Social Movements

Movements are the part of Indian democracy that operates between elections. Their measure is not whether they won their immediate demand but whether they changed what the state is obliged to do, and by that measure several of them have legislated.

This is chapter 32 of the PSIR Optional Notes, from the part on Indian Government and Politics in the Paper I syllabus. The complete book is a free download.

Framing the field

Old and new

Old movements were organised around class and made redistributive demands on the state: the peasant and workers’ movements of Chapter 19 are the type. New social movements, theorised by Touraine, Melucci and Offe and applied to India by Rajni Kothari, D.L. Sheth and Gail Omvedt, differ in four ways: their base is identity or issue rather than class; their organisation is decentralised and often anti-hierarchical; their demands concern autonomy, dignity, recognition and control over resources rather than a larger share of output; and they are frequently sceptical of the developmental state itself.

Kothari’s non-party political process is the standard Indian formulation: from the late 1970s, groups outside party politics took up issues parties would not, and became a parallel channel of representation. His own later worry, that this space could be depoliticised into project-based NGO work dependent on funding, is the standing internal criticism.

Civil liberties and human rights

PUCL, founded by Jayaprakash Narayan in 1976 as the People’s Union for Civil Liberties and Democratic Rights, and PUDR, which separated in 1977, are the movement’s core. The Emergency is the formative experience: preventive detention under MISA, press censorship, and the Supreme Court’s capitulation in ADM Jabalpur (1976) demonstrated that constitutional guarantees could fail exactly when needed.

The movement’s characteristic work: documentation of custodial deaths and encounter killings; fact finding after communal violence; litigation on preventive detention and on the operation of TADA, POTA, UAPA and the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act; and campaigns on the death penalty. Its jurisprudential yield is substantial, and the cases are worth naming: 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 movement’s own difficulties: dependence on courts whose enforcement is weak; the charge of selectivity, which is made against it from several directions; the shrinking of the space for foreign-funded organisations under FCRA amendments; and the persistent gap between judicial guidelines and police practice.

The women’s movement

Phases

• Social reform, nineteenth century. Led largely by men, Rammohun Roy, Vidyasagar, Phule, and directed at sati, widow remarriage, child marriage and women’s education. Its framing was reform of the community rather than rights of the woman.
• Nationalist phase. Women’s organisations, the Women’s Indian Association (1917), the National Council of Women in India (1925) and the All India Women’s Conference (1927), and mass participation in the civil disobedience movement. The demand for the vote was largely conceded with independence, which meant the movement did not need a suffrage struggle and did not build the organisation such a struggle produces.
• Autonomous movement, late 1970s onward. Triggered by the Supreme Court’s judgment in Tuka Ram v. State of Maharashtra (1979), the Mathura custodial rape case, in which four law teachers wrote an open letter that became the movement’s founding document. The campaign produced the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act 1983, which created the offence of custodial rape, shifted the burden of proof on consent in such cases, and provided for in-camera trial.
• After 1990. Diversification: Dalit feminist critique from Chapter 9, campaigns on dowry and domestic violence producing the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act 2005, the Vishaka guidelines (1997) and the sexual harassment Act of 2013, and the post-2012 mobilisation producing the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act 2013 on the Justice Verma Committee’s recommendations.

The anti-arrack movement

The 2024 paper asked about women’s role in the anti-arrack movement, which is a specific and answerable case.

It began in Dubagunta village in Nellore district of Andhra Pradesh in 1991–92. Its origin was a literacy programme: a lesson in the adult literacy primer described a woman whose household was destroyed by her husband’s drinking, and the women in the class recognised their own situation. They organised to stop arrack sales, picketed auctions and shops, and the movement spread across the district and then the state.

Its significance is fourfold. It was led by poor rural women, not by urban organisations, which is unusual. It connected an apparently private grievance, household violence and the diversion of wages, to a public and fiscal question, since state excise revenue depended on arrack sales. It succeeded: Andhra Pradesh prohibited arrack in 1993 and briefly imposed total prohibition in 1995. And it demonstrated the political consequences of literacy programmes, which is why it recurs in the adult-education literature as well as the movement literature. Prohibition was later rolled back under fiscal pressure, which is itself part of the lesson.

Environmental movements

Environmentalism of the poor

The concept, developed by Ramachandra Guha and Juan Martinez-Alier, distinguishes the environmentalism of affluent societies, concerned with amenity, wilderness and post-material values, from that of poor societies, where environmental conflict is a conflict over the material basis of livelihood. The 2023 question asked for exactly this term.

Its features: the protagonists are peasants, forest dwellers, fishers and Adivasis, not middle-class conservationists; the object is access to and control over forests, water, pasture and coastline; the language is often of customary right rather than of ecology; and the opponent is typically the state or a state-backed project. Guha and Madhav Gadgil’s omnivores and ecosystem people distinction is the accompanying analytical frame: those who draw resources from the whole country against those who depend on their immediate environment.

The cases

• Chipko (1973, Mandal village in Chamoli). Villagers, women prominently, embraced trees to prevent felling by contractors. Leadership from Chandi Prasad Bhatt and Sunderlal Bahuguna represented two strands, one emphasising local forest use for village industry, the other conservation. Outcome: a fifteen-year ban on green felling above 1000 metres in the Uttarakhand Himalaya in 1980.
• Silent Valley (1978–83, Kerala). A scientific and literary campaign, led by the Kerala Sasthra Sahithya Parishad, against a hydroelectric project in an undisturbed rainforest. Outcome: the project was abandoned and the area declared a national park in 1984. This is the one major case closer to classical conservation than to livelihood.
• Narmada Bachao Andolan (from 1985, Medha Patkar). Against the Sardar Sarovar and associated dams, on displacement and inadequate rehabilitation. Outcomes: the first World Bank independent review, the Morse Commission (1992), and Bank withdrawal in 1993; the Supreme Court’s judgment in 2000 permitting construction with rehabilitation conditions; and, most durably, the establishment of resettlement and rehabilitation as a policy question, leading eventually to the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act 2013.
• Appiko (1983, Karnataka), the southern counterpart of Chipko; the Chilika fishers’ movement against commercial prawn culture; anti-POSCO in Odisha; and Niyamgiri, where the Supreme Court in 2013 directed that the Dongria Kondh Gram Sabhas decide on bauxite mining, and all twelve rejected it. Niyamgiri is the strongest demonstration of the Forest Rights Act’s consent provision working.

Effect on environmental governance

The 2024 question asked how environmental movements shaped governance, and the causal links are specific: the Water Act 1974, Air Act 1981 and the Environment (Protection) Act 1986 following Stockholm and Bhopal; the creation of a separate Department and then Ministry of Environment; the Forest Conservation Act 1980 requiring central clearance for diversion of forest land; environmental impact assessment notified in 1994 and revised in 2006, with public hearing requirements that movements had demanded; the Forest Rights Act 2006, which recognised individual and community forest rights and required Gram Sabha consent for diversion; the National Green Tribunal Act 2010, creating a specialised forum; and the 2013 land acquisition Act’s consent and social impact assessment provisions.

The counter-current should also be stated: successive relaxations of clearance procedures, the draft EIA notification of 2020, and amendments to the Forest Conservation Act in 2023 have moved in the opposite direction, which is why movements remain active.

Other movements worth naming

The right to information campaign is the clearest case of movement-to-statute. It began with the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan in Rajasthan in the early 1990s demanding access to muster rolls and bills to verify whether wages recorded had been paid, expanded through the National Campaign for People’s Right to Information, produced state legislation, and culminated in the Right to Information Act 2005. The right to food campaign, from a PUCL petition in 2001, produced the Supreme Court’s interim orders on midday meals and eventually the National Food Security Act 2013. The right to work campaign contributed to MGNREGA in 2005. Together these are the strongest evidence for the claim that movements in India legislate.

Read the rest. This chapter is one of 58 in the complete PSIR Optional Notes, covering Paper I and Paper II in full — free to download.

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