Examine how social movements come to an end. Illustrate with examples. (2020)
Movements are episodic, not permanent. Armand L. Mauss (Social Problems as Social Movements, 1975) gave them a natural history running from incipiency through institutionalisation to fragmentation and demise, and Herbert Blumer and Charles Tilly likewise place a decline stage after bureaucratisation. Decline, however, is not a synonym for failure: a movement can die of success as easily as of defeat. Six pathways recur.
1. Success and goal attainment
When the demand is specific and winnable, victory removes the reason to mobilise. The anti-arrack movement, begun by women of Dubagunta in Nellore district in 1992 out of adult-literacy classes, stalled liquor auctions until Andhra Pradesh banned arrack in 1993 and imposed total prohibition in 1995; the mobilisation then dissolved, and when prohibition was rolled back in 1997 there was no organisation left to resist. Mauss’s paradox holds: success drains urgency and the periphery withdraws believing “things have improved”.
2. Institutionalisation — the movement becomes an organisation
The Assam Movement (1979–85) ended in the Assam Accord of August 1985, and its student leadership converted into the Asom Gana Parishad, which took office within months. Robert Michels‘s iron law of oligarchy (Political Parties, 1911) and Max Weber‘s routinisation of charisma explain the shift: agitators are replaced by office-holders. The grievance survives but travels through the state — in 2024 the Assam government accepted 57 of the 67 recommendations of the Justice Biplab Sarma committee on Clause 6 of the Accord.
3. Co-optation
Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward (Poor People’s Movements, 1977) argue that formal organisation itself blunts disruptive power, as leaders are absorbed into committees, boards and funding relationships. Vinoba Bhave‘s Bhoodan movement, which mobilised moral pressure for land gifts from 1951, was progressively converted into a state-administered land-donation programme and lost its momentum well before the land it collected was distributed.
4. Repression
Naxalbari (1967) was crushed within five years, its leadership dead or imprisoned. Repression remains a live pathway: after the Leh violence of 24 September 2025, in which four protesters died, Sonam Wangchuk, the public face of Ladakh’s statehood and Sixth Schedule demand, was detained under the National Security Act and released only on 14 March 2026. Mauss’s pattern of selective repression combined with partial concession is visible here.
5. Factionalism
The Dalit Panthers, founded in 1972 by Namdeo Dhasal, J. V. Pawar and Raja Dhale, split in 1974 over a Marxist versus Ambedkarite-Buddhist line, fragmented further, and were formally dissolved in 1988 as leaders entered party politics.
6. Exhaustion and encapsulation
Mancur Olson‘s free-rider problem erodes participation once costs outrun visible gains. Irom Sharmila ended her sixteen-year fast against the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act on 9 August 2016 and polled 90 votes in the 2017 Manipur election — the cause survived, its vehicle did not.
Conclusion
Movements seldom simply stop; they are transformed — into law, party, bureaucracy, sect or memory. T. K. Oommen (Protest and Change, 1990) is right that endings are phases in a continuing process: Alberto Melucci‘s latent networks preserve the identity, so that what looks like death is often dormancy awaiting the next opportunity.