Social Movements In India Research Articles

Comparative Analysis of the Gulabi Gang and the Anti-Liquor Movement in India

To explore progress on the Commission on the Status of Women’s 67th Session (2023) review theme, we examine two women-led rural social movements in India combating violence against women. Through in-depth case studies of the Gulabi Gang (GG) in Uttar Pradesh and the Anti-Liquor (AL) movement in Karnataka, we analyze their emergence, actions, tactics, progression, and outcomes. Findings reveal challenges faced by these movements in addressing women’s safety amid persistent domestic violence and gender inequality. The study emphasizes the need for sustained political support, efficient legal protection, and indigenous organizational empowerment, facilitated by international support, to drive effective social change.

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>

Teaching Climate Change Science with the Humanities and Global Perspectives

Teaching Climate Change Science with the Humanities and Global Perspectives

Identity tensions of women with two leadership positions in India

AbstractIdentity narratives enhance the understanding of women’s leadership, but there exist very few in‐depth analyses of negative identity tensions that influence agency. In this study, we examine the negative identity tensions of well‐to‐do women from small towns in India, who hold two leadership positions: organizational and social movement. We borrow from the discourse on well‐to‐do women’s participation in social movements in India to draw on the notions of identity, perceptions of feminism, and patriarchal challenge. Our data are derived from 49 in‐depth interviews with women leaders. Findings from qualitative analysis and creation of a composite narrative show that negative identity tensions arising from two leadership positions are gendered in nature. Furthermore, agency is (i) contingent on one’s reflection on challenges, (ii) rooted in an underlying principle, and (iii) practiced through the mechanisms of “managing femininity,” a concept that is widely discussed in the Western paradigms of postfeminism and neoliberalism. This paper contributes to the feminist dialog on the global South in the context of gender, class, and geographical location intersection by revealing certain non‐Western ways of managing femininity. However, in the process, the hegemony of Indian men remains intact.

The Role and Impact of Social Media on Online Social Movements: An Analysis of ‘ALS Ice Bucket Challenge’ in India

Online social movements have taken root and flourished in the last decade due to online communication networks attributed to Social media. In this paper, the mixed-method approach is utilized for qualita- tive and quantitative analysis to investigate the efficacy of social media in propounding the outcome of online social movements in India. Further, several factors which have a definite impact on the outcomes of such online social movements are highlighted. This study concludes that online social media campaigns can be viewed as an extension of ‘social norms media campaigns’. Further, it establishes that the internet penetration in India coupled with ‘online peer pressure’ accompanying such movements has ef- fectively aroused the consciousness of users towards such campaigns. It also highlights the alteration in the process of diffusion of ideas in society due to the advent of social media platforms.

«Английская ученица Ганди»: антиимпериалистическая политика и философия Саралы Бен ('Gandhi’s English Disciple': Anti-Imperialist Policy and the Philosophy of Sarala Behn)

Russian Abstract: В статье рассматривается жизнь и деятельность Кэтрин Мэри Хайлеман, известной в Индии как Сарала Бен. Эта британская женщина, сама называвшая себя «английской ученицей Ганди», внесла важный вклад в распространение идей гандизма в северной части Индии. Долгое время оставаясь малоизвестной фигурой, теперь она вышла на первый план в связи с начавшимися попытками реконструировать «женское начало» в истории гандизма. В 1946 году Сарала Бен основала ашрам Лакшми, ставший оплотом гандистской антиимпериалистической политики и философии в Гималаях, а также центром гандистского женского образования и подготовки гражданских активистов, возглавивших целый ряд социальных движений в Индии в последние полстолетия. English Abstract: The article is considered the life and work of Catherine Mary Heileman, known in India as Sarala Behn. This British woman, who called herself the Gandhi’s English disciple, made an important contribution to the spread of the ideas of Gandhianism in northern India. For a long time remaining a little-known figure, now she came to the fore relating to the beginning attempts to reconstruct the “feminine principle” in the history of Gandhianism. In 1946, Sarala Ben founded Lakshmi Ashram, which became a stronghold of Gandhian anti-imperialist politics and philosophy in the Himalayas, as well as a center for Gandhian women's education and training of civic activists who have led several social movements in India over the past half century.

"АНГЛИЙСКАЯ УЧЕНИЦА ГАНДИ": АНТИИМПЕРИАЛИСТИЧЕСКАЯ ПОЛИТИКА И ФИЛОСОФИЯ САРАЛЫ БЕН

The article is considered the life and work of Catherine Mary Heileman, known in India as Sarala Behn. This British woman, who called herself the «Gandhi’s English disciple», made an important contribution to the spread of the ideas of Gandhianism in northern India. For a long time remaining a little-known figure, now she came to the fore relating to the beginning attempts to reconstruct the «feminine principle» in the history of Gandhianism. In 1946, Sarala Behn founded Lakshmi Ashram, which became a stronghold of Gandhian anti-imperialist politics and philosophy in the Himalayas, as well as a center for Gandhian women's education and training of civic activists who have led several social movements in India over the past half century.

From Protests to Policies: Actors, Spaces and Processes

This paper addresses a rather understudied aspect of the ways through which protests get translated into policies by focussing on the actors, spaces and processes. It further identifies key actors in the policy making formulation process, which we call ‘policy intermediaries’. It discusses the emergence of ‘policy intermediaries’ in relation to the history of social movements in post-colonial India. It situates the policy making processes in the country and the role of ‘policy intermediaries’ therein, in the overall context of changing configurations of relationships amongst the state, non-governmental organisations, think tanks and the emergent transnational networks and discourses. By implication, it maps out some of the attributes of middle class activism with illustrations from select social movements in India. The paper explores the multiple spaces in which ‘policy intermediaries’ function, the diverse roles they play and the networks in which they are wilfully or otherwise enmeshed.

Whose Reality Counts?

The low caste, Dalit and Tribal social movements in India have reconfigured the fabric of Indian society in significant ways over the past decade. Likewise, the movement of these same groups into anthropology, a discipline previously dominated in India by uppercaste intellectuals, has created a dynamic force for change in the academy. At a time when India is vying with the global economic powers for supremacy, the people severely affected are low caste, Dalits and Tribal peoples, who see their lands being lost and their lifestyles in rapid transformation. Some from these same groups are also witnessing some of their daughters and sons pursuing higher studies and entering into the social sciences. The entry of these young scholars not only challenges the caste-based status quo in the academy, but it also forces these scholars to question their own position in relation to these social movements and in relation to Indian society more broadly.

Civil Society: A New Social Movements in India

Civil Society: A New Social Movements in India

Internationalized Framing in Social Movements against Mining in India and the Philippines

There are several documented cases of indigenous peoples’ conflicts with mining companies, often for the reason that the land planned for mining is sacred or culturally significant to them. This article presents a comparative analysis of two specific anti-mining social movements in India and the Philippines that combined an emphasis on environmental protection with an emphasis on indigenous cultural rights. We show how the emphasis on indigeneity in these social movements played itself out in relation to globalized frames, as well as the other frames within which the movements were also situated.

Social movements in india: From institutional politics to participatory democracy

Social movements in india: From institutional politics to participatory democracy

Rajni Kothari’s Ideas of Freedom: ‘Rethinking’ State, Democracy, Development and ‘New’ Social Movements in India

Ideas of freedom have been an integral part of the discourses on nationalism and national movements in most of the post-colonial societies, including especially India. These ideas of freedom and anti-colonial movement in India can be looked at from diverse perspectives—it may be liberal, Marxist, neo-Marxist, revolutionaries and even pacifists like Gandhi. This article makes a modest attempt to understand Rajni Kothari’s ideas of freedom, essentially through the prisms of his critical reflections and intervention on state, democracy, development and ‘new’ social or grass-roots movements. Kothari argued that freedom meant both ‘autonomy of man’ as well as ‘autonomy of states’. Embedded in Kothari’s ideas of freedom was the idea of a strong, deep and decentralized democratic structure, politics as a form of social transformation and rather an indigenous, autonomous, self-reliant and an ‘alternative’ model of economic development. However, contemporary India represents and reflects none of these ideas of freedom, whether it will be individual freedom or community freedom. With the decline of the welfare state as an agency pursuing socio-economic development, Kothari invents a ‘new’ idea of freedom as articulated by the grass-roots or ‘new’ social movements, which are essentially ‘non-class’, ‘non-materialistic’, ‘humanist’ and ‘universalist’ in their outlook and approach.

Subaltern Studies as a History of Social Movements in India

While there is a thriving sociological and historical literature on social movements in post-colonial India, popular mobilisations of the colonial period are rarely addressed in terms of social movements. But the historical record is replete with instances of countless mobilisations seeking change against the state and other forms of authority in colonial society. This essay analyses a select group of works by the historical collective, Subaltern Studies, with the explicit goal of seeing these works as histories of social movements in colonial India. It also argues that one of the lasting legacies of the collective's writings was to present us with a paradigm, not unchallenged, of the revolutionary subject of such movements. By focusing in particular on Ranajit Guha's early writings, I present a reading of the colonial Indian peasant as this paradigmatic rebel subject.

Adivasi Mobilization in Contemporary India: Democratizing the Local State?

This article addresses the political aspects of the structural marginalization of Adivasis (Scheduled Tribes) in India. Relating to critical debates about the changing nature of state–society relations in India, the article assesses the argument that the best way for social movements in India to advance their oppositional projects is to harness the state to their attempts to deepen democracy and advance subaltern emancipation. The trajectories of two Adivasi movements in western Madhya Pradesh are analysed, and I discuss the conceptual and political lessons that can be learnt from these case studies in terms of the relationship between subaltern politics and state power in contemporary India. Theoretically grounded in Marxian state theory, the article puts forward the argument that it is necessary to move beyond both anti-statism and state-centrism in order to develop a politically enabling engagement with contemporary Adivasi mobilization in India.

Questioning Borders: Social Movements, Political Parties and the Creation of New States in India

As the world’s largest multi-ethnic democracy, India has a federal constitution that is well-equipped with administrative devices that offer apparent recognition and measures of self-governance to territorially concentrated ethnic groups. This article analyzes how demands for political autonomy—or statehood—within the federal system have been used as a frame for social movement mobilization. It focuses on the most recent states to have been created in India: Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Uttarakhand, which came into being in 2000. These are the first states to have been created in India on a non-linguistic basis. Their creation has triggered questions about whether the creation of more, smaller states can improve political representation and help to make the state more responsive to diverse needs in India. This article draws attention to the processes which have brought borders into question, drawing social movements and political parties into alignment about the idea of creating new states. It ultimately looks at why the creation of states as a result of such processes may not lead to more substantive forms of political and economic citizenship on the part of marginalized communities. While the focus of the analysis will be on the processes that led up to statehood, the conclusions offer some insights into why pro-poor policy shifts at the national level in India have uneven regional effects. Despite the change in national political regime in India with the election of the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance in 2004, marginalized groups in India continue to experience the state through the refractive lens of multiple regional political histories. This article focuses on one part of the ever complex field of popular politics and resistance. It examines how, why and with what consequences some social movements in India have drawn on regional identity frames in electoral politics and demanded political autonomy in the form of statehood within the federal system. Explanations for the creation

Pro-Human Rights but Anti-Poor? A Critical Evaluation of the Indian Supreme Court from a Social Movement Perspective

Judicial activism is a contested phenomenon, with the liberals and even the conservatives championing it while denouncing its particular manifestations. In this article, I examine the recent judicial practice of one of the most activist judiciaries in the world, that of India, where progressive politics is often, and sometimes always, associated with an activist and benign court. Indeed, the Indian Supreme Court has a global reputation as a torchbearer on human rights. In this article, I adopt a social movement perspective to understand the actual impact of the court on the struggles of the poor for livelihood, resources, values, and identity, enacted through struggles for the recognition and realization of economic, social, and cultural rights. After an analysis of the record of the Supreme Court of India, I conclude that the Court has increasingly shown a bias against the poor in its activist rulings and made judicial activism a more problematic device for social movements in India to rely upon. To explain why this is happening, the article introduces two ideas: first, the emergence of the judiciary as an organ of governance and its attendant problems, and second, the internally biased nature of the rights discourse which tends to reproduce binary arguments for either increasing State capacity or for increasing choice of goods in the marketplace. The article concludes by exploring lessons from the jurisprudence of other countries and international law and urges the Indian Supreme Court to reinvent a jurisprudence informed more by the social movements of the poor.

Social Movements in India: Poverty, Power, and Politics

Social Movements in India: Poverty, Power, and Politics

Book Review: Social Movements in India: Poverty, Power and Politics

Book Review: Social Movements in India: Poverty, Power and Politics

Social Movements in India: A Select Bibliography

This bibliographic compilation lists the major works on social movements published in the last few years. All published materials could not be accessed, but it is hoped that the compilation will fulfill its objective of providing background knowledge to scholars and academics.