Jallikattu agitation not unique: TN saw 20,000 protests in 2015

TN has seen the most protests in India from 2009 to 2015. Experts attribute frequent protests to the “authoritarian” tendencies of TN’s major political parties. Kerala and West Bengal are not among the 10 states that saw most protests in 2015.

The recent protests for jallikattu in Tamil Nadu brought back memories of the anti-Hindi agitation of the 1960s, a watershed in the state’s history. The protests also confirm a propensity for agitations in TN — the state saw 20,450 demonstrations in 2015, the highest for any state.

The New Indian Express recently revealed the statistics of the top 10 states that saw most protests in 2015, which were released by the Union Home Ministry. The country as a whole saw 1,09,423 protests in 2015, which was higher than 2014 (87,486) and 2013 (75,991). The fact that India saw over 1 lakh protests in 2015 meant that more than 300 demonstrations occurred in the country on a daily basis that year.

This is not the first time that Tamil Nadu has dominated in the number of protests. Statistics from the Bureau of Police Research and Development (BPR&D) showed that there were about 4,20,000 protests between 2009 and 2014; TN accounted for approximately 25% of these protests. Experts claim that the “authoritarian” tendencies of the major political parties (DMK and AIADMK) with respect to governance are major factors contributing to protests. Further, smaller political outfits with casteist and hard-line regional identities frequently use mass protests as a means to assert their identity.

Karnataka was ranked number 9 on the list of states with most protests in 2015; the state saw 3,971 demonstrations. Caste/communal groups were the category that staged most protests in Karnataka in 2015, with 1,263 demonstrations; there were only 285 student protests in Karnataka in 2015. Karnataka saw the most number of protests by students in any state from 2009 to 2014. Experts attributed this to the concentration of educational institutions in the State.

The 2015 list of top 10 “protest” states has two notable exceptions: Kerala and West Bengal, states routinely associated with agitations, aren’t on the list. Another interesting fact from the BPR&D statistics for 2009-2014 is that Uttar Pradesh and Bihar — states that have roughly 25% of the country’s population — accounted for less than 1% of the protests between those five years, showing a direct correlation between literacy levels and the propensity to agitate.