Grassroots Movements in India

The politics that happens outside representation

Indian democracy is usually described through the institutions that hold elections and the representatives those elections produce. But much of what actually changes in India is decided in the long stretches between elections, by people who hold no office and contest none. Grassroots movements are the part of democratic politics that operates outside representation altogether — and several of them have ended by writing statutes.

What a grassroots movement is

• A grassroots movement is a sustained, organised, collective effort by people acting outside formal institutions to change or resist a condition they share. Each element of that definition does work.
  • Sustained rules out a single riot or a one-day agitation.
  • Organised rules out an unstructured crowd acting on impulse.
  • Outside formal institutions is what distinguishes it from ordinary party or legislative politics.
• Ghanshyam Shah adopts a deliberately wide working definition — non-institutionalised collective political action striving for political or social change — preferring usefulness to precision.
  • On his usage, protests, agitations and strikes are components of movements rather than movements in themselves.
• The “grassroots” qualifier adds two further conditions to the general definition.
  • The movement’s base is local and popular rather than national and organisational.
  • Its participants are the people directly affected, not advocates acting on their behalf from a distance.
• A movement is therefore best understood not as an event but as a form of politics — one with its own logic of mobilisation, its own repertoire of action, and its own relationship to the state.

Movement, party and pressure group

• All three are forms of collective behaviour, which is why political sociologists rather than institutional theorists have done most of the work on them.
  • A political party contests for formal office; it aggregates diverse social interests into a programme and seeks to occupy the state, performing interest aggregation.
  • A pressure group does not contest office but attempts to influence those who hold it, performing interest articulation.
  • Samuel Finer called pressure groups “invisible empires” — a phrase capturing their preference for working out of sight, playing hide-and-seek with the political system.
• A social movement is the least institutionalised of the three. It has no membership roll it must maintain, no office it must win, and no seat at a table it must keep — simultaneously its freedom and its weakness.

Form	Relation to power	Degree of institutionalisation	Characteristic function
Political party	Contests for formal office and seeks to occupy the state	Highest — permanent organisation, registration, symbols, funds	Interest aggregation into a governing programme
Pressure group	Influences those in office without contesting for it	High — continuous organisation, recognised interlocutors	Interest articulation on behalf of a defined membership
Social movement	Challenges authority or a distribution, often without a demand addressed to any single office	Lowest — fluid membership, episodic organisation, life-cycle	Consciousness, contestation and agenda-setting

• The three forms are convertible, and Indian history supplies both directions of travel.
  • The Indian National Congress began as something close to a social movement, passed through a phase as a pressure group on colonial authority, and became a political party.
  • The Aam Aadmi Party converted an anti-corruption mobilisation into an electoral organisation within roughly a year.
  • Conversion is never costless. The move into institutional politics buys leverage at the price of the movement’s characteristic advantage — its ability to raise questions the institutional system has no interest in raising.

The three things every movement has

• Three features separate a movement from an episode of protest, and each of them also names a vulnerability.
  • Ideology. A shared account of what is wrong and why, converting individually felt grievances into a collectively named injustice. Without it, discontent remains dispersed.
  • Leadership. Movements depend disproportionately on individuals who can articulate the ideology, negotiate with authority and hold a coalition together.
  • Life-cycle. Movements emerge, coalesce, institutionalise and decline — and the decline may take the form of success, repression, co-option, or conversion into a party or a non-governmental organisation. Unlike a party, a movement is not designed to be permanent.
• The historical association is with the left. Modern social movements began in the West as a reaction to the exploitation of the working classes, and movement politics has generally carried a redistributive or emancipatory charge — though identity-based and religious mobilisations complicate any simple identification.

A movement’s characteristic power is that it can put a question on the agenda that no institution had any incentive to raise.

The theoretical vocabularies

Movements have been theorised several times over, and each theory tells a different story about what a movement fundamentally is. The sequence matters because each was a correction of the one before, and because the vocabulary a scholar chooses already contains a judgement about whether movements are rational.

Collective behaviour: movements as breakdown

• The earliest tradition, running from Gustave Le Bon through Herbert Blumer to Neil Smelser, treated movements as a species of collective behaviour alongside crowds, panics and crazes.
  • The underlying account is one of strain and breakdown: rapid social change produces structural strain, strain produces generalised beliefs, and generalised beliefs produce mobilisation.
  • Smelser’s value-added model in Theory of Collective Behavior set out those conditions in sequence.
  • Its weakness is that it makes movements irrational by construction, and cannot explain why identical grievances produce mobilisation in one place and silence in another.

Resource mobilisation: the liberal reframing

• In liberal and especially American scholarship the preferred vocabulary is not “social movement” but “resource mobilisation”, and the substitution is not merely terminological.
• John McCarthy and Mayer Zald, in Resource Mobilization and Social Movements: A Partial Theory, argued that grievance is more or less constant in any society, while resources are not.
  • What varies, and therefore what explains mobilisation, is the availability of money, organisation, professional cadres, media access and elite patronage.
  • A movement is best analysed as a social movement organisation competing in a social movement sector for a finite supply of resources — a market model of protest.
  • Mancur Olson‘s logic of collective action supplies the puzzle the theory answers: since a movement’s benefits are collective and its costs individual, rational actors should free-ride, so the question becomes what selective incentives overcome that.
• What the reframing does is decisive, and it cuts two ways.
  • It converts movements from eruptions of grievance into rational organisations pursuing goals with means, which makes them respectable objects of political science.
  • It simultaneously drains the concept of its critical charge: a movement described as an organisation mobilising resources is no longer described as a challenge to a structure of power.
  • Applied to India, its logic predicts what happened after 1990 — that movements dependent on external resources would professionalise, and that professionalisation would change what they demand.

Political process and political opportunity structure

• Charles Tilly, Sidney Tarrow and Doug McAdam shifted attention from a movement’s internal resources to the political environment that makes mobilisation possible.
  • The central concept is the political opportunity structure: movements arise when the polity opens — when elite alignments fracture, when allies appear inside the system, when the state’s willingness to repress declines, or when institutional access widens.
  • Tilly contributed the repertoire of contention, the historically available stock of forms of protest, and the argument that movements make worthiness, unity, numbers and commitment visible to observers.
  • Tarrow added cycles of contention, in which one successful mobilisation lowers the cost of the next and produces a wave.
  • McAdam added cognitive liberation — the collective realisation that a condition is unjust and alterable.
• This is the tradition that explains timing, which resource mobilisation explains poorly and collective behaviour not at all.

Framing

• David Snow and Robert Benford argued that movements do not simply have grievances; they construct them, through frames that make a condition intelligible as an injustice with an author and a remedy.
  • Diagnostic framing names the problem and assigns blame.
  • Prognostic framing proposes a solution.
  • Motivational framing supplies the rationale for acting.
• The Indian application is immediate, and both of the country’s most celebrated movements are framing achievements.
  • Reframing forest felling from a forestry question into a livelihood question was Chipko’s essential work.
  • Reframing household drinking from a private misfortune into a public and fiscal question was the anti-arrack movement’s.

New social movement theory

• Alain Touraine, Alberto Melucci and Claus Offe theorised a distinct family of Western movements emerging from the 1960s whose demands were not about the distribution of output.
  • Touraine located them in the programmed society, where the central conflict concerns control over society’s cultural models rather than over the products of industry.
  • Melucci made collective identity the central category — the movement’s real work is the construction of a shared “we”, and it exists in latency between visible episodes.
  • Offe described them as challenging the boundaries of institutional politics itself.
• Herbert Marcuse is the intellectual origin of both the new left and, through it, of new social movements.
  • His analysis of the one-dimensional society, in which advanced industrial capitalism absorbs opposition by satisfying and administering it, redirected radical hope away from the industrial working class and toward students, minorities and the marginal.
• Jürgen Habermas supplied the most influential structural account, and two of his concepts recur throughout the Indian literature.
  • New social movements are defensive reactions at the seam where the system — money and administrative power — encroaches on the lifeworld of communicatively structured meaning. He called this the colonisation of the lifeworld, and it explains why they defend forms of life rather than demand shares.
  • The public sphere — the domain of reasoned public argument between state and society — matters because movements enlarge and re-democratise it when administration and the media market have narrowed it.
• Ronald Inglehart gave the shift its empirical form. His post-material values thesis held that generations socialised in economic and physical security come to prioritise belonging, self-expression and quality of life over income and order.

Approach	Movements are fundamentally	Central variable	Principal theorists
Collective behaviour	Eruptions of strain, close to crowd behaviour	Grievance and structural strain	Le Bon, Blumer, Smelser
Resource mobilisation	Rational organisations pursuing goals	Resources and organisation	McCarthy and Zald, Olson
Political process	Contentious politics conditioned by the polity	Political opportunity structure	Tilly, Tarrow, McAdam
Framing	Interpretive work that constructs injustice	Meaning and frame alignment	Snow and Benford
New social movements	Defence of identity and lifeworld	Post-material values, cultural conflict	Touraine, Melucci, Offe, Habermas, Inglehart

The Indian vocabulary: micro-movements and the non-party political process

India generated its own terms for this politics, and they are not translations of the Western ones. Micro-movements names the scale — localised, single-issue, geographically bounded formations active across the country since the 1970s. The non-party political process names the location — a domain that is neither the state nor the party system, and which came into being because the party system stopped doing part of its job.

D. L. Sheth

• D. L. Sheth described the micro-movements active in different parts of India from the 1970s as representing the desperate struggle of the economically marginalised and the socially excluded — those whom neither the developmental state nor the party system had reached.
  • His crucial observation is about aggregation: many small, dispersed formations combined into national-level alliances to confront the Indian state, and the issue on which they combined was globalisation.
  • Underlying that alliance is a perception Sheth reports rather than endorses — that the Indian state is increasingly aligning itself with foreign capital, so the citizen’s adversary is no longer merely a domestic government.
  • His conclusion gives the movements a role far larger than their size suggests: micro-movements function as countervailing forces against global political and economic power, the only organised resistance where both state and market have escaped national democratic control.

Rajni Kothari

• Rajni Kothari read the same phenomenon as a symptom rather than a strategy — the visible sign of disillusionment with representational and institutionalised politics.
  • The decline of Parliament is the first element: as legislative business contracted and disruption became routine, the connection between people and their representatives thinned, leaving citizens with a vote but no channel.
  • The decline of political parties is the second and more important. Parties abandoned the movement aspect of politics and reduced themselves to electoral machines, appearing at the grassroots only when an election is called.
  • Trade unions, which might have filled the gap, could not, because in India they became junior partners and bargaining counters of political parties rather than autonomous organisations of labour.
• The consequence is a vacancy, and micro-movements led by the educated middle class moved into it.
  • Kothari’s name for that vacancy is the non-party political process: from the late 1970s, groups outside party politics took up issues parties would not touch and became a parallel channel of representation.
  • He is explicit that the leadership is middle class — a description in his hands, which later becomes a criticism in others’.

“The emergence of a new non-party political process… to open alternative political spaces outside the usual arenas of party and government.” — Rajni Kothari

• Kothari’s later position is the standing internal criticism of the whole field, and it is his and not an opponent’s.
  • He came to worry that the non-party space was being depoliticised — converted into project-based, donor-funded work by professional organisations accountable to funders rather than to constituencies.
  • This is the NGO-isation thesis, and its force is that it identifies a decline that looks like success: the movement acquires an office, a budget and a reporting cycle, and stops making claims the funder would find awkward.

Smitu Kothari

• Smitu Kothari located the revival of grassroots movements in globalisation itself, and drew a deliberately two-sided conclusion.
  • Globalisation revived grassroots movements worldwide because of the destructive force of the prevailing development model — displacement, resource extraction, and the conversion of subsistence bases into inputs for distant markets.
  • It simultaneously promoted movements for peace, for human rights and against corruption, by circulating norms, connecting activists across borders, and creating transnational audiences before whom governments could be embarrassed.

Amrita Basu

• Amrita Basu offers the most economical explanation of why grassroots movements grew in India specifically: the capitalist model of development on one side and the availability of democratic space on the other.
  • The first term supplies the grievance — a development path that concentrated its benefits and distributed its costs, dispossessing those least able to absorb the loss.
  • The second supplies the possibility — competitive elections, a free press, an independent judiciary, freedom of association, and a federal structure that gave a movement blocked in one state an opening in another.
• The two-sidedness of the explanation is the point, and it is what makes it superior to single-cause accounts.
  • Grievance alone does not produce movements. Authoritarian states generate at least as much dispossession and far fewer movements, because mobilisation there is met with force before it becomes visible.
  • Openness alone does not produce them either. A society with democratic space and no accumulating grievance produces interest groups and lobbying.
  • Movements arise where there is enough injury to make mobilisation necessary and enough freedom to make it survivable — which describes post-independence India, and explains why India has more movement politics than either its authoritarian neighbours or the affluent democracies.

Ranjita Mohanty

• Ranjita Mohanty gives the most systematic statement of what grassroots movements have contributed to Indian democracy, and her five claims are worth separating.
• They replaced the exclusionary narrative of state-led development with a counter-narrative of inclusion. For four decades development was described in a single official voice, and the displaced appeared in it only as a cost.
• They expanded the non-party political space available for citizen action, widening what can be politically raised without joining or forming a party.
• They continuously democratise the public sphere. The claim is about process: the public sphere was not democratised once, but must be repeatedly reopened as it repeatedly narrows.
• They are sites of the reconstruction of modernity through the discourse of citizenship rights and duties. Movements do not reject modernity; they contest a technocratic, state-led version of it and rebuild it around the citizen.
• They renegotiate the citizen’s relationship with the state, converting the citizen from a claimant on official benevolence into a bearer of rights the state is obliged to honour.

“Movements are a site of the reconstruction of modernity through the discourse of citizenship and rights.” — Ranjita Mohanty

The wider Indian literature

• Gail Omvedt connected the new-social-movement framework to India’s anti-caste and rural realities.
  • Her argument in Reinventing Revolution is that India’s new movements — Dalit, farmers’, women’s, environmental — were not imitations of Western post-material politics but a reinvention of the socialist tradition from below.
• Ghanshyam Shah‘s classification organises the field by participants and issues rather than by ideology.
  • His categories are peasant, tribal, Dalit, backward-caste, women’s, industrial working class, student, middle-class, and human rights and environmental movements.
• M. S. A. Rao classified movements instead by the degree of change they seek.
  • Reformist movements alter particular practices within the existing order — the nineteenth-century social reform movements are the type.
  • Transformative movements alter substantial parts of the social structure, as the anti-caste and backward-class movements have.
  • Revolutionary movements aim at replacing the structure itself, which is the Naxalite movement’s stated intent.
• T. K. Oommen shifted attention from a movement’s objectives to its process of crystallisation.
  • He identifies three phases — charismatic, ideological and organisational: a movement begins around a leader, acquires a doctrine, and finally acquires a structure.
  • His second contribution is the movement-institution relationship: movements neither wholly destroy the systems they contest nor are wholly absorbed by them, and the interesting outcome is the partial institutionalisation in which a movement’s demand becomes an institution’s routine — precisely what the social audit did to the public hearing.

Partha Chatterjee’s political society

• Partha Chatterjee supplies the frame that best explains how the Indian poor actually deal with the state, and it is not the language of civil society.
  • Civil society, in his usage, is the domain of citizens bearing formal rights and dealing with the state through law and constitutional procedure — and in India it is a comparatively small, propertied, educated domain.
  • Political society is where most people live: a domain in which population groups, often technically in violation of the law — squatters, unauthorised settlements, encroachers, unlicensed vendors — negotiate with governmental agencies through claims of need, moral pressure and political brokerage rather than through rights.
• The frame matters because most grassroots movements operate in political society rather than civil society.
  • They win concessions through negotiation, moral leverage and disruption, not through the enforcement of an existing right.
  • It also explains a puzzle: the right-to-information and forest-rights campaigns are notable precisely because they converted political-society bargaining into civil-society entitlement, turning a claim of need into a claim of right.

Amartya Sen on public discourse

• Amartya Sen‘s contribution is the argument that public discussion is the mechanism through which democratic states are compelled to act, and that without it the formal machinery is inert.
  • His famous demonstration is negative: no substantial famine has occurred in a functioning democracy with a free press and an active opposition, because publicity makes non-response politically fatal.

“No famine has ever taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy.” — Amartya Sen

• The generalisation is what matters here. A democratic state responds to what is publicly argued, and movements are the principal machinery by which the grievances of the unorganised become publicly arguable.
  • This is the strongest normative defence of movement politics available: movements are not a nuisance tolerated by democracy but a functional requirement of it, because representative institutions systematically under-register the concerns of those with least organisational capacity.

Old and new social movements

• Modern social movements originated in the West as a reaction against the exploitation of the working classes.
  • Workers’ movements were the earliest, and are now called old social movements retrospectively.
  • New social movements began in the West in the 1960s, concerned with developmental and quality-of-life issues — environment, human rights, civil rights, peace, gender and sexuality.

Dimension	Old social movements	New social movements
Objectives	Bread-and-butter issues — wages, land, employment, prices	Quality of life — ecology, autonomy, dignity, sustainable development
Class composition	Lower classes and workers	Primarily the middle class
Leadership	Advanced sections of the middle class, with important exceptions	Advanced sections of the middle class
Techniques	Direct political action — force, strike, protest, demonstration	Multiple media — art, literature, theatre, street theatre, film
Object of action	Capturing political and economic power	Raising consciousness rather than seizing power
Ideological orientation	Materialist	Post-materialist
Organisation	Hierarchical, often party- or union-linked	Decentralised, network-like, often anti-hierarchical

Reading the table

• Four of the rows carry qualifications the table itself cannot show.
• On objectives, the distinction is between demands for a larger share of output and demands about the terms on which output is produced. A wage demand accepts the productive order and disputes the division; an ecological demand disputes the order itself.
• On leadership, in both old and new movements leadership has come mainly from the advanced sections of the middle classes — but this does not mean the lower classes have never led. If Lenin came from the middle class, Mao came from the peasantry. The qualification blocks the deterministic inference that the oppressed cannot lead.
• On techniques, the difference follows from the difference in target. Old movements confronted an employer or a state with instruments that impose cost — the strike, the blockade. New movements confront a way of seeing, and use theatre, song, street theatre, documentary film and literature.
• On ideological orientation, Inglehart’s post-materialism supplies the mechanism: where physical and economic security can be assumed, the values that come forward are those of expression, participation and belonging.

The Indian qualification: the prismatic society

• F. W. Riggs described developing societies as prismatic — societies in transition in which traditional and modern structures are not sequential but simultaneous and overlapping, so a single institution performs several functionally distinct roles at once.
  • Applied to movements, the consequence is decisive: in India, old and new social movements are not distinct categories but overlapping ones, and any attempt to sort Indian movements neatly into the two boxes will misdescribe them.
• The Indian environmental movement is the definitive case.
  • As an old movement it is about the livelihood of the poor and of tribal populations — access to fuel, fodder, minor forest produce, grazing, water and fish.
  • As a new movement it is simultaneously about ecology, biodiversity and the sustainability of a development model.
• This overlapping quality is the single most important thing to say about Indian social movements.
• It makes them harder to classify, harder to co-opt with a purely economic concession, and harder for the state to answer, because a settlement satisfying the livelihood claim may leave the ecological claim untouched.
• A Dalit movement is simultaneously an old movement about land, wages and bonded labour and a new movement about dignity, recognition and the right to be seen.
• A women’s movement in rural India is simultaneously about wages and water and about autonomy and bodily integrity.

In India the two movement types are not two eras but two faces of the same struggle, and a movement that loses either face loses its constituency.

Why movements arose in India when they did

• Micro-movements become a general feature of Indian politics from the 1970s and multiply through the 1980s and 1990s, and several causes converged to produce that timing.
• The exhaustion of the Nehruvian developmental consensus. The first two decades rested on an agreement that a planning state would deliver growth whose benefits would reach everyone. By the late 1960s that agreement had visibly failed for the poorest.
• The failure of land reform. Tenancy legislation and ceiling laws were extensively enacted and thinly implemented; the agrarian structure survived largely intact, leaving a permanent reservoir of rural grievance with no institutional outlet.
• The JP movement and the Emergency as the hinge. The Nav Nirman agitation in Gujarat and the Bihar movement of 1974, and Jayaprakash Narayan‘s call for Total Revolution, established that mobilisation outside the party system could shake a government.
• The Emergency of 1975–77 then taught the opposite lesson — that constitutional institutions could fail exactly when needed — and the two lessons together are the founding experience of India’s non-party politics.
• The decline of the Congress system. As party competition fragmented after 1967 and again after 1989, parties became electoral machines optimised for winning seats and dormant between contests, vacating the organising and educating functions they had performed.
• Displacement and the “development refugee”. Dams, mines, industrial estates and later special economic zones displaced very large numbers, disproportionately tribal populations, under a colonial land acquisition law resting on eminent domain that compensated title and ignored those without it.
• The growth of an educated middle class and a professional voluntary sector, which supplied leadership, documentation skills, legal capacity and media access — and simultaneously created the conditions for the NGO-isation Kothari later worried about.
• The space opened by an independent judiciary and public interest litigation. From the late 1970s the relaxation of locus standi meant a movement without electoral weight could still obtain a hearing, and the courts became an alternative arena of contention.
• Liberalisation after 1991. The state’s realignment with private and foreign capital converted development conflicts into confrontations in which the state appears on the side of the acquirer — exactly the perception Sheth records.

What grassroots movements have achieved: the movement-to-statute record

The strongest evidence for the effectiveness of Indian movements is not that they blocked projects but that they wrote law. A movement that converts its demand into a statutory obligation changes what the state must do for everyone, not only for its own participants — and India has an unusual number of such conversions.

The Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan and the Right to Information

• The Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS) was founded on 1 May 1990 at Devdungri in Rajasthan by Aruna Roy, Nikhil Dey, Shankar Singh and their colleagues, to press for payment of statutory minimum wages on public works.
  • The wage question could not be settled without the records: establishing whether a worker had been paid required muster rolls and bills — documents that were official, that existed, and that were unavailable to the people named in them.
  • The demand for information therefore emerged from a wage struggle, not from a theory of transparency, which is why the Indian right to information has a labour genealogy rather than a press-freedom one.
• The invented instrument was the jan sunwai or public hearing, held from December 1994.
  • Official expenditure records were read aloud in the village, and the people named in them — as labourers paid, as suppliers, as beneficiaries of houses supposedly built — testified in public to what had actually happened.
  • Its logic is a genuine institutional innovation: it verifies a written record against the living memory of the people it describes, in the presence of the officials who wrote it. Neither an audit nor a court can do that.
  • A forty-day dharna at Beawar from 6 April 1996 converted a district campaign into a state and then a national one, and gave rise to the National Campaign for People’s Right to Information (NCPRI).
• The legislative sequence then followed, over roughly a decade.
• Tamil Nadu enacted the first state law in 1997, and several states followed.
• Rajasthan, where the movement began, legislated in 2000.
• A central Freedom of Information Act 2002 was passed but never brought into force.
• The Right to Information Act 2005 finally created an enforceable right with an independent appellate machinery.
• The RTI Act is the clearest case in Indian history of a village-level movement writing a national statute, and it did so within fifteen years of the movement’s founding.

The right to food

• The right-to-food campaign began with a writ petition filed by the People’s Union for Civil Liberties in April 2001, arising from starvation deaths in Rajasthan at a time when public granaries held large stocks.
  • The juxtaposition framed the issue as one of distribution rather than scarcity, which is what made it justiciable.
  • The Supreme Court issued a long series of interim orders rather than a single judgment, the most consequential directing the universalisation of cooked midday meals in government primary schools.
  • The Court appointed Commissioners to monitor compliance, creating a standing reporting channel between the movement and the judiciary.
• The campaign’s legislative outcome was the National Food Security Act 2013, which converted subsidised foodgrain from a scheme into a legal entitlement for roughly two-thirds of the population and gave statutory form to midday meals and maternity benefits.

The right to work, and what has since happened to it

• The right-to-work campaign, carried by many of the same organisations, produced the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act 2005, later renamed for Mahatma Gandhi — a legally enforceable guarantee of unskilled manual work on demand, with unemployment allowance if work was not provided.
• The movement’s institutional signature is in the audit provision, not only in the guarantee.
  • Section 17 required the gram sabha to conduct social audits of all works executed in the panchayat — the jan sunwai written into a central statute and made compulsory.
  • The Audit of Scheme Rules 2011 created independent Social Audit Units in each state, staffed substantially by village-level resource persons; the composite state of Andhra Pradesh established the first in 2009.
  • This is the most complete example of a movement’s invented instrument becoming a permanent obligation of government. A method devised to read muster rolls aloud in a Rajasthan village became a statutory duty of every gram sabha in India.
• The Viksit Bharat–Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin) Act, 2025, passed on 18–19 December 2025 and assented on 21 December 2025, repeals the 2005 Act and subsumes its programmes and structures.
  • It raises the guarantee to 125 days and funds it on 60:40 Centre–State sharing, 90:10 for the North-East and union territories.
  • It permits states to suspend employment for up to 60 days during sowing and harvesting, and mandates Viksit Gram Panchayat Plans.
  • Social audit and public disclosure at gram panchayat level are retained, so the movement’s instrument survives the repeal of the statute that first carried it.
  • The criticism falls on the guarantee: the shift from a demand-driven entitlement to a normatively allocated programme weakens the legal character of the right and transfers fiscal risk to the states.
• What a movement wrote into law, a later legislature can rewrite — the standing limitation of the movement-to-statute strategy.

The Forest Rights Act and Niyamgiri

• The Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006 is described in its own preamble as correcting a historical injustice — the conversion of inhabited forests into state property, which turned residents into encroachers by operation of law.
• It vests individual title in families cultivating forest land as on 13 December 2005, up to a ceiling of four hectares.
• It recognises use rights over minor forest produce, grazing routes and pastoral areas.
• It recognises community forest resource rights to protect, regenerate and manage a traditional forest area.
• It provides for relief and rehabilitation in cases of illegal eviction or past displacement.
• The Act’s real innovation is procedural, and it is what makes it a movement’s statute. Determination of claims begins with the gram sabha, not the forest bureaucracy: the village assembly initiates the process, receives and verifies claims, and passes resolutions that higher committees review rather than originate.
• Niyamgiri demonstrated what that power could do.
  • In Orissa Mining Corporation v. Ministry of Environment and Forest (18 April 2013), the Supreme Court held that whether bauxite mining in the Niyamgiri hills would affect the religious and cultural rights of the Dongria Kondh was for the gram sabhas to decide.
  • Twelve gram sabhas were convened and all twelve rejected the project — the closest thing India has had to a referendum on a development project.
  • The movement had organised itself as the Niyamgiri Suraksha Samiti, and a committee under N. C. Saxena in 2010 had already found violations of both the Forest Rights Act and the PESA Act — findings the state initially declined to act upon.

Narmada and the law of land acquisition

• The Narmada Bachao Andolan, from 1985 under Medha Patkar, contested the Sardar Sarovar and associated dams on the ground that displacement had been undercounted and rehabilitation was inadequate.
  • Its most striking immediate outcome was international: the Morse Commission of 1992, the first independent review in the World Bank’s history, found the resettlement and environmental assessment gravely deficient, and the Bank withdrew in 1993.
  • The Supreme Court’s judgment in 2000 permitted construction subject to rehabilitation conditions, which the movement regarded as a defeat on the immediate question.
• The durable achievement was to establish resettlement and rehabilitation as a policy question at all. Before Narmada, displacement was an administrative detail of project execution; after it, a subject with its own literature, policies and eventually its own statute.
  • That statute is the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013, which replaced the colonial law of 1894.
  • It introduced social impact assessment, mandatory consent thresholds for private and public-private projects, enhanced compensation, and rehabilitation entitlements extending to families dependent on the land without owning it — the category the old law had rendered invisible.

Anti-corruption and the Lokpal

• The mobilisation of 2011 around India Against Corruption and Anna Hazare‘s fasts, and the demand for a Jan Lokpal Bill, produced the largest urban middle-class agitation in decades and forced a legislative response.
  • The outcome was the Lokpal and Lokayuktas Act 2013, creating a national anti-corruption ombudsman and requiring states to establish Lokayuktas.
  • This case also illustrates the conversion problem in its clearest form. A wing of the movement founded the Aam Aadmi Party in 2012; the movement as a movement effectively ended, and the institution it had demanded took years to be constituted and has had limited effect.

Movement	Instrument invented or demand pressed	Statutory outcome
MKSS, Rajasthan, from 1990	Jan sunwai; access to muster rolls and bills	Right to Information Act 2005
Right to food campaign, from 2001	PUCL petition; Supreme Court interim orders	National Food Security Act 2013
Right to work campaign	Employment guarantee; gram sabha social audit	MGNREGA 2005, now the 2025 Act
Forest rights campaign	Gram sabha determination of forest claims	Forest Rights Act 2006; Niyamgiri 2013
Narmada Bachao Andolan, from 1985	Rehabilitation before displacement	Land Acquisition and Rehabilitation Act 2013
Anti-corruption mobilisation, 2011	Independent ombudsman	Lokpal and Lokayuktas Act 2013

The movement families as evidence

The three families named in the standard classification are best used here as evidence of the general argument rather than as separate chronicles. Each shows something the others do not.

Environmental movements: the environmentalism of the poor

• Ramachandra Guha and Juan Martinez-Alier developed the concept of the environmentalism of the poor, distinguishing the environmentalism of affluent societies — concerned with amenity, wilderness and post-material value — from that of poor societies, where environmental conflict is a conflict over the material basis of livelihood.
• Guha’s shorthand contrast is between the “full stomach” environmentalism of the rich world and the “empty stomach” environmentalism of the poor.
• The protagonists are peasants, forest dwellers, fishers and Adivasis rather than middle-class conservationists.
• The object is access to and control over forest, water, pasture and coastline, and the idiom is customary right as much as ecology.
• The antagonist is typically the state or a state-backed project, which is why these conflicts become political rather than merely regulatory.
• Sunita Narain draws the same contrast in the vocabulary of conservation itself, and the pair of terms is precise.
  • Western environmental management rests on protectionist conservationism — nature protected by being fenced off from human use.
  • The Indian movement was built on utilitarian conservationism — protection through sustainable use, because very large populations draw firewood, fodder, water, food, medicine and building material directly from the resource.
  • Her conclusion is that Indian environmentalism is pro-poor and human-centred where the Western variety is nature-centred, and that the Reni women of 1974 were asserting a right to use the forest, not an objection to felling in principle.
• Madhav Gadgil and Guha’s accompanying frame is the distinction between omnivores and ecosystem people.
  • Omnivores draw resources from the whole country and beyond; ecosystem people depend on the resources of their immediate surroundings.
  • Ecological refugees are what the asymmetry produces — people displaced from a degraded or appropriated environment into urban destitution.
• The distinction refutes the claim that environmentalism is a luxury of the rich, and changes the policy question from conservation against development into a question about whose resources are being converted into whose growth.

The environmental cases

• Chipko (1973), at Mandal village in Chamoli, is the reference case: villagers, women prominently, embraced trees to prevent felling by contractors from outside the region.
  • Chandi Prasad Bhatt and Sunderlal Bahuguna represented two strands — one emphasising local forest use for village industry, the other conservation — the first a livelihood claim and the second an ecological one.
  • The outcome was a fifteen-year ban on green felling above 1,000 metres in the Uttarakhand Himalaya, imposed in 1980.
  • Chipko was not fundamentally a conservation movement: it was an assertion by local people of their right to the forest against commercial extraction, which is why it belongs to the environmentalism of the poor.
• Appiko (1983) in Uttara Kannada, Karnataka, was the southern counterpart, taking the same technique of embracing trees into a different forest economy.
• Silent Valley (1978–83) in Kerala is the one major Indian case closer to classical conservation.
  • A scientific and literary campaign, in which the Kerala Sasthra Sahithya Parishad was central, opposed a hydroelectric project in an undisturbed rainforest.
  • The project was abandoned and the area declared a national park in 1984.
• The Chilika fishers’ movement against commercial prawn culture in Odisha, and the anti-POSCO struggle in Jagatsinghpur against a large steel project, are the cases where livelihood and ecology are indistinguishable, and both turned on who owns a commons.

What the movements did to environmental governance

• The institutional trace of these movements is substantial, and the causal links are specific.
• The Water Act 1974, Air Act 1981 and Environment (Protection) Act 1986 followed Stockholm and, in the last case, Bhopal.
• The Forest Conservation Act 1980 required central clearance for any diversion of forest land.
• Environmental impact assessment was notified in 1994 and revised in 2006, carrying the public hearing requirements movements had demanded.
• The Forest Rights Act 2006, the National Green Tribunal Act 2010 and the consent and social impact provisions of the 2013 land acquisition Act complete the sequence.
• The counter-current runs in the opposite direction, and belongs in any assessment.
• Clearance procedure has been relaxed repeatedly, and the draft EIA notification of 2020 would have gone considerably further.
• The Forest (Conservation) Amendment Act 2023 renamed the parent Act the Van (Sanrakshan Evam Samvardhan) Adhiniyam and exempted several categories of land from clearance requirements.
• The Van (Sanrakshan Evam Samvardhan) Amendment Rules 2025 made protected-forest notification of compensatory afforestation land optional and allowed states to grant initial working permission for linear projects before central approval.

Civil liberties and human rights

• The civil liberties movement demonstrates a different proposition: that a movement can supply a constitutional guarantee the constitutional machinery failed to supply on its own.
• The Emergency of 1975–77 is the formative experience.
  • Preventive detention under MISA, press censorship, and the Supreme Court’s capitulation in ADM Jabalpur (1976) — holding that even the right to life could not be enforced during the suspension of Article 21 — demonstrated that formal guarantees could fail at the exact moment they were needed.
• The People’s Union for Civil Liberties was formed under the inspiration of Jayaprakash Narayan in 1976; the People’s Union for Democratic Rights separated in 1977.
  • The two carry different orientations — PUCL working largely through litigation and the courts, PUDR emphasising social and economic rights and grassroots mobilisation among tribal and peasant communities.
• The movement’s characteristic work is documentation: custodial deaths, encounter killings, fact-finding after communal violence, and the operation of TADA, POTA, UAPA and the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act.
  • Its jurisprudential yield is substantial and specific: Hussainara Khatoon (1979) on undertrials and speedy trial, Sunil Batra on prisoners’ rights, D. K. Basu (1997) on arrest guidelines, PUCL (1997) on telephone tapping and privacy, and Nandini Sundar (2011) on state-supported vigilantism in Chhattisgarh.

The women’s movement

• The Indian women’s movement runs through three long phases before it becomes autonomous.
  • Nineteenth-century social reform, led largely by men and framed as reform of the community rather than as rights of the woman.
  • A nationalist phase with bodies such as the Women’s Indian Association (1917) and the All India Women’s Conference (1927).
  • A long quiet period after independence, in which constitutional equality was assumed to suffice.
• The absence of a suffrage struggle is an organisational fact, not only a historical one. The vote was conceded with independence, so the movement never had to build the mass organisation that a suffrage campaign builds elsewhere.
• The Towards Equality report of the Committee on the Status of Women in India (1974) is the turning point.
  • It documented that large numbers of women had been untouched by constitutional guarantees, and revealed the adverse sex ratio and the phenomenon of missing women.
• The autonomous movement of the late 1970s was triggered by the Supreme Court’s judgment in Tuka Ram v. State of Maharashtra (1979), the Mathura custodial rape case, and by the open letter four law teachers wrote in response.
  • Its outcome was the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act 1983, creating the offence of custodial rape and shifting the burden of proof on consent in such cases.

The anti-arrack movement as the exemplary case

• The anti-arrack movement of 1991–92 is the clearest single example of a grassroots movement in the strict sense, and its origin is inseparable from the case.
  • It began at Dubagunta village in Nellore district of Andhra Pradesh, out of an adult literacy programme: a lesson in the primer described a woman whose household was destroyed by her husband’s drinking, and the women in the class recognised their own circumstances.
  • They organised to stop arrack sales, picketed auctions and liquor shops, and the movement spread across the district and then across the state.
• Its significance is fourfold, and each element is separately instructive.
• It was led by poor rural women, not by urban organisations acting on their behalf, which is what makes it grassroots in the strict sense.
• It connected an apparently private grievance — household violence and the diversion of male wages — to a public and fiscal question, since state excise revenue depended on arrack sales.
• It succeeded: Andhra Pradesh prohibited arrack in 1993 and imposed total prohibition in 1995.
• It demonstrated the political consequences of literacy programmes, which is why the case recurs in the adult-education literature as well as the movement literature.
• The rollback is part of the lesson, not an appendix to it. Prohibition was reversed under fiscal pressure within a few years, showing that a movement can win a policy without acquiring the durable institutional weight needed to hold it — precisely the difference between the anti-arrack victory and the RTI victory.

Dalit, anti-caste and farmers’ movements

• Dalit and anti-caste movements are the family in which the old-new distinction collapses most completely.
• The demand is simultaneously material — land, wages, freedom from bonded labour, access to water sources — and recognitional: dignity, the right to enter, the right not to be seen as polluting.
• Ambedkar‘s movement supplied the founding argument that political democracy without social democracy is unsustainable; the Dalit Panthers, formed in Bombay in 1972, supplied the militant idiom and a literary movement alongside it; the Bahujan Samaj Party demonstrated conversion into an electoral formation.
• The recurring grievance today is implementation rather than legislation — the operation of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act 1989, whose dilution by judicial direction in March 2018 produced nationwide mobilisation and a parliamentary amendment restoring the original provisions within months.
• That sequence is itself evidence of movement capacity: a court decision was reversed by legislation because a mobilisation made the political cost of inaction unbearable.
• Farmers’ movements show the same overlap from the other direction.
• The movements of the 1980s — Shetkari Sanghatana under Sharad Joshi, the Bharatiya Kisan Union under Mahendra Singh Tikait — framed the conflict as Bharat against India, and demanded remunerative prices rather than land redistribution.
• The mobilisation of 2020–21 is the strongest modern demonstration that sustained non-party mobilisation can still reverse national legislation. A coalition organised as the Samyukt Kisan Morcha sustained encampments at Delhi’s borders for over a year, and the three farm laws were repealed in December 2021.
• The sequel qualifies the lesson. The protest resumed from 13 February 2024 at the Shambhu and Khanauri borders, demanding a legal guarantee for minimum support prices and implementation of the Swaminathan Committee recommendations; it met heavy containment, produced a partial procurement offer, and won no statutory guarantee.
• Repeal is easier than enactment, because stopping a law requires only that a government find the cost too high, while writing one requires that it accept a permanent obligation.

Movements and institutional grassroots democracy

This is where the argument returns to the rest of the unit, because India built its institutions of local democracy and its movement politics on entirely different principles, and the relationship between them explains much of where the institutions work.

The panchayat experiment was supply-driven

• The Seventy-third and Seventy-fourth Amendments were handed down, not demanded from below — the product of a national political decision, a lineage of expert committees, and an executive judgment about how development should be administered.
  • There has never been a sustained popular movement in India demanding good governance, and institutions created by supply arrive with a constituency that has not asked for them and does not yet know what to do with them.
  • The contrast with the movement-written statutes is exact. The Right to Information Act arrived with a national network of people who had spent fifteen years learning to use exactly the instrument it created; the gram sabha arrived as a constitutional body with no comparable constituency of practice.
• This is why the devolution record is what it is.
• The national devolution score rose only from 39.9% in 2013-14 to 43.9% in 2021-22, across six dimensions of framework, functions, finances, functionaries, capacity building and accountability.
• Panchayats raise about 1% of their revenue from their own taxes, the rest arriving as central and state grants.
• The Panchayat Advancement Index, launched on 24 April 2025, found no panchayat in the country reaching the “Achiever” category, with 61.2% still classified “Aspirant”.
• Institutions can be created by amendment; the capacity and the demand to use them cannot. That is the division of labour between amendments and movements.

Where both existed together, the institutions worked

• Kerala is the standing demonstration that decentralisation works where a movement preceded it.
  • The People’s Plan Campaign launched in 1996 devolved a large share of the state plan to local governments, but its distinctive feature was that it was executed as a campaign — mass training of resource persons, development seminars, and an existing literacy and library movement, the Kerala Sasthra Sahithya Parishad among others, to carry it.
  • Kudumbashree, from 1998, added a mass organisation of women’s neighbourhood groups that linked the panchayat to the household and gave the gram sabha a constituency that actually attended it.
  • The Kerala lesson is that decentralisation succeeded where a movement had already produced the capacity the institution assumed. The same statutory design elsewhere produced meetings without quorum.
• The PESA and forest rights areas show the same pattern in a different register.
  • PESA 1996 extended panchayat provisions to Fifth Schedule areas while subordinating them to customary law and customary dispute resolution, made the hamlet the unit of the gram sabha, and vested it with competence over community resources, minor forest produce, approval of plans and selection of beneficiaries.
  • Those provisions had teeth only where tribal movements had already built the organisation to use them — which is why the same law produces a functioning gram sabha in one district and a nominal one in the next.

The reverse traffic: the gram sabha as arena

• The traffic does not run only from movement to institution. The constitutional gram sabha has become the arena in which movements now fight, which is a genuine change in the character of Indian movement politics.
  • Niyamgiri is the paradigm: the victory took the form of twelve gram sabha resolutions, not a blockade, because the Forest Rights Act had converted the movement’s demand into a statutory decision-point.
  • The same is true of social audit under the employment guarantee, where the gram sabha performs an accountability function a movement invented, and of community forest resource claims, where the gram sabha is the claimant.
• Movement and institution now constitute each other. The institution supplies a legally recognised forum in which a claim must be answered; the movement supplies the organisation, information and turnout without which the forum is empty.

The tensions

• Three tensions run in the opposite direction, and all three weaken the elected tier rather than strengthening it.
• Co-option. A movement that captures a panchayat acquires resources and legitimacy and loses distance; it becomes responsible for administering a scheme it once criticised.
• NGO-isation substitutes projects for politics. An organisation surviving on grants adopts the funder’s cycle, indicators and appetite for controversy — Kothari’s warning in operational form.
• Direct funding bypasses the elected tier. Where donors, corporate social responsibility funds or central schemes route money to organisations working in a village, they build a parallel delivery channel the elected panchayat neither controls nor answers for.

The amendments built the arena and the movements built the players; where only one of the two exists, nothing much happens in it.

The critique, stated fairly

The structural weaknesses

• Single-issue and localised, movements fragment rather than aggregate. A movement over one dam, one mine or one forest cannot by itself produce a national alternative, and their multiplication can leave a society with much contestation and no coherent programme.
  • Sheth’s national alliances are the partial answer, and they have been episodic.
• A politics of protest without a programme of governance. Movements are better at stopping than at building; they can establish that a project is unjust without establishing what should be done instead.
• Dependence on charismatic leaders. Oommen’s charismatic phase is where many movements remain.
  • The dependence produces succession crises, leaves the movement vulnerable to the leader’s co-option or discrediting, and means repression aimed at a handful of individuals can immobilise a large organisation.
• Middle-class leadership speaking for constituencies it does not belong to, which is the criticism Kothari’s own description invites.
  • It raises the question of whose framing prevails when the affected are not the articulate, and of what happens when the leadership’s professional interests diverge from the constituency’s.

NGO-isation, foreign funding and the regulatory answer

• The state’s answer to NGO-isation has been regulatory rather than political, and it has tightened steadily.
• The Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act 2010 replaced the 1976 law.
• The 2020 amendment capped administrative expenditure at 20%, prohibited the sub-granting of foreign contributions to other organisations, required a designated account at a single specified bank branch, and mandated Aadhaar identification of office bearers.
• More than twenty thousand registrations have been cancelled or allowed to lapse since 2011.
• The tightening has continued into the current legislative cycle.
• The Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Amendment Rules 2026 require activity- and area-specific registration with separate fees, disclosure of ultimate donors, websites and social media accounts, and minimum utilisation and expenditure thresholds for renewal.
• They also provide that associations with foreign nationals as key functionaries will ordinarily not be registered.
• The Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Amendment Bill, 2026, introduced in the Lok Sabha on 25 March 2026 and referred to a Joint Parliamentary Committee, would vest the assets of organisations losing certification in a Designated Authority empowered to transfer or sell them, with proceeds to the Consolidated Fund.
• Both readings of this are available and both hold.
  • The state’s case is that foreign funding of domestic political advocacy is a legitimate object of regulation in any country, and that the sector was genuinely under-regulated.
  • The critics’ case is that the effect, whatever the intention, falls hardest on organisations that document state conduct, and that the instrument is administrative rather than judicial, so the cost is imposed before any finding of wrongdoing.

The shrinking space for dissent, and the obstruction charge

• The shrinking space for dissent is the sharper charge, and it operates through cost rather than prohibition.
• The use of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act and sedition provisions against activists, and the long pre-trial detention a stringent bail standard produces.
• The “urban naxal” framing, which attaches a security label to advocacy and raises the reputational cost of participation for the educated professionals on whom movements depend.
• The Bhima Koregaon prosecutions, in which activists spent years in custody before obtaining bail, are the standing illustration.
• The obstruction-of-development charge deserves an answer rather than dismissal.
  • Infrastructure requires land, forests and minerals; a veto exercised by every affected locality would make investment impossible; and delay imposes real costs on people not represented in the dispute.
  • The answer is that the alternative to negotiated consent is not speed but litigation and conflict, and that projects settled with the affected population end faster than those imposed on it.

Deepening democracy or hollowing it out

• The deepest question is whether movements deepen democracy or hollow it out, and the honest position is that the evidence supports both.
• The deepening case: movements represent constituencies the party system structurally under-represents, raise questions no party has an incentive to raise, have produced enforceable rights for people who could never have won a legislature, and keep the public sphere open in the sense both Habermas and Sen require.
• The hollowing case: energy spent in non-party space is energy not spent making parties and legislatures work; movements are unelected, unaccountable and self-selected in a way elected bodies are not; and a movement’s success in the courts is won at the expense of legislative politics.
• The reconciliation, such as it is, lies in sequencing. Movements have been most valuable where they converted demands into institutional obligations and then left the institution to carry them — as with the RTI and the social audit — and least valuable where they substituted themselves permanently for representation.

Contemporary relevance

Networked mobilisation and its limits

• Digital and networked mobilisation has changed the cost structure of movement politics: coordination that once required cadres, printing and travel now requires a messaging group, and a mobilisation can reach national scale within days.
  • The corresponding problem is shallow commitment. Participation costs that once selected for durable commitment — travel, risk, time — have fallen, and mobilisations cheap to join are cheap to leave.
  • Networked movements accordingly show rapid scale followed by rapid dissipation, and struggle to convert visibility into the organisation needed to negotiate.

The live conflicts

• Land, water and climate are the axes on which the next generation of movement conflict is forming.
  • Acquisition for industrial corridors and for renewable-energy installations.
  • Competition between agricultural, urban and industrial water use.
  • The displacement effects of both climate impacts and climate mitigation projects.
• The farmers’ movement remains the proof of concept that mass mobilisation can still reverse national legislation, and the 2024–25 sequel the proof of its limit.
• Tribal rights and forest governance are the sharpest current conflict.
• The 2023 forest amendment and the 2025 rules narrowed the categories of land requiring clearance and accelerated approvals.
• Recognition of community forest resource rights remains far behind that of individual titles.
• Adivasi mobilisation through 2025 has targeted forest department restrictions on rights already recognised — a movement now fights to enforce a statute an earlier movement wrote.
• Ladakh is the most instructive current case for this unit, because it is a movement about local self-government itself.
  • The Leh Apex Body and the Kargil Democratic Alliance demand statehood, inclusion in the Sixth Schedule, a public service commission and separate parliamentary seats — institutions of self-rule, not the blocking of a project.
  • Sustained peaceful agitation gave way to violence in Leh on 24 September 2025, in which four people died.
  • Sonam Wangchuk was detained under the National Security Act two days later and released when the detention was revoked in March 2026, with the constitutional demands still unresolved.

Is the non-party space opening or closing

• The standing question is whether the non-party political space is expanding or being closed, and the evidence points both ways.
  • The register of protest through 2025 was wide and continuous — trade unions, farmers, anganwadi and ASHA workers, students, forest communities, gig workers, urban residents on air quality.
  • The regulatory and security environment has simultaneously narrowed the room for the organisations that sustain such activity between episodes.
• That combination is itself the finding. India retains a large capacity for episodic mobilisation and a diminishing capacity for the durable organisation that turns mobilisation into law — and the constraint on organisation is a constraint on exactly the thing that made these movements matter.

Grassroots movements are best judged not by whether they won their immediate demand but by whether they changed what the state is obliged to do — and by that measure the record is substantial. The right to know, the right to food, the right to work and the right to a forest were written by people with no institutional standing whatever. What that record cannot settle is whether a democracy improved from outside its own institutions is being deepened or confessed inadequate.