Almost 20 years have passed since the publication of MSA. Rao (ed), Social Movement in India in 2 volumes. It was felt necessary to take stock of the social movements prevalent in the country, particularly Necause a number of new issues have cropped up like the women's rights, ecology the problems of the handicapped and displacement of tribals besides various kinds of communitarianism. Some of the older. class-oriented movements are being transformed under the impact of a certain kind of disorientation. Thus, peasant movements are being overshadowed by farmers' movements and, simultaneously, penetrated by caste politics. The trade union movements are getting affected by ethnic consciousness.
The Rao volumes were essentially the work of sociologists. The reasons behind the present undertaking of the DSA (India) group of the Department of Political Science, University of Delhi, were the following Social movements are the most effective forms of social action. Secondly, all social movements have some political content, overt or covert. Even the passages of the Rao volumes demonstrate it. The first article in the first of those volumes was on the naxalite movement. Yet, political scientists, for long, have ignored this vital activity, their attention being divided into legal-historical and philosophical studies on the one hand and behaviouralistic studies with focus on individuals on the other. Political scientists have read about social movements studied by historians, sociologists and anthropologists.
Thus, for nearly two decades, the post-graduate courses in the Delhi University, Political Science Department, have included people's movements. By 'people's movements", however, the courses have meant the peasant and worker movements and the autonomy movements. Communalism has been studied as a phenomenon affecting national integration. Since the late 1980s, however, there is a perceptible growth of interest in the various movements at the grassroot level, partly roused by the appearance of the non-governmental organisations in the scene and reform in the self-government system.
The papers in this volume will give an idea of the vast range of new issues that have cropped up in the recent period as well as of the extent of transformation that has been taking place in some of the older movements, though they by no means cover the entire spectrum. Nor are they of equal importance in terms of impact. By no means do they suggest (or rule out) the weakening or replacement of the class-based political-economic movements that dominated the first three decades after Independence of India. There is no intention to cultivate a post-modernist subalternism in order to understand the struggles. The effort is towards discovering the points of convergence and difference, for both are relevant to the common human beings.
Although Prof. C.P. Bhambhri warned the seminar against glorification of social fragments, interestingly, from the seminar, no suggestion for substitution of subalternism for the class-based movements did crop up. This may or may not be attributed to the outlook of the seminar participants. The organisers are aware of the possibility of being accused of bias in invitation to the scholars.
What is more important, however, is that time and again the question arose as to what exactly is a social movement. It was not difficult to arrive at a broad consensus on the nature of a movement. It was agreed that a movement should have a considerable following. a sustained existence, an element of spontaneity (along with organisation) and some goal(s). It was more difficult to define "social'. Dr Verginus Xaxa, a sociologist, suggested that it is a residual category even though every social movement may have a political and an economic content. One editor of this volume suggested a quantitative as well as a qualitative approach. If society is a generic concept, the civil society is defined in terms of the political economy of the state. It is here that the market-based and class-based parties and forces operate. However. the type of movements that are studied by the papers in this volume suggest in each case an effort to build a community distinguished by membership criteria.
This interpretation does not subscribe to the post-modernist communitarian ideology. Yet, it acknowledges the effort of every collectivity to build its own niche with the ulterior objective to enter into the bargain system of the civil society.
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