Due to uneven economic reforms, Chinese provinces developed distinct approaches to governing that shaped social policy priorities and policy implementation in the 2000s. This chapter presents the book’s argument in the context of research on social policy and Chinese politics. The chapter synthesizes previous research on the welfare state in developing countries, social policy in China, and decentralization in Chinese politics. The chapter also explains the book’s theoretical framework of policy styles. The chapter concludes by discussing research methods and the structure of the book.

How did organisations in India's textile and pharmaceutical industries respond to institutional changes triggered at the global level? To what extent was their successful response co-determined by firm-level investments in developing new capabilities and the resources provided by the institutional system in which they operated? Continuing with our analysis of the three levels of the institutional system developed in Chapter 2, in this chapter we address these research questions by keeping the organisation as the central focus of attention. We develop a conceptual model that links organisational choices around resources and capabilities in response to global institutional changes with their success in global markets and test the model through analyses of fine-grained firm-level data from the Indian pharmaceutical and textile industries during the thirty-year period of 1990 to 2019. Some prior scholarly work has examined the transformation in the Indian pharmaceutical industry (for example, Pradhan 2003; Joseph 2016; Chittoor, Sarkar, Ray and Aulakh 2009; Chaudhuri 2012), and there is limited work in the context of the Indian textile industry (for example, Dhiman and Sharma 2017); however, to our knowledge, prior work has not compared and contrasted empirical evidence from two strategically important industries of India and developed a unifying theoretical framework as we do in this chapter.

As outlined in earlier chapters, until 2005, the Indian pharmaceutical industry was governed by the Patents Act of 1970, which allowed patenting based on manufacturing processes rather than end products. This regulation enabled Indian pharmaceutical firms to reverse engineer and produce drugs that were product patented in other countries at a fraction of the cost incurred by other multinational corporations. In 1995, soon after signing up with the World Trade Organization (WTO) as a member country, India consented to enforce product patents and to provide legal protection to Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) effective 1 January 2005. The implications of adopting the TRIPS framework were particularly severe for Indian pharmaceutical firms. They could no longer manufacture and sell knock-offs of patented drugs in India by exploiting the prevailing process patent regime once the new framework came into effect. In other words, these firms were deprived of not only a traditional core advantage that gave them a competitive edge but also alternate sources of competitive advantage to compete with global competition.

A Financial History of Western Europe is Kindleberger’s self-identified masterwork, an attempt to derive robust theories from centuries of accumulated fact, and then to use those theories as a framework for making sense of the momentous events of Kindleberger’s own life. It is a story of financial development in support of economic development at a global scale, both development processes advancing together in Darwinian evolutionary fashion by means of boom and bust.

The most remarkable part of the DMK history is theincredible energy that went into grassrootsmobilization, which has remained so elusive to beingcaptured gainfully by the theoretical or analyticallens. We have already noted in Chapter 2 thesacrificial figure of Kilapaluvur Chinnasamy as anexemplar of the spirit of self-immolation thatCharles Taylor invokes in discussing the newer formsof the transcendental aspirations or moraldispositions in the age of modern politicalimaginary. However, such extreme acts of sacrificeshould not distract us from the predominantlypragmatic and programmatic aspects of associationallife, social mobility, and political empowermentthat characterized the lives of hundreds ofthousands of Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) partyworkers at grassroots level all across the state inthe eighteen-year period of our study. However, itis obviously impossible to condense qualitatively,let alone measure quantitatively, the myriad formsthe grassroots mobilization assumed in the period,though this precisely is the most significant aspectof history. It should be possible to write anethnographic account of the history of theorganizational formation in a given place but thatwould demand a book-length narration.

When that is the case, to pick from the extensivematerial of ethnographic accounts we mobilized fromvarious locations in a short chapter like this islikely to render it purely anecdotal. For the sakeof brevity, we opt to provide a synoptic overview asan extraction of salient features from all thatmaterial, ethnographic and archival, in which wewill study the phenomenon under five distinctrubrics: the historicalbackdrop, the newsociality, theorganizational structure, fostering of politicalculture, thepolitical insurmountable, and finally acase study which would illustrate all of these.

THE HISTORICAL BACKDROP

It will be useful to conceptually segregate threedistinct dimensions of the formations of thepolitical to begin with: civil societyorganizational formations; discursive formationsthat include both ideational synthesis and diffusearticulations; and finally, popular uprisings,protest events of mass participation, organizedagitations, electoral victories, and so on. Itshould be borne in mind that these three dimensionsare not always welded together; it will often bedifficult to ascribe causal relationships and strictcorrespondences between them, as Shahid Amin hasconvincingly shown in his abundantly illustrativeaccount of the Chauri Chaura “event” in 1922 (Amin1996). More importantly, it would be misleading toidentify one for the other.

From 1948 to mandatory retirement in 1976, Kindleberger taught international economics at MIT, which over that same time grew to become the leading economics department in the world. His original plan was to keep one foot in the world of policy, the better to push for Hansen’s postwar vision of economic development in the Global South. Security clearance trouble, however, put that plan on hold, and forced him instead to embrace a more purely scholarly career. Over time, the increasingly technical character of modern economics pushed him to the fringes of academia, where he reinvented himself as an economic historian.

The extent of diffusion of the Hindu Puranic corpusover a couple of millennia among the people of TamilNadu is inestimable. Innumerable would be the extentof local variations and interpretations ascirculated through folk performances, oralnarratives, and many a mode of textualizations frompalm leaves to early access to print during theeighteenth and nineteenth century. Hence, it is hardto hazard a guess whether a commoner would, in themiddle of twentieth century, be aware of, say forexample, the story of churning of the “ocean ofmilk” to extract amṛ́ta, or nectar, a signal Puranicincident, is difficult since a lot would depend onwhat kinds of access he or she had to folk culturalforms and oral narrative traditions, let alone printliterature. We could think of the example ofMenocchio, the sixteenth-century miller of Italy,whose cultural world was so painstakingly laid outto us by Carlo Ginsberg, for thinking of whatconstitutes a common person's view and knowledge ofthings, say as he or she is immersed in “popularculture” (Ginzburg 1992). Unlike the Italian case,much of what informed a commoner in Tamil Nadushould be oral and folk narratives, occasionally, ifever, supplemented by reading due to the high rateof illiteracy reported in mid-twentieth century.What notion of the asura of the puranic lore the commonermight have carried is a matter of speculation. Wecan however be certain that he or she had a rich andvaried sedimentation of cultures to choose from. Itis in such an open field of imaginations that theDravidianists sought to make a case for theassertion of the asuras over the allegedly unjustcharacterizations the Puranic imagination had castthem in.

If we, the authors, were to speak of our ownassimilation of the cosmic scheme of the Puranas,not from studying the Sanskrit texts or the works ofIndologists but as people who had been immersed inpopular culture as we grew up, we should first notethat there were three worlds to contend with. TheDevaloka is the heavenly abode where the devas resided. The Bhulokais the world of the humans. The Patalaloka, thenetherworld, is where the asuras and rakshasas lived.

The conclusion recapitulates the book’s argument that Chinese provinces take different approaches to governing, which have impacted social policy implementation. This chapter discusses how recentralization under Xi Jinping may interact with local approaches to governing. The chapter also examines how policy style may have exacerbated local actors’ initial response to the novel coronavirus in 2019. The chapter concludes by discussing how the policy-style framework could be applied to subnational analysis beyond China and the broader implications of the argument.

On the day the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) wasfounded, September 17, 1949, the debates on theDraft Constitution of India were being held in theConstituent Assembly. They were concluded in amonth's time; the draft was approved by November 14,1949, and was formally adopted on January 24, 1950,four months from the day the DMK was founded. Itcould be said that the Republic of India and the DMKwere born simultaneously. The information issignificant because the party mirrored and shared anantinomy of the new republic. The DMK vowed to workfor another republic, the south Indian federation ofstates known as Dravida Nadu. It decided to work forthe goal under the conditions of possibility madeavailable by the Indian republic, a Union of States.We can thus say that the political mobilization ofthe DMK is constituted by an antinomy. This antinomyimmediately mirrored the antinomy of centrifugal andcentripetal tendencies of power consolidation inIndian polity. As per the Constitution, the term“state” is applied to the regional governments thatconstitute the Union. The “union of states” iscentrally governed. There is a lasting antinomy inthe formation. On the one hand, in effect, thepowers are largely concentrated at the Union, makingthe Union government a unitary state with theprovincial governments, grandiosely called States,increasingly becoming dependent on the centralpower. On the other hand, popular politics,particularly electoral outcomes, have beenstrengthening party formations at the regionallevel, thus constituting the antinomy of therepublic in the practice of popular electoraldemocracy.

The DMK was an exemplar of the autonomous politicalformations at the regional level. It was alsodistinguished by the fact that the very building ofthe party structure involved elections to varioustiers of party positions. The way the party wroteits constitution and conducted organizationalelections pointed to the liberal streak of politicsit endorsed, which aligned it with a possibleelectoral participation.

The global institutional changes implemented under the auspices of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2005 were expected to challenge the existing sources of competitive advantage in the Indian pharmaceutical and textile industries and thus India's trade position in international markets. These challenges acquired strategic significance at the national level given the historical importance of the two industries to India's attainment of various socio-economic objectives. The above-quoted extracts from the annual reports of the respective ministries of the Government of India fifteen years later suggest that each industry adequately adapted to the global institutional change and was able to maintain or increase its share in global trade, while fulfilling the social goals, that is, employment generation in the textile industry and supply of affordable drugs in the pharmaceutical industry. How were these two industries able to adapt to and cope with externally imposed changes that amounted to tectonic shifts in the rules of the game? Studying similarities and differences in the strategic trajectories of these two very different industries in response to global changes was the primary objective of the current book.

The main argument of this book is that coping with such momentous changes triggered at the global level required a multi-level strategic response. Global institutional change necessitated the search for new organisational capabilities by Indian firms to catch up with global competitors and successfully compete in international markets.

The political rise of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam(DMK) was intimately connected to the use of theTamil language, the recovery and circulation of itsliterary corpus of the last two millennia, and acelebration of Tamil difference, its past, itscivilization, and its glory. However, officially,and for all intents and purposes, the DMK aspired towork for an independent federation of the southIndian states speaking four languages, to be calledDravida Nadu. This was the only form of secession itarticulated from 1949 to 1963. It never demanded thesecession of the state of Tamil Nadu alone. Hence,whether one likes it or not, the DMK was not a Tamilnationalist party. This disambiguation is necessaryif we are to understand how exactly the relationshipbetween Tamil, as a signifier that can stand for notonly the language but also a people and a land, andthe politics of the DMK are intimately connected. Itwill be rewarding to begin with a text that bestbetokens the ambiguity surrounding this issue.

Sumathi Ramaswamy's Passions ofthe Tongue (hereafter PoT) opens with the dramaticscene of Chinnasamy, a well-known martyr for theTamil cause and a DMK cadre, walking out of hishouse early in the morning on January 25, 1964, witha fuel can in his hand to douse and set himself onfire. His death cry “Inti oḻika! Tamiḻ vāḻka!”(Death to Hindi! May Tamil flourish!), launches thetrain of reflection for the book. In other words, ina semiotic sense, Chinnasamy's self-immolationprovides the token for the whole enquiry; assumingthat he belonged to the type called Tamil devotee,the enquiry turns out to be about the passioninvoked by language. The book PoT is a history of Tamiḻ paṟṟu, a composite of terms“Tamiḻ” and “paṟṟu”—the latter standing forattachment or allegiance—the act of holding on tosomething, which PoTglosses as Tamil-language devotion.

If every key text authored by Annadurai in the 1940sthat functioned as ammunition for the ideologicalpropagation of the DMK at its inception wascontroversial in some sense, there is one text thatparticularly makes even his supporters feel awkwardto speak about. In drawing-room conversations inmiddle-class, educated households, the text iswhispered as Annadurai's all-time low. Hisdetractors always lay it against him as anexhibition of bad taste. This text, Kamparacam (Aṟiñar Aṇṇā2008b), is a critical albeit selective reading ofKamparāmāyaṇam.Kamban is the twelfth-century Tamil poet whorendered Valmiki's Ramayana in Tamil as Irāmavatāram (The RamaIncarnation). The text however is popularly known asKamparāmāyaṇam.Annadurai's Kamparacamis a close reading of some of the verses of the textwith explicit and “inappropriate sexual references”that a common reader feels embarrassed to speakabout. However, it is really surprising that in theseventy-five years since Annadurai wrote the text,no critical tradition has developed in Tamilscholarship to actually study what Annadurai triedto do as critical hermeneutics and how far his workcould be validated.

For the limited purposes of this chapter, we would liketo contextualize the work and a pamphlet thatpreceded it known as TīParavaṭṭum (Let the Fire Spread), acompilation of debates that Annadurai had withscholars on the question of whether Kamparāmāyaṇam should beburnt along with another twelfth-century Shaiviteclassic Periya Purāṇamas a program of spreading awareness among the peopleagainst Brahminical Hinduism (Annadurai 1995). Thecall to burn these two texts was given by theSelf-Respect Movement. Since Tamil scholars had cometo be aligned to the Self-Respect Movement from thedays of the first wave of anti-Hindi agitations in1938–1939, their objections to the burning of thetwo literary texts were engaged with in the mode ofpublic debates, a significant gesture in thestill-emerging public sphere. Though there were twotexts to be consigned to flames, what whollypreoccupied the debates was Kamparāmāyaṇam, which excited a sharpconflict in views particularly because of the highliterary value the text was accorded.

The Dravidianist journey in the terrain of arts andliterature that we call the domain of imaginationpreceded and substantially contributed to thefounding of the DMK. Of the many key interventionsAnnadurai made in the mid-1940s writing plays forthe stage assumes a unique significance sinceimagination takes the form of the performative andthe theatrical in a highly potent combination. Wehave already discussed AryanAllure, the seminal treatise he wrote in1944, which was to function as a kind of manifestofor the party that he would launch a few years laterin 1949. We will be discussing the intervention inliterary criticism, or rather a challenge to canonformation in Tamil that he made with regard to thetwelfth-century rendition of Ramayana in Tamil byKamban in the next chapter. We will also bediscussing the writing of prose fiction that hepopularized among the party men in Chapter 8. Of allthese, there is a reason to feel that the stageplayed the most crucial role. Given the fact of lackof literary training of the subaltern populace whenthey were barely literate, not to speak of the bulkof illiterate people, theater or plays had theunique facility to combine refined expression inlanguage with melodramatic imagination through whicha certain political sensibility could be cultivated.The language used in the play synchronized with themode of public address that the DMK leaderscultivated in terms of its rhetorical flourish. Suchdiscursive synergy was further enhanced by the factthat the DMK leaders themselves acted in these playswhich they wrote. In fact, perhaps it was the turnto imagination that created the ground for a newparty, the DMK, to be headed by Annadurai, who leadDravidianists in this new battlefront, recruitingable lieutenants like Karunanidhi to wage theculture war on the turf of imagination. The foray ofthe DMK leaders into cinema, enabled by the relativenewness of that cultural form that catered to thewhole of society than any other form that catered toselective audiences, has been muchoveremphasized.

In the months of January and February 1965, Tamil Naduwitnessed the eruption of mass protest and violencethat shocked almost all political actors in itsintensity and scale. The protests carried severalfeatures of subaltern uprisings such as lack ofcentral directives, spontaneity of action, role ofrumors, destructive and homicidal violence, staterepression, and finally, unverifiability of theprecise nature of events in many places whereseveral lives were lost. Though the Dravida MunnetraKazhagam (DMK) had spearheaded anti-Hindi movementsuntil the moment of eruption, it was the studentswho took the lead in “direct action,” which thenpropelled mass action in many places, the scale ofwhich is still a matter of oral histories and “folk”narratives. A perusal of the events between January25 and March 15, 1965, most particularly the threecataclysmic days between February 10 and 12, wouldscarcely leave anyone in doubt that these daystransformed Tamil politics forever. The party, as anorganization, was not directly involved in the wavesof spontaneous agitations in most places, eventhough students and activists belonging to the partyjoined the “public” in action. However, the eventswere bracketed by the DMK's sustained opposition tothe imposition of Hindi as well as a demand forDravidian political independence from its inceptionand its subsequent gain of popular support in theelectoral arena. It was as though the DMK wasairlifted in the most difficult part of its climb topower by the event of anti-Hindi uprising of 1965,as we will have occasion to analyze in detail in thesubsequent chapter on electoral participation.

In what follows in this chapter, we need to focus onmaking sense of the scale and spread of the uprisingwithin a span of a month, though a short-lived one.Before we narrate and analyze the event itself, weneed to gather the larger historical context inwhich it happened. We shall do so under threerubrics: the constitutive roles of the elite and thesubaltern in the linguistic public sphere, theconstitutional conundrum of designating the nationalor sole official language, and the Damocles sword ofofficial language implementation that theConstituent Assembly left hanging on the Indianrepublic.