target resources and campaigning efforts
more effectively. A catchall campaign strategy risks wasting resources on groups that will not
yield votes. By targeting (promises of) the provision of public resources to one side of a social
divide, politicians can ensure the gratitude and loyalty of this particular community. As long as
the targeted group is large enough to yield a majority of the votes, politicians have little incentive
to spend resources on groups other than the targeted communities. These considerations yield
electoral “arithmetic”: it is commonly noted that politicians throughout India use detailed demo-
graphic information to forge coalitions of communities that are big enough to yield a majority.
The KHAM coalition (Kshatriya, Harijan, Adivasi, Muslim) that sustained Congress’s power
in Gujarat and the AJGAR (Ahir, Jat, Gujjar, and Rajput) anti-Congress alliance in Uttar
Pradesh are only two of the prominent examples from the 1980s.
Politicians operating in a largely clientelistic political context thus face strong incentives to
target their efforts – the speeches, the building of networks, the distribution of state resources
32 W. Berenschot

– to specific groups that can deliver a majority of the votes. Both Shailesh Parmar and Shailesh
Macwana organized their efforts around us vs. them categorizations: while the Congress politician
largely excluded the upper-caste electorate in his constituency and tried to build a coalition of
Muslims and lower-caste Hindus, Shailesh Macwana excluded Muslims and emphasized
Hindu unity. The BSP pamphlet discussed above targeted yet another division, as it aimed to
present the BSP as a better choice for people from north Gujarat – since neither Shailesh
Macwana or Shailesh Parmar are from there. Consequently, they engaged in a skillful and
subtle manipulation of these different characteristics of their electorate. Electoral success requires
a capacity to increase the awareness of a targeted social division and a capacity to mitigate other
social divisions. Political success thus depends on choosing an us vs. them division that might
yield a majority of the votes in the constituency and finding ways to make that us vs. them div-
ision more central to the self-perception of voters than other social divisions. This is one reason
why Indian politics is so fascinatingly rich with identity-related symbolism – clothing, language,
gods, rituals – and discourse: politicians need them to articulate their loyalty as well as manipulate
the importance that voters attach to different identity dimensions.

Networks and the Instrumentalization of Social Identities

This mishmash of crosscutting social divisions in Isanpur’s campaign rhetoric evokes this article’s
main question: how to explain the changing mobilization capacities of these social divisions?
How to explain, in the context of Isanpur, the current prominence of caste, religious, and regional
divisions in election campaigns?
As discussed above, political scientists generally see the attachment of voters to their caste or
religion as a product of the political opportunities that these identities offer. “Voters have incen-
tives to choose categories which put them in a winning position – and to change their forms of
self-definition when the winning configuration changes.”17 In such an analysis, networks
follow politics: people invest in, say, caste- or region-based networks and attendant “forms of
self-definition” because of cost–benefit analyses about the likelihood that an investment in a par-
ticular social identity is going to yield benefits such as status and access to state resources. As
Chandra put it,

[t]he dense social networks that categorize ethnic groups – whether they are spatial, organizational, or
extended ethnic kinship – are an outcome of a process whereby individuals come to prefer their ethnic
identification, rather than the result of that process.18

In the remainder of this article I propose a more interactive analysis between the political instru-
mentalization of social identities and the nature of social networks. The character of local trust
networks and their capacity to facilitate clientelistic exchange limit the capacity of parties and
politicians to bring social divisions to the fore. The way in which (competition for) state
access gets bound up with caste or religious identities is not shaped just by political strategizing
or state policies. It also develops from the ground up by the way available identity-based social
networks lend themselves to exchanging access to state resources for support. A focus on the his-
torical development of informal trust networks and their integration into patronage networks can
reveal a more interactive relationship between the nature of clientelistic networks and the political
salience of social identities: when politicians, either through discourse or actual distribution of

17
Chandra 2014, 290.
18
Chandra 2004, 72; emphasis in original.
 Critical Asian Studies 33

resources, create the impression that one’s membership in a community is bound up with the
chance to secure access to state resources, incentives arise (particularly for brokers) to build or
strengthen networks that strengthen the representation of this community. At the same time
such instrumentalization of a social division is more likely to succeed when the social connections
that people employ to solve daily problems are structured along this social divide.
Gujarat’s recent history illustrates this interactive relationship between politics and the evol-
ution of local trust networks. The importance of class in political rhetoric in Gujarat in the 1960s
was sustained by the prominence of a thriving labor union, the Textile Labour Association, or
Majoor Mahajan Sangh (TLA). Founded by Mahatma Gandhi in 1917 to defend the interests
of laborers in Ahmedabad’s budding textile industry, the TLA developed a dominating presence
in (textile) labor localities, setting up neighborhood libraries, day-care facilities, schools, and
medical facilities. TLA members in each mill – both Muslims and Hindus – where organized
in committees that represented the interests of workers vis-à-vis both mill owners and the
municipality.
This associational strength enabled the labor union to enter into an intimate exchange relation-
ship with the Congress party. Using its large membership – up to a hundred thousand in the 1960s
– the labor union could form “worker voter associations” that functioned as a mobilizational
vehicle for Congress. As a result “working class votes were the basis of the Congress’s power
in Ahmedabad. TLA leaders called for workers to vote Congress, and they did.”19 In exchange
the labor union could call on Congress politicians to pressurize the state bureaucracy on their
behalf. Through a system of local representatives called pratinidhi, local demands and complaints
were passed on to representatives from the Congress party. Furthermore, Congress agreed to put
TLA members up for election, which further strengthened the access of workers to public ser-
vices, as this TLA official remarks: “With Kacharabhai in the municipality it became easier to
call the attention of both the Congress party and the municipal officers to the needs of the
workers’ neighborhoods for roads, lights, water, toilets, and other facilities.”20
This neighborhood presence of the TLA eroded in the 1970s. Mismanagement and economic
changes led to the gradual collapse of Gujarat’s textile industry. As textile laborers lost their jobs,
the factory ceased to be the center of associational activity. The various factory committees, the
neighborhood-based libraries, and the network of pratinidhis disappeared as people’s livelihoods
became increasingly informalized and the textile factories no longer provided a common ground
for mobilization. The networks organized around occupation and attendant class identities lost
their capacity to mediate access to state resources.21
With its patronage networks around the TLA thus weakened, Congress adopted caste-based
electoral strategies focused on a coalition of Kshatriya, Dalits, Adivasis, and Muslims (named
after its acronym the “KHAM” coalition) in the late 1970s. Yet the weakness of its local
network made this coalition unstable. In this period, Hindu-nationalist organizations managed
to fill the organizational void left behind by the collapse of TLA’s worker associations. While
the BJP and its affiliated organizations were still seen as an upper-caste party, these organizations
managed in the 1980s to expand their networks by wooing leaders of lower-caste communities.22
The impact of this strengthening of BJP’s patronage networks was dramatically illustrated in 1985
when rioting between upper and lower castes turned into Hindu–Muslim violence.23

19
Spodek 2011, 101.
20
Ibid.; see also Breman 2004.
21
Spodek 2011; Berenschot 2011, 59–73.
22
Nandy et al. 1995; Shah 2002; Sud 2008.
23
Shani 2007.
34 W. Berenschot

In other words, the collapse of the textile industry and its work-based trust networks changed
the nature of politics – rather than vice versa. People did not stop investing in labor union-based
networks because they thought that investment in caste- or religious-based networks would yield
better access to state resources. It was the other way around: people started investing more in
caste- and region-based networks because they realized that their labor union was no longer
able to provide access to state resources. The closure of the textile mills not only forced thou-
sands of laborers to look for new and often more precarious livelihoods in, for example, the
smaller sweatshops that sprang up, it also undermined the likelihood of class-based political
mobilization. The mills had given thousands of textile workers shared interests and an opportu-
nity to form the necessary informal networks to engage in vote pooling and engage in a success-
ful exchange of votes for channels to access state resources. The new, informalized livelihoods
offered fewer such opportunities to meet and organize, thus undermining a sense of having
shared interests.24
In other words, class-based mobilization and discourse became less viable because the net-
works to facilitate this mobilization in Ahmedabad were undermined by economic changes –
in particular the restructuring of the textile industry. This collapse of work-based patronage net-
works enabled the BJP to make inroads into Dalit localities. That lower-caste communities in
localities like Isanpur responded to overtures from the upper-caste-tainted BJP was due not so
much to the popularity of Hindu-nationalist ideology or their wish for recognition. Rather,
Hindu nationalist organizations like BJP and VHP gained a foothold among Dalit communities
because TLA’s collapse had created a need for alternative networks to facilitate access to state
resources. The increased prominence of Hindu-nationalist rhetoric was sustained by the capacity
of Hindu-nationalist organizations to provide access to state resources, creating an association
between this access and one’s religious identity.
Ashutosh Varshney has taken up the collapse of the TLA and other such “civic” organizations
as a major cause of Hindu–Muslim violence, arguing that civil society organizations play a role in
preventing violence by quelling rumors and generating shared interests.25 The link between reli-
gious polarization and civic society I propose here is different, however, as it revolves around the
role of patronage networks in fostering or impeding communal discourse. The ability of non–
identity-based associations to build patronage networks preclude mobilization based on caste
or religion. As Ahmedabad’s work-based networks lost in importance, inhabitants of textile
mill localities came to rely on networks organized around other communalities. As we will see
below, networks organized around caste and, particularly, neighborhood were more viable
because they generated shared interests and facilitated frequent interactions. Caste and neighbor-
hood leaders became the key intermediaries in mobilizing voters and providing access to state
resources. This shift facilitated the increased salience of caste and particularly religion.
This dynamic became self-propelling. As communal political discourse gained ascendance,
perceptions of enmity and competition between Muslims and Hindus were fostered by the fact
that competition for access to state resources came to be organized around religious divisions.
Politicians used violence between Hindus and Muslims to promote an awareness of one’s reli-
gious identity while relegating other social divisions to the background. As we will see below,
the susceptibility of local residents to such communal mobilization had much to do with the
way settlement patterns had structured neighborhood-based trust networks along regional and
religious divides.

24
See Breman 2004.
25
Varshney 2002.
 Critical Asian Studies 35

Photo 2. Lok sampark (meet the people): Together with local brokers, candidates tour different
neighborhoods in their constituency. (Credit: Ward Berenschot.)

Brokers and Neighborhoods

In his public speeches, Shailesh Macwana typically presented himself as a defender of all Hindus,
but in more intimate settings he and his workers invoked other identities. As one of his campaign
workers related:

When he comes to [a neighborhood with many Chamars] Shaileshbhai will say, “I am from your caste,
I will do your work, so please give me your vote.” They will organize this meeting secretly, the will
invite people personally. They will present their wishes to Shaileshbhai, and he will say, “I will do
your work; I will be helpful for you.”

This invocation of caste needs to be done secretly since such promises can alienate other
caste groups – in this case particularly Vankars – who might feel that, if caste will indeed
influence Shailesh’s loyalties, they might be better off supporting a Vankar candidate such
as Shailesh Parmar. During the lok sampark (“meet the people” neighborhood visits by
politicians), his workers devised ways to avoid giving this impression (Photo 2). As one
of his close assistants answered when asked how Shailesh Macwana campaigns in Vankar-
dominated localities:

We try to contact committed people, who are our workers from those castes. Only they can convince
their people. In this way we utilize such local people and the jati netas [caste leaders]. They will say, “I
am close to Shailesh Macwana, so they will work for us.” It’s like people management.
36 W. Berenschot

Similarly, Shailesh Parmar’s campaign team made sure to enlist (and buy) the support of leaders
from the Chamar community: “Shailesh will survey who is a strong person there. He will send
someone to make contact and he will bargain for his canvassing. He will evaluate, how strong
this local person is, and then he will give money accordingly.”
This is one way of preventing the salience of an unfavorable social division: the development
of clientelistic ties with leaders of other communities enables politicians to convey the impression
that this particular division will not impact the provision of public resources after the election. At
the same time, candidates make little effort to gain a foothold among communities on the other
side of the divide that they are targeting: Shailesh Parmar had only a few upper-caste workers,
while Shailesh Macwana never – as far as I could tell – visited Muslim-dominated localities
during the campaign. In their campaigns, the invocation of social divisions was closely bound
up with Shailesh Macwana’s and Manoj Parmar’s a strategic engagement with caste and neigh-
borhood leaders. Unhelpful social divisions were smoothed over in speeches, and politicians
sought to build a clientelistic network that included representatives of targeted communities –
while excluding leaders from across the targeted divide.
In Isanpur, candidates go to great lengths to court neighborhood leaders with specific prom-
ises, since these leaders can use their considerable influence to swing votes in favor of the candi-
date who promises more. Much of the political gossiping that took place in the evenings during
election time was devoted to speculations about such deals. One reason for candidates to finance
the food and drinks at the local karyalay was that these election offices gave local leaders a chance
to publicly show their allegiance: sitting in a candidate’s office signal’s the local leader’s support
and thus shows voters the strength of the candidate’s local network. Daily walks by candidates
through neighborhoods in their constituency serve the same purpose. These lok sampark
walks – in the company of neighborhood leaders – are visual proof of the connections between
local brokers and the candidate.
Brokers are an unavoidable element of patronage democracies as facilitators of clientelistic
exchanges between voters and politicians: politicians need brokers to ensure that their efforts
to provide public services or jobs will actually translate into votes, while voters rely on
brokers to contact and pressurize politicians on their behalf.26 Brokers can take various guises,
from the earlier labor union leaders mentioned above to the caste and neighborhood leaders
who are more prominent today. The characteristic they have in common is that their effectiveness
depends on their capacity to convince politicians that they can sway a lot of votes, since poli-
ticians need to focus their efforts on requests from brokers who can be trusted upon to deliver
the vote. Political success depends to a certain extent on identifying the right brokers. Politicians
need to nurture relations with brokers who actually possess the authority to sway votes, while
avoiding wasting efforts on requests from brokers who cannot be relied upon to deliver the vote.27
That makes the character of trust networks politically relevant: in the calculations of poli-
ticians, the authority and the strength of the network of the broker have to be assessed carefully.
Clientelistic exchanges require trust. Politicians need guarantees that their efforts to provide
access to state resources will lead to votes, while voters and their brokers are looking for guaran-
tees that politicians will reward their electoral support when help is needed. This constitutes an
important link between trust networks and identity politics in the clientelistic political arena:
social identities and the networks organized around these identities are the ways brokers can con-
vince politicians of their capacity to sway votes. The claim to represent a community – if backed
up by an existing network – holds out the promise of a lot of votes and enables a broker to

26
Stokes et al. 2013, 76.
27
On the functioning of brokers in India’s patronage democracy, see Berenschot 2014.
 Critical Asian Studies 37

Figure 1. An approximation of the resulting settlement pattern in Isanpur, compiled with the help of
local informants. (Credit: Reproduced from Berenschot 2011, 153.)

translate a particularistic request like “can you help this girl get admission in a school” into “are
you willing to help the Vankar community.” For both voters and brokers, social identities then
become a vote-pooling instrument, enabling them to maximize pressure on politicians to
deliver access to state resources. For politicians, social identities can then become a useful, if
imperfect, means to make calculations about which kinds of brokers are able to garner a majority
of the votes.
Neighborhoods provide politicians with another guarantee that their provision of public ser-
vices will translate into votes: the proximity and frequency of interactions in poorer neighbor-
hoods give politicians the reassurance that neighborhood leaders can influence and, later,
monitor voting behavior. Furthermore, given the shared interests of inhabitants in improving
basic amenities, neighborhoods lend themselves well to vote pooling: by allowing a neighbor-
hood leader to broker their votes, inhabitants can increase their chances of securing government
budgets for such improvements. In addition, in the absence of alternative networks, neighborhood
leaders provide an important channel for inhabitants to gain access to state institutions and obtain
access to state resources. This is how Dhiren, a young Isanpur resident, describes the capacity of
one such neighborhood leader, Jayent Parmar, to mobilize votes during elections:

I cannot say “No, Mr. Parmar, I will not vote for your candidate” because after elections I might have
to go to him. We live in the same chali, in daily life we meet and he is a power man, he has many
contacts in BJP, so it is in our mutual interest that I follow his advice. I cannot say “I will not vote
according to your wish.” Like if I need to go for an interview for a job, I ask him for a recommen-
dation. A political recommendation is very important to get a job. So for such help I need him.

Jayent uses his political connections as both a carrot and a stick to ensure compliance, thus enhan-
cing his capacity to deliver votes.
In the absence of alternative networks, neighborhoods give citizens a way to solve everyday
problems. Neighborhoods have become a focal point of local political life. As their (informal)
occupation can no longer sustain political mobilization, residents look to their neighborhoods
as an alternative means to find shared interests and to organize clientelistic exchanges. That is
why poor neighborhoods are important political units, here and elsewhere in India: neighborhoods
not only give residents many shared interests (in, for example, the improvement of political
38 W. Berenschot

facilities), they also give residents a way to mediate access to state institutions.28 Geert de Neve
and his colleagues have highlighted the political importance of neighborhoods, arguing that they
are

the places in and through which people gain access to resources and where they encounter the insti-
tutions and representatives of the state.… [T]hey constitute the locale where both individual and social
identities are reproduced through shared ritual activity, economic cooperation and political
mobilization.29

In particular, fine-grained localized ethnographic studies suggest that the presence and character
of neighborhood associations can shape the susceptibility of neighborhoods to identity-based pol-
itical mobilization.30
The importance of neighborhood leaders in facilitating clientelistic exchanges makes the par-
ticular composition of a neighborhood politically significant. A heterogeneous neighborhood pre-
vents neighborhood leaders from evoking social identities to bolster their claims, while
homogenous neighbors divided by caste, region, or religion can generate the impression of
enmity and competition: this particular composition of a locality would turn the unavoidable com-
petition for state resources between neighborhoods into a competition between different commu-
nities. In that context – when neighborhood-based trust networks have become organized around
identity-based divisions – clientelistic politics engenders an exclusionary, identity-based dis-
course in an almost organic way, from the ground up: this kind of discourse emerges from the
way in which brokers and politicians instrumentalize social identities to generate the confidence
needed to facilitate their clientelistic dealings.
That is indeed what happened in Isanpur. Isanpur and other textile mill localities sprang up in
the early twentieth century as the burgeoning textile mills attracted Muslims and lower-caste
Hindu laborers from (particularly) Gujarat’s countryside. Laborers found their jobs in the mills
as well as their housing through regional networks: mill laborers send word back to their
native village about upcoming job opportunities and they help find housing in their housing
block (chali) for the newcomers. As a result of these migration patterns, the chalis became
divided by region, while each chali housed people from various castes as well as Muslims.
This pattern changed as a result of communal violence. Isanpur gradually became more segre-
gated religiously as safety concerns drove both religious communities to move to areas where
they would hold a majority,31 further strengthening the prominence of a religious divide in
local politics.
Figure 1 shows how Isanpur has become a segregated neighborhood, while different commu-
nities still live in close proximity. Inhabitants are strongly segregated in terms of religion and, to a
lesser extent, region, while most chalis house people from different castes. My informants would
hesitate little when asked about the composition of particular chalis. Their continued awareness of
this settlement pattern points to its political relevance, as my informants interpreted the pattern as
a political map: Saurasthran areas would vote more for Shailesh Macwana, Muslim areas would
vote for Manoj Parmar, and the North-Gujarati chalis were the battleground areas. The salience of
the divide between Saurasthran and North-Gujarati voters illustrates how the nature of social net-
works can drive politics – instead of the other way around. Politicians in Gujarat regularly down-
play regional divisions, but the importance of neighborhood-based networks and the particular

28
See Björkman 2014; De Wit 1996.
29
De Neve and Donner 2006, 11; see also Hansen 2001.
30
Chakrabarti 2006; Chidambaram 2012.
31
See Jasani 2008.
 Critical Asian Studies 39

Photo 3. Election day: Party workers hand out voter slips outside voting booths. These slips are
used as proof of identification. Their distribution facilitates vote monitoring. (Credit: Ward
Berenschot.)

settlement pattern of textile mill localities has forced politicians in Isanpur to engage with this
particular social division both in their speeches and their selections of brokers.
The embeddedness of these social divisions – caste, region, and caste – in everyday life makes
local politics in Isanpur highly volatile. In 2002 Hindu–Muslim violence polarized the electorate
in Isanpur along religious lines, but during the 2007 election the division between Vankars and
Chamars became central. Shailesh Macwana needed to get the support of leaders of the Vankar
community to prevent a split in the Dalit vote. But in the weeks before the elections it became
clear that he had alienated many of those brokers. Previously loyal local leaders complained
about Shailesh Macwana’s “greedy” involvement in corrupt transactions and his unwillingness
to take up their issues. A number of local BJP workers had approached the BJP committee in
charge of selecting the candidates and asked them to back another candidate. Selection commit-
tees always solicit the views of several local workers in order to gauge the local strength of a can-
didate. It was rumored at the time that the rebelliousness of local workers in Isanpur caused BJP
leaders to regard this constituency as a difficult one to win. The decision of the selection commit-
tee to stand by Shailesh Macwana was no doubt shaped by other factors that influence the decision
to endorse a candidate, namely, caste demography and “money power.” Shailesh Macwana was
able to use his membership in a large caste group, his wealth, and his connections with business-
men to convince the committee of his capacity to win the elections.
Yet his tenuous connections to local brokers – particularly from the Vankar community –
turned out to be Shailesh’s Achilles’ heel. Following BJP’s decision to give Shailesh Macwana
the ticket, important local workers from the Vankar community loudly proclaimed that they
40 W. Berenschot

would not support him. One of them said: “I supported him before, but now I cannot support him.
He is corrupt, he has eaten too much, and he does not do our work. We are not content.” When
asked about whether some compromise could be reached, he said, “It is up to the samaj [caste
leadership]. We have to talk about the future [i.e., promises for future support] first.” Two
years earlier another broker from the Vankar community had had his candidacy for a seat in
the municipality cut short by Macwana. This year this broker presented BJP’s selection committee
with more than one hundred signatures against Macwana. Disgruntled, he remarked that
Macwana might have bought the committee’s support. As he confided about his stance during
the subsequent election campaign:

I cannot go directly, openly against him; that would end my career. We have to maintain party proto-
col, people would think bad about me. But I could make arrangements, through my agents. Normal
people, who are close to me. I could go through them and influence things.

It was this subordination of the local brokers aligned to the BJP – or, in their perspective, the rela-
tive disregard of their demands – that sealed Shailesh Macwana’s fate. As Vankar leaders in par-
ticular discreetly communicated to others that they felt that “he had not done their work” and
refused to participate in the rallies and the neighborhood meetings, Macwana lost his connections
to the Vankar community. As a result the Dalit vote – largely united behind him after the violence
in 2002 – split.
This split in the Dalit vote was, my informants believed, the main reason that Manoj Parmar
got his revenge for the 2002 elections (Photo 3). While Congress lost badly throughout Gujarat –
BJP won 117 seats and Congress only 59 seats – the Congress candidate Parmar won the elections
in Isanpur with 54 percent of the votes. Shailesh Macwana trailed him by almost 10,000 votes (38
percent). The BSP candidate, who had emphasized his background as a North-Gujarati, ended up
with less than 4 percent. The result illustrates the particular form of democratic accountability that
a clientelistic political arena generates: while voters may have little incentive to punish an incum-
bent for a failure to implement effective policies, the negligence of particularistic demands com-
municated through brokers can lead to important vote swings.

Conclusion
This analysis of an election campaign in a Dalit-dominated locality in Ahmedabad highlights the
interaction between the political instrumentalization of social divisions and the nature of the net-
works that people use to solve everyday problems. Social divisions provide politicians with a very
useful instrument to build local patronage channels and target the distribution of resources. These
divisions also provide them with the symbolic means to convey their closeness and responsive-
ness to voters. Social divisions can serve this purpose: the imperative to organize campaigns
around us-vs.-them divisions stimulates politicians to engage in attempts to manipulate the impor-
tance that voters attach to different identity dimensions.
I have highlighted the contrasting ways in which political scientists and anthropologists
analyze the political exploitation of these social divisions. A point of convergence between
these very different accounts, I have argued, lies in the evolution of local trust networks, i.e.,
the networks through which people solve everyday problems and organize access to state
resources. I have argued that two characteristics of these networks – the extent to which they
are organized along social divides and the extent to which they help facilitate clientelistic
exchanges – can either bolster or diminish the political salience of social divisions.
To illustrate these arguments, I have related the ever-changing salience of social divisions in
Gujarat’s politics – from class to caste to religion and region – to the evolution of local trust
 Critical Asian Studies 41

networks. I have discussed how until the 1970s patronage channels in Isanpur were largely work-
based, as the Gujarat’s TLA could facilitate access to state resources in exchange for functioning
as a mobilizational vehicle for Congress. That Gujarat’s class-based politics gave way to commu-
nal politics was not because of the appeal of Hindu-nationalist ideology. This shift was made
possible by the closure of the textile mills and the subsequent collapse of TLA’s patronage chan-
nels. The subsequent informalization of livelihoods precluded a renewal of work-based patronage
networks and led instead to the increased dependence on caste- and neighborhood-based net-
works. The prominence of such networks underpinned the growing role of religious and caste-
based divisions in political discourse. As trust networks became more firmly centered on caste
and neighborhood leaders, the particular composition of neighborhoods become an important
determinant of the mobilizational capacity of different social divisions. As neighborhoods in
Isanpur are divided largely by region, religion, and caste, the shared interests and networks
that these neighborhoods generate make it difficult for politicians and their brokers to ignore
such divisions. As a result of the particular settlement pattern of textile mill localities, politicians
in Isanpur organize their campaigns around identity dimensions – caste, religion, and region – and
their electoral success depends to a certain extent on heightening the public awareness of one
dimension at the expense of other dimensions.
In order to highlight this interaction between trust networks and identity politics in this article
I felt it necessary to adopt a very narrow focus on one urban, Dalit-dominated locality. This
narrow focus and Isanpur’s idiosyncrasies have precluded a discussion of the myriad other
ways in which changing trust networks are shaping the nature of politics. I have paid little atten-
tion, for example, to (failures of) civil society organizations linking up with slum localities32 or
the evolution of caste networks – such as the role of social mobility in boosting the social capital
of (particularly) upper castes,33 the declining dominance of upper castes in village leadership,34 or
the emergence of brokers who transcend caste in some parts of India.35
Yet I hope that the reader sees the relevance of the arguments developed in this article as a help
in interpreting the political impacts of such developments. A more interactive interpretation
between the evolution of social networks and political strategizing could yield fuller explanations
of the ever-changing salience of social divisions in Indian politics. The political exploitation of a
social division is likely to be more successful if the social connections that people employ to solve
daily problems are indeed structured along this social divide. The particular historical develop-
ment of trust networks and their entanglement in patronage networks impacts the likelihood of
the emergence of divisive political discourse.

Acknowledgments
For the development of ideas in this article, I am particularly grateful for conversations with Jan Breman,
Ghanshyam Shah, and Mario Rutten.

Funding
Research for this article was made possible by a WOTRO grant from the Dutch Research Council NWO. No
potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

32
See Appadurai 2001; Harriss 2006; De Wit and Berner 2009.
33
See Jeffrey 2001; Rutten 1995.
34
Mendelsohn 2003.
35
Krishna 2003.
42 W. Berenschot

Notes on contributor
Ward Berenschot is a researcher at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Southeast Asian and Caribbean
Studies (KITLV) in Leiden, the Netherlands. Studying democratization, clientelism, and identity politics
in India and Indonesia, he is the author of Riot Politics: Hindu‒Muslim Violence and the Indian State
(Columbia University Press, 2011) and several other publications on local democracy, public service deliv-
ery, and access to justice.

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