Copyright by Jolie Marie Frenzel Wood 2010
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Copyright by Jolie Marie Frenzel Wood 2010 The Dissertation Committee for Jolie Marie Frenzel Wood certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: White-collar Agitation, No-collar Compliance: The Privilege of Protest in Varanasi, India Committee: Clement Henry, Supervisor Philip Oldenburg, Co-Supervisor Itty Abraham John Higley Robert Moser White-collar Agitation, No-collar Compliance: The Privilege of Protest in Varanasi, India by Jolie Marie Frenzel Wood, B.A.; M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin August 2010 Acknowledgements First and foremost, I wish to acknowledge my adviser Philip Oldenburg, without whose steady guidance and encouragement I probably could not have completed this project. I can only hope that this and future work justify even a small part of his effort on my behalf. Clement Henry, Catherine Boone, and Itty Abraham have also been invaluable sources of intellectual guidance; the following pages show abundant evidence of their influence. I am also deeply thankful to Ajay Pandey, whose assistance in Varanasi opened the city to me and made fieldwork one of the most rewarding experiences of my life, and to Nitya Pandey, Vinay Sharma, and Dwarika Chaube for their research assistance during the summer of 2008. Finally, I am grateful for the generosity and frankness of all those in Varanasi and New Delhi who made this project possible—those who accommodated me, befriended me, advised me, shared their views with me, gave me their time, took a genuine interest in my research, and fueled me with innumerable cups of tea and more. iv White-collar Agitation, No-collar Compliance: The Privilege of Protest in Varanasi, India Jolie Marie Frenzel Wood, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2010 Supervisors: Clement Henry and Philip Oldenburg An investigation of contentious action by associations representing six occupational groups at different socio-economic levels reveals that middle-class groups tend to favor contentious means of making demands such as demonstrations and strikes, while lower-class groups tend to avoid contentious action, preferring more institutionalized or contained means. While such findings might appear to be puzzling given middle-class groups’ superior access to state institutions and the Habermasian concept of a rational, orderly, bourgeois public sphere, they are consistent with the literature on resource mobilization and social movements in the West: Access to financial resources and strong mobilizing structures enables the middle-class groups to take advantage of a political opportunity structure that rewards contentious action. v Table of Contents List of Tables................................................................................................... viii List of Figures.....................................................................................................ix Chapter I: Introduction.........................................................................................1 Introduction to Varanasi ..............................................................................4 Introduction to the Occupational Groups Under Study.................................8 Methods and Data......................................................................................27 Chapter Overview .....................................................................................33 Chapter II: Theory..............................................................................................37 The Public Sphere in Theory and in India..................................................38 Protest and Varanasi’s Public Sphere.........................................................48 Findings: The Privilege of Protest..............................................................56 Explaining the Findings: Resource Mobilization........................................71 Alternative Explanations ...........................................................................83 Class and Occupation ................................................................................91 Chapter III: Financial Resources, Mobilizing Structures, and Influential Allies ..94 Financial and Educational Resources.........................................................94 Mobilizing Structures..............................................................................104 Influential Allies......................................................................................119 Preferred Means of Making Demands Upon the State..............................141 Conclusion ..............................................................................................147 Chapter IV: Case Studies.................................................................................149 The Boatmen: Successful Strike with Outside Assistance ........................150 The “Control Case” of Handloom Weavers versus Powerloom Weavers..159 The Teachers: Routinized Contention......................................................187 The Lawyers: Familiarity Breeds Contempt?...........................................194 The Traders: Highly Politicized Contentiousness.....................................208 vi The Doctors: A Special Case ...................................................................226 Chapter V: Conclusion....................................................................................246 Appendices ......................................................................................................259 Appendix A: List of Interviews ...............................................................259 Appendix B: Acronyms and Glossary......................................................271 Appendix C: Summaries of Questionnaire Data.......................................275 Bibliography ....................................................................................................288 Vita ................................................................................................................300 vii List of Tables Table 1: Overview of Group Resources and Contentious Action................................. 35 Table 2: Reports of Contentious Public Action by Occupational Associations in Varanasi, 1998-2008 ............................................................................................................. 58 Table 3: Contentious Action and Political Parties ....................................................... 85 Table 4: Types of Claims Made by Each Group and Levels of Contentious Action..... 87 Table 5: Contentious Actions by Weavers: Handloom Weavers vs. Powerloom Weavers and Strikes vs. Non-strikes, with Principal Mobilizing Structures. ....................... 162 Table 6: Survey Responses: To whom do handloom weavers go for help?................ 164 Table 7: Survey Responses: Is there any leader who works for handloom weavers?.. 164 Table 8: Survey Responses: Why aren’t handloom weavers organized?.................... 165 Table 9: Doctors’ Attitudes Toward the IMA ........................................................... 242 viii List of Figures Figure 1: Location of Varanasi in India ........................................................................5 Figure 2: A Continuum of Public Action .................................................................... 61 Figure 3: “Advocates on Hunger Strike.” Amar Ujaala, August 24, 2007, Varanasi Edition (page 6)................................................................................................... 198 Figure 4: Traders’ Reported Levels of Contentious Action in Dainik Jaagran, 1998- 2008 .................................................................................................................. 222 Figure 5: Trend in Reports of Contentious Actions by Doctors (Dainik Jaagran, 1998- 2008) .................................................................................................................. 239 Figure 6: Illustrating the Hypothesis of Curvilinearity: Number of Contentious Actions and General Levels of Resources in Varanasi ...................................................... 248 ix Chapter I: Introduction In popular consciousness, protesters are those who have been excluded from the benefits of society, who want to change the political system, who are “mad as hell” and not going to take it anymore. What does it mean, then, when we find that it is not the excluded or deprived who engage most frequently in protest, but the privileged, educated middle classes, those who are more capable of accessing institutions of the state? In the United States, the early scholarly work on social movements was based on the assumption that protest was driven by grievances, the result of structural conditions that lead to the deprivation and frustration of a particular group, combined with the spread of a belief system regarding the causes of their grievances and the best means of redress—in other words, an ideological justification for agitation (Zald and McCarthy, 1987: 150). However, no relationship between deprivation and the occurrence of social movements could be established; grievances were ubiquitous throughout time and space, while protest was not. Furthermore, Mancur Olson’s elucidation of the collective action problem presented the puzzle of why anyone would join a movement if he or she could reap the benefits