appearance, but highly energetic chief minister presented a strongly pro-market visage to
the World Bank, private investors, and international media. But on the campaign stump,
and in public forums most relevant to the majority of the state’s population (such as the
chief minister’s weekly television program), he presented a generously populist version
of himself, generally working within the idiom of paternalist state welfarism typical of
AP politics since the 1980s. While the strategy seemed to work for a while, Naidu’s
attempt to have it both ways ultimately left him open to attacks by a vituperative
opposition calling him a pawn of the World Bank—a charge that allowed his opponents
to frame the public debate on the state’s reform process at precisely the moment that
some of the more painful elements of the fiscal adjustment were kicking in.
By contrast, in Karnataka, the septuagenarian Krishna was both more
straightforward and low-key, championing market-oriented reform and fiscal discipline to
elite and mass audiences alike, and eschewing Naidu-style hype for a calm yet confident
advocacy of Karnataka’s potential. Perhaps most importantly, Krishna’s approach
asserted greater ownership of the reform process, and avoided falling prey to opposition
charges of capitulation to the World Bank. Only after Karnataka had experienced three
years of drought (and he began to contemplate reelection) did Krishna resort to populist
electoral schemes—and even then, they were of a milder variety than the brazen spending
binges Naidu engaged in before the same weather calamities befell AP.
While the analysis here attributes the differing political reactions to reform in the
two states largely to their leaders’ contrasting strategies, it also attempts to locate those
strategies within the broader contexts of differing democratic traditions and social
structures. AP has a more entrenched history of political conflict, especially between its
more developed coastal region and much less developed interior region of Telengana. It
has also experienced intense competition over the years between two rival peasant-
proprietor castes, the Reddis and the Kammas, for control of the machinery of
government. Since the 1980s, AP’s electoral politics have revolved around widespread
4
Convention