Indian Movement Research Articles

Letter to the Unknown Indian Kisan

<p>This letter is an expression of gratitude, from two students of social movements in India who are currently working in the USA, to the thousands of unknown Indian kisans (peasants). In 2020-21, peasants from across the country protested and participated in a movement widely known as anti-farm law movement—which was, in turn, triggered by the passage of three laws, together known as the farm laws, that aimed to liberalize agricultural commodity production and marketing. But what started out as a movement with a limited purpose soon morphed into a statement against the high-handedness of the Indian state. Through this letter, we pay a tribute to the farmers who drew inspiration from diverse intellectual strands including Gandhiism and Ambedkarite philosophy to craft a profound statement to highlight the precarity experienced by the farmers and in defense of India’s democratic ethos.</p>

Analysing the Factors Behind Exchange Rate Fluctuations in India

Abstract: The study gives an overview of the various determinants of the exchange rate movements in India. Out of the multiple factors affecting the Rupee-Dollar value the impact of Interest rate differential, Trade deficit of India, Foreign Net investment inflows to India, Oil prices, and Gold prices (in the short term) on the exchange rate has been studied using Regression analysis and correlation and the role they played by the above mentioned variables in determining the exchange rate during the Global Financial Crisis of 2008-2010 and during the Covid-19 Period from 2020-2023. Exchange rate fluctuations play a crucial role in shaping the economy of a country, and India is no exception. The exchange rate of the Indian rupee against major world currencies is subject to constant fluctuations, influenced by a multitude of domestic and global factors. These fluctuations have significant implications for various stakeholders, including businesses, consumers, investors, and policymakers. Several factors contribute to the exchange rate fluctuations in India. One of the primary factors is the demand and supply dynamics of foreign exchange. Factors such as trade balance, foreign direct investments, portfolio investments, remittances impact the demand for and supply of foreign currency, Crude oil prices, Gold prices, and thereby affecting the exchange rate. In addition, macroeconomic variables like inflation, interest rates, and economic growth also play a crucial role in determining exchange rate movements. For instance, a high inflation rate in India compared to trading partner countries can lead to a depreciation of the rupee. Global economic conditions and geopolitical events are other significant factors influencing exchange rate fluctuations in India. Economic developments in major trading partners, changes in global commodity prices, and geopolitical tensions can all impact investor sentiment and capital flows, leading to fluctuations in the exchange rate. For example, uncertainties related to Brexit or trade tensions between major economies can trigger volatility in currency markets. Monetary policy decisions by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) also play a crucial role in influencing exchange rates. Interest rate changes, open market operations, and forex interventions by the central bank can impact the value of the rupee visa-vis other currencies. The RBI often intervenes in the foreign exchange market to stabilize the rupee or prevent extreme volatility. Apart from these factors, market speculation, investor sentiment, and technological advancements in the financial markets can also contribute to exchange rate fluctuations. High-frequency trading, algorithmic trading, and the use of complex financial instruments by market participants can amplify exchange rate movements and increase volatility

Voluntary Movements in India: Gandhian Perspectives

Voluntary organizations are part of a larger civil society. The concept of voluntarism is as old as the mankind itself, whereas Gandhian concepts of voluntary work are the product of the twentieth century.voluntary or the civil society sector today is comprised of a very diverse group of institutions ranging from those who want to facilitate the development of the poor and the marginalized, to those who run economic and service delivery activities that privatize public institutions and services.

Indigenous onto-epistemology and the Niyamgiri Movement in India

Climate crises and other manifestations of environmental degradation are inextricably linked to the universalizing technoscientific paradigm underpinning capitalist industrialization and modernization. This study aimed to problematize the modern/colonial ontological dualism underpinning environmental crises and advocates the indigenous/Adivasi relational onto-epistemology. It offers a different reality that questions the virtues of science, capitalism, the colonial narrative, and its continuation in subjectivities and social relations with the modern state. Drawing from the new materialist insights of human and non-human imbrications and the framework of political ontology, this study further analyzed the Dongaria Kondh people's political success in defending their relational way of worlding against corporate-driven extractivism. The state perpetuates violence and takes development initiatives in this mineral-rich eastern Indian province. While other political movements have succumbed to combined corporate and state power, the Dongaria's political struggle continues in different forms. Finally, the article makes the point that knowledge and insights born out of political struggle against a particular ontology, masquerading as universal, press the need for engagement between different realities, knowledges, and recognition of a pluriverse, a world of multiple ways of worlding, where each ontological story exists not as superior or inferior, but as equal, with space for mutual engagement and dialogue.

Interrogating Intersectionality: The Me-Too Movement in India

In recent times, intersectionality, as a critical framework for feminist analysis, has been subjected to both criticism and appreciation. This paper aims to contribute to the wider literature of feminist thought in India with an examination of the MeToo movement. We argue that the MeToo movement allows for a significant space to interrogate the relevance of intersectionality in conceiving the socio-political landscape of India. The #MeToo movement initiated and ignited a new wave of feminist consciousness, while contributing to the wider discourse of the feminist movement in India. Many women, hitherto significantly suppressed, shared experiences of and raised their voices against sexual discrimination. Despite being a platform which brought women’s voices to the forefront he #MeToo movement has, however, been criticised for neglecting subaltern voices, marginalising the lower-castes, and possessing an inherent upper-caste bias. Analysing the MeToo movement through an intersectional lens allows scholars to address the invisibility of violence while also helping redress the injustices stemming from the intersection of multiple social vectors. Social positions are relational, the contours of which are determined by the coalition and dialectic of a multitude of forces, they in turn shaping the everyday social life.

Leo Tolstoy’s Anti-Colonial Views and Their Influence on Liberation Movements in Africa

Leo Tolstoy is one of the few Russian thinkers of the pre-Soviet era whose views influenced leaders of liberation movements in Africa. Soviet researchers explored his anti-colonial views and their perception in the African continent. Although based on extensive source material, these publications are overly ideologized. The topic is reconsidered, using previously untapped archival data, as well as publications which appeared in Russia and internationally over the past thirty years. Tolstoy’s first attempts to speak out in the press about the colonial partition of Africa date to the Italo-Ethiopian War of 1895–1896. He denounced colonial expansion as an attempt by governments to distract their people from problems at home and force them to sacrifice themselves for business and political interests of others. Tolstoy advised people in metropoles not to take part in colonial schemes, and prompted colonised peoples to defend their rights through peaceful means so that the vicious circle of violence could be broken. His anticolonial rhetoric resonated in Africa, and from the beginning of the 20th century, his ideas were accepted as a guideline. M.K. Gandhi, a future leader of the struggle for Indian independence, who spearheaded a civil-rights movement of South African Indians in the 1900s, used Tolstoy’s ideas in developing his tactics of nonviolent resistance (satyagraha). Indirectly, these ideas continued to impact the South African liberation movement thanks to Gandhi’s influence. It was not until 1961 that the African National Congress (ANC) had to form a military organisation to fight against the apartheid regime. Yet the ANC managed to achieve a non-violent transition from apartheid to non-racial democracy. The success is associated with President N.R. Mandela, who shared Tolstoy’s views on the need to abandon armed confrontation.

Religion, Ecology and Hindu Nationalism in India

Abstract In this paper I examine the construction of Hinduism as inherently “environmentally friendly” within religions and ecology discourses and how this construction has been appropriated by the Hindu nationalist movement in India to serve ends that are at odds with the pursuit of sustainable development. I begin by tracing the emergence of religions and ecology discourses and the assertion that Asian or Eastern religions are inherently environmentally friendly. This is followed by critiques of this neo-traditionalist approach for being anachronistic and essentialist, as well as for promoting a “myth of primitive ecological wisdom” that can have damaging effects on communities who live close to nature. This is because it reduces them to idealisations to serve other ends and has little impact on effecting policies that can improve their lives as well as addressing anthropogenic climate change. Next, I consider the construction of Hinduism as environmentally friendly within the context of the ascendency of Hindu nationalism. I examine the ways in which the claim to support sustainable development, alongside invoking neo-traditionalist religions and ecology discourse, is at odds with the actual policies pursued by Hindu nationalists, whose Bharatiya Janata Party has been in power since 2014. I will demonstrate that in its bid to spread a particular version of Hinduism across India alongside the growth of the market economy, some traditional livelihoods that are more sustainable than modern alternatives, such as nomadic pastoralism or Adivasi (tribal) economies, and the religio-cultural traditions that surround them, are being undermined and threatened with extinction.

Non-Cooperation Movement

The most important movement in India's freedom movement was the non-cooperation movement, that is, if the Indians did not cooperate with the British government in any way, it would be difficult for the British to form a government, then Mahatma Gandhi's intention was that they would give freedom to the Indians. Thus, if Gandhi called the Indians to do the non-cooperation movement, he also told how this movement should be done. The purpose of this article is to provide information about it.

Feeling for the Anthropocene: affective relations and ecological activism in the global South

Abstract How do emotions shape ecological activism in the global South? Despite growing interest in researching ecological activism in International Relations (IR), there hasn't been much work that draws insights from the global South due to the predominant focus on western societies. Against the backdrop of the recent ‘relational’, ‘emotional’ and ‘Anthropocene’ turns in IR scholarship, this article examines how emotions can contribute to ecological activism in the global South. The article seeks to move beyond the dominant rationalist technocratic fixes to the Anthropocene condition and conceptualize the ‘affective relations’ as a frame for situating and sustaining relations between humans and nature. It argues that the ‘international’ in IR is a relational sphere of society—and emotions act as the purveyor of those social relations. Empirically, this article examines historical insights from ecological activism in the Chipko (tree-hugging) movement in India. The article argues that feelings as the non-violent practice (in their hugging of trees, silent demonstrations, protest slogans, street plays, songs and performances) become sites of resistance in ecological activism in India's Chipko movement. Finally, the article explains how affective relations sustain humans, nature and the state.

Environmental Movements in India - A Historical Perspective

Environmental Movements in India - A Historical Perspective

The Shaheen Bagh Strike: Muslim Women and Political Protest in Contemporary India

The Shaheen Bagh protest in New Delhi highlighted the changing dynamics of Muslim women’s participation in socio-political movements in India. This paper argues how Muslim women proved themselves to be concerned citizens while protesting against the Citizenship Amendment Act (2019) and other forms of social discrimination. The paper analyses the Shaheen Bagh protest from an intersectional perspective to understand how Muslim women voiced their political opinions negotiating with gender and religion-based discrimination; they had to fight the multiple forms of patriarchy of Indian society while protesting against hypermasculine Hindutva politics. The Shaheen Bagh protest can be called a feminist strike of Third World women for the rights of their religious community in a particular socio-political context.

Growing Restiveness of the Peasantry in Contemporary India: Context and Challenges

The global rise of neoliberalism has drastically altered the economic landscape of the peasantry and deepened the agrarian crisis of the countries of the Global South, including India. The roots of India’s agrarian crisis can be traced to a very significant transition from dirigiste to a neoliberal macroeconomic policy regime, in 1991, which has continued till date. Its most gruesome manifestation has been high and ever-rising farmers’ suicides. Factors such as substantial compression of rural development expenditures, increasing input prices, vulnerability to world market price fluctuations due to greater openness, inadequate crop insurance and substantial weakening of the provisioning for credit, along with the governments’ apathy to the demand for remunerative prices for farm produce, are among the obvious causal correlates of the contemporary agrarian crisis in the country. An important consequence has been a steady building up of peasant resistance, particularly over the last decade, leading up to the recent mass protests. Given their scale, intensity, and tenacity, they have been widely hailed as among the most significant resistance movements within the country and across the world against the machinations of corporate power and the interests of big business. This article addresses some of the primary features of the farmers’ movement in India, and the contradictions and challenges with which it has been contending.

Conceptualizing the Paradigm Shift from Prosocial Communism to Violent Communism and Pogroms of Dalits to Adivasi Guerrillas in India: A Systematic Literature Review

In India, the violent communist movement encompasses 70 districts of 10 states with substantial support from the marginalized people with arms in their hands. Why does the transformation process from a communist political party to violent communism take place in India? How does communism in its violent form still survive in India? These questions are addressed by reviewing the literature on the left-wing extremist movement in India from 2005 to 2022. It is found that the violent version of communism has largely succeeded in the domain of suppressing caste-based exploitations of the landless lower castes and gaining support from the indigenous tribes on land and forest-related issues. Therefore, the destination of communism in India is an important eventuality to study its survival strategies, diverse forms and processes.

An Insight into the Eventful Journey of a Freedom Fighter, Writer and Social Reformer

Chinna Annamalai, a passionate freedom fighter, a remarkable Tamil enthusiast and a dedicated social reformer played a significant part in India’s freedom struggle in the southern part of Tamil Nadu and contributed to various social causes. He earned several nicknames like “Desiya Semmal,” “Thiyaga Semmal”. and ” Tamizh Thondar.” He had his early education in Karaikudi and pursued his higher secondary education at Nagarathar High School in Devakottai. Influenced greatly by his cousin Litterateur Kamban Adippodi Sa. Ganesan, he became involved in the Congress Movement and met Mahatma Gandhi during his visit to Karaikudi. Impacted at the very first sight by Gandhi’s charisma and simplicity and integrity, Chinna Annamalai became a staunch supporter of the Congress Movement and remained a staunch member of the party throughout his life. As an enthusiastic advocate of India’s liberation, he participated in numerous events and processions that resulted in temporary suspension of his education at Devakottai. He later studied in Vairavizha High School in Gopichettipalayam. Chinna Annamalai’s activism and oratory skills drew the attention of great leaders; and he had the opportunity to speak at the Congress Conference in Gobichettipalayam and his fiery speech elicited appreciation for its eloquence. From then on he started wearing Khadar and continued that habit till his death. He remained actively engaged in various movements of India’s independence struggle, including the Quit India Movement. To divert young Chinna Annamalai’s attention from the freedom struggle activities his father sent him to Malaysia and his participation in protests against alcohol in Malaysia led to his expulsion from that country. Again in India he participated in the freedom struggle with renewed vigour. His dedication to the cause of India’s freedom resulted in several arrests and imprisonments, with an instance of public support for his release from the jail. His exhortations to the Tamil community to participate in struggles for India’s freedom remains a significant part of his legacy. Chinna Annamalai also made contributions to Tamil literature and the film industry, writing scripts for successful movies with social messages and establishing a Fan Club for a star actor Shivaji Ganesan. By launching Tamil Pannai, a publishing concern, he inspired many to establish similar companies that richly contributed the growth of modern Tamil Literature. In short his life was one of endless pursuits and achievements contributing to the national and societal welfare.

The Progression of Trade Policy Reforms within the Context of National Economic Reforms

The primary goal of this chapter is to outline the key points of the trade policy reforms that have taken place in India since 1991, focusing on the changes that have occurred both before and after the reforms. Specifically, a comprehensive analysis that aims to comprehend the key components of the trade policy reform initiatives. Using the many metrics of India's international trade performance throughout the Reform years, as well as the direction and makeup of India's imports and exports, the movements in India's external sector have been examined in depth.

Deconstructing women's agency in new social movements of post-colonial India: a relentless struggle to secure fundamental rights and human dignity

Deconstructing women's agency in new social movements of post-colonial India: a relentless struggle to secure fundamental rights and human dignity

Deconstructing women's agency in new social movements of post-colonial India: a relentless struggle to secure fundamental rights and human dignity

Deconstructing women's agency in new social movements of post-colonial India: a relentless struggle to secure fundamental rights and human dignity

Contribution of Banasthali Vidyapith in fit India movement: A step towards healthy India

Contribution of Banasthali Vidyapith in fit India movement: A step towards healthy India

EVERYDAY HATE ON FACEBOOK: VISUAL MISOGYNY AND THE ANTI-FEMINIST MOVEMENT IN INDIA

The #metoo movement has been one of the key social movements which has ushered in a change in structural relations in the society. In the Indian context, the movement has meant giving a powerful platform to women address generations of sexual assault in the Indian society. However, the #metoo movement has also witnessed a counter-response from the growing online ‘men’s rights activists’ (MRA) community. This study focuses on the online presence of MRA movement in India and the practice of everyday visual misogyny on their Facebook pages. I specifically focus on the public Facebook page of Save Indian Family Movement. The paper focuses on visual posts like images in form of memes and distorted news clips shared on their public page with the aim of capturing visual misogyny. The selection criteria were to manually collect all posts with an image for a duration of three months (17 October, 2022 – 21 January, 2023). I focus on this timeframe to cover the three months after Justice Chandrachud--who is not seen favourably amongst the MRA community for his progressive judgements --was appointed as the new Chief Justice of India. The dataset of images only contains either memes or cartoons or news clips. I employ an iterative multimodal critical discourse analysis approach to analyse the visual posts and categorise them based on the schema of explicit and implicit misogyny developed by Strathern and Pfeffer (2022). The findings suggest majority of the visual posts fall within the implicit misogyny category.

Forgotten Flames of Bravery: Unsung Heroes of Inidia’s Struggle for Freedom

Every Individual in India knows about a country’s struggle story for freedom. India was ruled by several European powers from time to time, i.e., Portuguese, Dutch, English, Danish and France. The most recent rulers were the British rulers, and they ruled for a long time. Indian freedom fighters had a dream of removing British rule. The Indian freedom fighters were the brave-hearted souls who did not think twice about sacrificing themselves and liberating us from the British rule. It is because of these brave souls that we are living happily and peacefully in an independent nation, so as a responsible citizen it is our duty to discuss these freedom fighters who fought our future. There were possibly thousands of unsung Heroes of the freedom movement in India. Thus, India’s independence would not have been possible without sacrifices and struggles made by freedom fighters. Aside From Subhash Chandra Bose, Mahatma Gandhi, Bhagat Singh. Rani Laxmi Bai, many hidden gems have given their lives to make our nation free from the British Raj.