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Rise of Popular Movements
(i) Popular movements may take the form of social political movements or political movements and there is an overlap between the two. The Nationalist movement was mainly a political movement.
(ii) Some party-based movements continued in the post-independence period, for example Trade Union movement in Mumbai, Kolkata and Kanpur. All major political parties have their own trade union for mobilising these sections of workers.
(iii) Peasants in Telangana organised agitations under the leadership of Communist parties. Marxist-Leninist worked organised agitations of agricultural labourers in Andhra Pradesh, West Bengal and Bihar on the issues of economic injustice and inequality.
(iv) These movements do not take part in elections formally and yet retain connections with political parties to ensure a better representation of the demands of diverse social sections in party politics.
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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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