Examine the transiting social movements from physical movements to virtual movements in 21st century India. (2026, 10 Marks)
A social movement is sustained collective mobilisation, through formal or informal organisation and guided by an ideology, oriented to promoting or resisting change — M. S. A. Rao’s formulation in Social Movements and Social Transformation (1979). The 21st century has not replaced that form; it has rewritten its repertoire. Manuel Castells names the result networked social movements.
The virtual turn and what drives it
- Charles Tilly’s “repertoires of contention” holds that the toolkit of protest shifts with communication technology. Print gave the petition and the public meeting; the smartphone gives the hashtag, the live stream and the encrypted group.
- Resource mobilisation theory (John McCarthy and Mayer Zald, 1977) explains the appeal: platforms cut the cost of recruiting, framing and coordinating to near zero, so grievance converts into mobilisation without an organisational apparatus.
- The infrastructure exists. TRAI counted 1,028.61 million internet subscribers in India at the end of December 2025, overwhelmingly wireless.
- The Indian sequence is visible: the India Against Corruption mobilisation (2011), amplified by continuous television; the December 2012 Delhi protests; #JusticeForRohith (2016); the Me Too wave from October 2018, which ran almost wholly on posted testimony; anti-CAA and Shaheen Bagh (2019–20); and the farmers’ movement (2020–21), with its Twitter campaigns, WhatsApp chains, diaspora amplification and its own protest newspaper.
Why “transition” overstates the case
- Castells insists networked movements occupy both the “space of flows” and the “space of places”. The farm laws were repealed in November 2021 after a year-long physical occupation of Delhi’s borders, not after a viral hashtag.
- Zeynep Tufekci (Twitter and Tear Gas, 2017) argues such movements gain scale while losing the organisational capacity that slow offline work once built, leaving them vulnerable to a “tactical freeze” once the state responds.
- Evgeny Morozov’s “slacktivism” and Jodi Dean’s communicative capitalism warn that the circulation of messages can substitute for political effect.
Structural limits in India
- NFHS-5 (2019–21) found 33.3% of women against 57.1% of men had ever used the internet, and only 24.6% of rural women. TRAI’s rural internet penetration stood at 47.63 per 100 people against 116.09 in urban India.
- The virtual arena is also the most governable one: India recorded among the world’s highest counts of internet shutdowns in 2025, while the IT Rules, 2021 and the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 widen state leverage over intermediaries.
Conclusion
The movement form is hybridising, not migrating. The digital layer supplies speed, framing and reach; durable outcomes still demand bodies, organisation and time. The “transition” is best read as an expanded repertoire in which online mobilisation triggers, and offline endurance decides.