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Targets of Violence: Evidence from India's Naxalite Conflict

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Targets of Violence: Evidence from India's Naxalite Conflict Targets of violence: evidence from India’s Naxalite conflict Oliver Vanden Eynde To cite this version: Oliver Vanden Eynde. Targets of violence: evidence from India’s Naxalite conflict. 2015. halshs- 01202689 HAL Id: halshs-01202689 https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-01202689 Preprint submitted on 21 Sep 2015 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. WORKING PAPER N° 2015 – 29 Targets of violence: evidence from India’s Naxalite conflict Oliver Vanden Eynde JEL Codes: Keywords: PARIS-JOURDAN SCIENCES ECONOMIQUES 48, BD JOURDAN – E.N.S. – 75014 PARIS TÉL. : 33(0) 1 43 13 63 00 – FAX : 33 (0) 1 43 13 63 10 www.pse.ens.fr CENTRE NATIONAL DE LA RECHERCHE SCIENTIFIQUE – ECOLE DES HAUTES ETUDES EN SCIENCES SOCIALES ÉCOLE DES PONTS PARISTECH – ECOLE NORMALE SUPÉRIEURE – INSTITUT NATIONAL DE LA RECHERCHE AGRONOMIQUE Targets of violence: evidence from India’s Naxalite conflict Oliver Vanden Eynde∗ 5 April 2015 (first version: July 2011) Abstract This paper considers how shocks to rural incomes intensify violence in India’s Naxalite in- surgency. Using variation in annual rainfall in a panel of district level fatal incidents between 2005 and 2011, I find that deficient rainfall generally spurs targeted violence against civilians, but the number of Maoist attacks against security forces only increases in mining districts. This finding consistent with the idea that the relationship between income shocks and conflict depends on the type of targets and the revenue sources of the rebels. In particular, the fighting capacity of rebel groups against government forces could benefit more from negative rural income shocks if the group’s resources are sufficiently independent from the agricultural economy, as is the case in mining areas. Introduction This paper considers the relationship between scanty rainfall and the intensity of civil conflict in the context of India’s "Naxalite" or "Maoist" insurgency, which started in the sixties but has be- come particularly violent in recent years. The Naxalite-affected communities are among the most marginalized groups in India, and they rely disproportionately on rain-fed subsistence agriculture. It is precisely in such a context that we would expect naturally occurring, unpredicted changes in ∗Paris School of Economics, [email protected]. The results of this paper were circulated in an earlier working paper, entitled "Targets of Violence: Evidence from India’s Naxalite conflict". I am grateful to Gerard Padro i Miquel and Robin Burgess for their support and advice. I would also like to thank Jean-Paul Azam, Eli Berman, Tim Besley, Fransesco Caselli, Maitreesh Ghatak, Radha Iyengar, Sandip Mitra, Dominic Rohner, Shanker Satyanath, Petros Sekeris, and Jacob Shapiro for helpful comments and discussions. I also benefited from comments by seminar participants at LSE, Sussex, Warwick, Lisbon, NEUDC, HICN, ISI Delhi, CEMFI, Namur, Bristol, Royal Holloway, Navarra, UPF, PSE, SFU, RES, Princeton, Oxford, Lausanne, ESOC, and UConn. Support from a Bagri Fellowship (Asia Research Centre, LSE) is gratefully acknowledged. All remaining errors are mine. 1 rainfall to matter most for incomes and conflict. I find that poor rainfall tends to increase Naxalite violence against government forces, but only in areas where mining activity is sufficiently important. In contrast, it spurs targeted attacks against civilians regardless of whether the district has mining activity. On the basis of these results, I argue that mining revenues can explain whether rebels versus security forces benefit from reduced local incomes, and which groups become the target of increased violence. This paper contributes to a current academic debate about the mechanisms linking income shocks in underdeveloped areas to violent conflict. A number of studies have established a negative relation- ship between the incomes of the potential participants in the conflict and measures of the extent and intensity of violence (Dube and Vargas, 2013; Miguel, Satyanath, and Sergenti, 2004).1 These results offer support for the opportunity cost theory, whereby the reduced incomes lower the opportunity cost for civilians of participating in violent activities.2 However, this theory has been challenged in recent work that finds an insignificant or even a positive relationship between labour income shocks and conflict (Berman, Callen, Felter, and Shapiro, 2011; Ciccone, 2011). Berman et al. (2011) find that high unemployment is associated with reduced violence in the context of Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Philippines. The authors propose an information based theory as an alternative for the opportunity cost theory: when times are bad, anti-insurgency forces find it easier to gather information. I ar- gue that these divergent results and theories can be reconciled once we consider the structure of the rebels’ tax base. The information and opportunity cost channels could formally be quite close: in one theory, lower incomes benefit recruitment into violent activities and lead to an escalation of violence. In the other story, lower incomes benefit the state’s security forces through increased information sharing, which drives insurgency violence down. It is clear that these channels can operate simul- taneously. Also, which channel dominates can differ from context to context, depending on which side benefits disproportionately from a given economic shock. My paper will explore this idea in the context of India’s Naxalite conflict. To understand the interplay between information sharing and rebel recruitment, I investigate local 1Besley and Persson (2011) report similar findings for a wider range of income shocks and for a larger set of countries. Iyengar, Monten, and Hanson (2011) find that higher spending on employment programmes by the US military reduced labour-intensive insurgent violence in Iraq. In contrast, Crost, Felter, and Johnston (2013) find that development aid increased insurgency violence in the Philippines as rebels try to sabotage projects. Blattman and Miguel (2010) survey the broader conflict literature. Ross (2004) provides a survey of the literature on the relationship between civil war and natural resources (e.g. Collier and Hoeffler, 2000; and Elbadawi and Sambanis, 2000). Rohner and Morelli (2010) develop a model that links the geographical distribution of natural resources between ethnic homelands to the probability of conflict. 2See for example Chassang and Padro i Miquel (2009); Dal Bo and Dal Bo (2011). 2 agricultural shocks in India’s Naxalite conflict. In this context, negative local income shocks should benefit the security forces disproportionately. The rebels are typically dependent on taxation of the local (mainly agricultural) economy, while security forces are funded at the state and national level. Hence, if local incomes fall, the rebels’ income and their ability to attract new recruits (through the opportunity cost channel) could suffer. However, the degree to which the rebel’s resources depend on local income shocks varies between different locations. Importantly, the Maoists are organized in local units with limited capacity to share these resources among each other. Only in certain districts, extortion of mining activity provides a source of income for the Left-Wing insurgents that is independent from the agricultural economy. I expect the rebels’ ability to improve their fighting capacity against the government in response to poor rainfall to be strongest in these mining districts. I collect a data set of annual casualty numbers at the district level between 2005 and 2011 from the South Asia Terrorism Portal (SATP) for eight Maoist affected states in India. These conflict outcomes are combined with Kharif season (monsoon season) rainfall data, data on mineral resource wealth, and key socio-economic and environmental controls. The conflict’s casualties can be attributed to three categories: civilian deaths inflicted by Maoists, security force deaths inflicted by the Maoists, and Maoist deaths inflicted by the security forces. For civilian casualties, the raw SATP reports also provide information on the identity of the victim, which allows me to distinguish between targeted an untargeted attacks. In support of my empirical approach, I first confirm that rainfall deficiency reduces rice output in the Naxalite-affected districts. The main results confirm differential effects of rainfall on the intensity of violence. I find that lower rainfall (weakly) reduces violence against the government’s security forces, in the absence of mining activity. However, as the value of mining activity increases, I find that the relationship between rainfall and conflict reverses: lower rainfall boosts violence against security forces if the mineral resource wealth is sufficiently high. This result is consistent with the idea that the opportunity cost channel is more important if the rebels have a source of funding that is independent from local labour income shocks. Interestingly, targeted violence against civilians does not follow the same pattern. Violence against civilians increases
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