This chapter applies the theory to India. I first describe the colonial history of how the British annexed certain Indian states into direct rule and signed treaties with other Indian princes as indirect rule. I then develop a theory of different types of indirect rule within India—a formal type of indirect rule through princely states and an informal type of indirect rule through zamindars/landlords. These different types of colonial indirect rule created different causal pathways of structural inequalities and low state capacity, which persisted through path dependent mechanisms into the postcolonial period to result in Maoist insurgency in the 1980s. The zamindari landlord tenure system created one causal pathway of land/caste inequality and lower bureaucratic penetration in the northern epicenter of insurgency in Bihar/Bengal, while the princely states in central-eastern India created a second causal pathway of exploitation of land and natural resources in tribal areas in Andhra Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. I also theorize the role of rebel agency in the form of Maoist leaders and organizations and analyze how the interaction of rebel agency with the structural conditions created by indirect rule creates conjunctural causation for Maoist insurgency.

In this chapter, I test the theory of the effect of colonial indirect rule on postcolonial insurgency using an all-India district-level dataset. I use unique Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) data as a measure of the dependent variable of Maoist control. Unlike other quantitative studies of Maoist insurgency that use measures of violence from 2005 to 2010 as their dependent variable, I do not use such violence data as my dependent variable since violence is only the most visible aspect of insurgency and does not measure actual Maoist rebel control, which is a more multidimensional concept. There is potential bias in the OLS regression estimates since the British possibly selected those districts for indirect rule that were worse off in terms of revenue and productivity. To correctly estimate the causal effect of colonial indirect rule, I control for some observable pre-colonial determinants of indirect rule choice, like forest cover, terrain, soil quality, and pre-colonial agrarian rebellion and find that princely state is still a statistically significant predictor of Maoist control. While these pre-colonial qualities may have played a role in the choice of institutions, once in place such colonial indirect rule had an independent causal effect on postcolonial insurgency.