What is new in ‘new social movements’? Elaborate your answer with special reference to India.

What is new in ‘new social movements’? Elaborate your answer with special reference to India. (2017)

The label new social movements (NSM) was coined in Western Europe in the 1970s and 1980s for a wave of feminist, ecological, peace and sexual-minority mobilisations that did not fit the Marxist template of class struggle. Their novelty lies in who mobilises, for what, against whom and how. In India the form travels well; the content does not.

Five things that are new

  1. A new base. Claus Offe (1985) located NSMs in the educated new middle class rather than in a class defined by its place in production. Ronald Inglehart (The Silent Revolution, 1977) supplied the cause: generations raised in security shift to post-material values of self-expression.
  2. New goals. The demand is identity, autonomy, dignity and quality of life rather than a larger share of income. In Nancy Fraser’s terms, the axis moves from redistribution to recognition.
  3. A new adversary. Alain Touraine argued that conflict in post-industrial society is over historicity, the society’s capacity to define its own future, so movements confront technocracy rather than capital. Jürgen Habermas (The Theory of Communicative Action, 1981) described them as defending the lifeworld against colonisation by money and administrative power.
  4. New organisation. Decentralised and networked, in deliberate contrast to the party and the union.
  5. New means. Alberto Melucci (Nomads of the Present, 1989) held that a movement’s central work is constructing collective identity and challenging the codes by which reality is named, so much of its action is symbolic and latent between visible protests.

With special reference to India

Rajni Kothari (“Party and State in Our Times”, 1984) named the Indian version the non-party political process: after the Emergency, grassroots groups began to act outside parties. What is genuinely new here is:

  • Autonomy from party. The autonomous women’s movement after the Towards Equality report (1974) refused affiliation to any party.
  • Dignity as a demand in itself. The Dalit Panthers (1972) fought humiliation, not only poverty.
  • New issues and claimants. Displacement (Narmada Bachao Andolan), transparency (the campaign behind the Right to Information Act, 2005), sexual minorities (Navtej Singh Johar, 2018) and persons with disabilities (Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016).
  • New workforces outside the classic union. Platform-worker mobilisation produced the Karnataka Platform Based Gig Workers (Social Security and Welfare) Act, 2025, whose one per cent welfare fee on every payout was notified in February 2026.

What is not new

  • Gail Omvedt (Reinventing Revolution, 1993) and Ghanshyam Shah insist that India’s NSMs are about land, water, forest, wage and quota. The Narmada Bachao Andolan is displacement, livelihood and Adivasi identity at once, so the material/post-material line collapses.
  • Old movements were never purely economic; the labour movement built a working-class culture.
  • Class mobilisation persists: the general strike of 12 February 2026 covered over 600 districts.
  • Indian movements harden into parties or professional NGOs, confirming Robert Michels’s iron law and T. K. Oommen’s account of charisma routinising.

Conclusion

Newness is a matter of degree and of place. What is genuinely new is the decoupling of protest from class and party and the arrival of recognition as an end in itself; what is not new is scarcity. In India the NSM framework is best used as a description of form, with political economy supplying the explanation.