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Rise of Popular Movements
The limited impact are due to :
(i) These movements focus on a single issue.
(ii) They represent the interest of one section of society only e.g., Dalit Panthers for Dalits only or BKU for rich farmers of Western UP and Haryana.
(iii) There is no broad alliance that is a necessity in a democracy to act as a pressure group.
(iv) Political parties do not take up the issues relating to marginal social groups.
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.....nearly all ‘new social movements have emerged as corrective to new maladies–environmental degradation, violation of the status of women, destruction of tribal cultures and the undermining of human rights-none of which are in and by themselves transformative of the social order. They are in that way quite different from revolutionary ideologies of the past. But their weakness lies in their being so heavily fragmented......................a large part of the space occupied by the new social movements seem to be suffering from ..various characteristics which Have prevented them from being relevant to the truly oppressed and the poor in the form of a solid unified movement of the people. They are too fragmented, reactive, ad hocish, providing no comprehensive framework of basic social change. Their being anti-this or that (anti-West, anti-capitalist, anti-development, etc.) does not make them any more coherent, any more relevant to oppressed and peripheralised communities. —Rajni Kothari
(a) What is the difference between new social movements and revolutionary ideologies ?
(b) What according to the author are the limitations of social movements ?
(c) If social movements address specific issues, would you say that they are ‘fragmented’ or that they are more focused ? Give reasons for your answer by giving examples.
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