Social Movements in India: Poverty, Power and Politics
Edited by Raka Ray and Mary Fainsod Katzenstein,
Oxford, Rs 650

In post-Independence India, the liberal, secular and pro-industrial vision of the Nehruvian state held sway for nearly two decades. Poverty alleviation served as the foundational basis of the statecraft. The vision gradually came to be blurred after Nehru’s death in 1964. The decline of the Nehruvian state was prompted by the growing importance of market forces and the emergency of religious nationalism until, in recent times, the issue of poverty is totally eclipsed by that of identity politics.

The social movements of India in the last fifty years or so are diverse. Yet the issues of class, caste and gender, which they primarily involve, tend to overlap quite often. The editors of the book point out in the introduction that the work is premised upon two “core generalisations” characterizing movement activisms in India. The first generalization concerns the issues of class and poverty within the master frame of the Nehruvian state ideology. The second one is based on a reinvented matrix of ideas necessitated by the changed political scenario of priority preference. The editors make it clear that Nehru’s death serves as the watershed between two radically different patterns of movement activism.

The editors focus on a triadic structure of periodization of movement politics. The first phase covers a period from 1947 to some years after Nehru’s death in 1965 when the Indian National Congress dominated Indian politics. The second phase started a few years after Nehru’s death and continued till the late Eighties. This period saw the decline of the power of the Congress and the notorious proclamation of Emergency in 1975. The last phase, starting from the late Eighties and continuing till recent times, is a period of economic liberalization and the massive ‘NGO-ification’ of civil society. These three phases come through with well-intentioned yet inefficient modes of governance against which protest-oriented social movements were launched.

The first three articles of the volume by Vivek Chibber, Tanika Sarkar and Patrick Heller chronicle the three different social movements which epitomized the first phase of political change. Gopal Guru and Anuradha Chakraborty’s articles concern Dalit movements against gross social injustices in the second phase. Gail Omvedt’s discussion of the new modes of farmer movements and Neema Kudva’s analysis of the proliferation of NGOs are emblematic of the third phase.

In short, the articles in this book explore the dynamics of the relation between the state and the society in post-Independence India. The Nehruvian vision of the state plays a pivotal role in the dynamics.