Book Review: Rob Jenkins, Loraine Kennedy and Partha Mukhopadhyay, eds, Power, Protest and India’s Special Economic Zones
| DOI | 10.1177/2321023015575232 |
| Date | 01 June 2015 |
| Author | Aseema Sinha |
| Published date | 01 June 2015 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
136 Book Reviews
to team with the BJP; Muslim voters were far more likely to vote for an RJD candidate than an LJP
candidate supported by the RJD, which meant that the LJP had much less to lose by allying with the BJP.
Kushan Pal and Pravin Rai’s chapter on Haryana captures the drama in the shift of the support base
of the INC under Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda: Table 5.5 shows how the proportion of Jat
votes going to the INC rose 17 percentage points to 42 per cent between 2004 and 2009, whereas the
proportion of Dalit votes won by the INC halved to 34 per cent, with many of those shifting over to the
Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP).
The state chapters also underline how crucial small new parties could be to election outcomes in sev-
eral states: Manpreet Badal’s People’s Party of Punjab, Bhajan Lal’s Haryana Janhit Congress and
Chiranjeevi’s Praja Rajyam Party all proved key in foiling or facilitating the state electoral success of
their larger competitors.
There is some variation in the quality of analysis of these chapters, partly dependent on the availabil-
ity of data, and some of the chapters are more detailed and deep than others. The authors sometimes
display a tendency to insert their personal views into the analysis, but the discerning reader should be
able to filter these and focus on the underlying data-driven story.
Occasionally, the contributors make an insufficient distinction made between voting patterns in state
and national elections: to take one example, Mirza Asmer Beg, Sudhir Kumar and A.K. Verma’s chapter
on Uttar Pradesh appears to assume that the voters look at national and state parties with the same
prism when voting in state and national elections; however, the inability of the INC and BJP to grow
local roots did not prevent a good INC performance in 2009 and (as we retrospectively know) a spect-
acular BJP performance in 2014. Comparisons of this sort are sometimes warranted, such as asking why
the BSP failed to hold on to its Delhi vote base only one year after the state election, but they must be
made with care.
Such quibbles aside, the state chapters largely complement the overall analysis and offer a useful
resource for anyone interested in an in-depth understanding of state political shifts during the period
under study. They allow the interested reader, be they researchers, journalists or political junkies, to
follow the broad argument to the state level and judge its validity for themselves.
Amitabh Dubey
Political analyst
E-mail: amitabh.dubey@gmail.com
Rob Jenkins, Loraine Kennedy and Partha Mukhopadhyay, eds, Power, Protest and India’s Special Economic
Zones. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. 2014. 396 pages. `1,145.
DOI: 10.1177/2321023015575232
Power, Protest and India’s Special Economic Zones is a coherent collection that uncovers the land-
related conflicts unleashed by the process of industrialization in India. It analyzes the struggles around
economic reforms, land and the state’s attempt to achieve contradictory goals through the policy lens of
Special Economic Zones (SEZs). In consonance with the regional turn in India’s political economy it
undertakes a detailed analysis of 11 states and their experience with SEZs. The states analyzed are as
follows: Andhra Pradesh, Goa, Gujarat, Haryana, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Odisha, Punjab, Tamil Nadu,
Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal. A couple of chapters are a two-state pair analysis: Gujarat and Punjab
(Chapter 4) and Orissa and West Bengal (Chapter 8).
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