Making sense of contemporary social movements in India

Abstract

This chapter attempts to suggest the significance of social movements as actors in their own right - both against the state and, more recently, against emerging neoliberal institutions - in the transformation of India's social and political institutions. It reviews three widely known sustained collective struggles in India - the Narmada Bachao Andolan, the post-independence Dalit movements and the ongoing armed Maoist insurgency in central India - into conversation with the broader literature on social movements. The chapter seeks to illustrate the contrasting successes and failures of these distinctive movements of the dispossessed and also to evaluate the emancipatory potentials of each of these struggles, forced as they increasingly are to refashion their strategies of mobilization - and perhaps, even of survival - in the face of the newer structural injustices introduced by the demands of neoliberalism and globalization.