Social Movements in India

Poverty, Power, and Politics

Raka Ray, Mary Fainsod Katzenstein

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781461643418
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Social movements have played a vital role in Indian politics since well before the inception of India as a new nation in 1947. During the Nehruvian era, from Independence to Nehru's death in 1964, poverty alleviation was a foundational standard against which policy proposals and political claims were measured; at this time, movement activism was directly accountable to this state discourse. However, the role of social movements in India has shifted during the last several decades to accompany a changed political focus—from state to market and from reigning ideologies of secularism to credos of religious nationalism. In the first volume to focus on poverty and class in its analysis of social movements, a group of leading India scholars shows how social movements have had to change because poverty reduction no longer serves its earlier role as a political template. Nonetheless, particular sectors of social movement politics remain the holding vessels for India's egalitarian conscience. With distinctive chapters on gender, lower castes, environment, the Hindu Right, Kerala, labor, farmers, and biotechnology, Social Movements in India will be attractive to students and researchers in many different disciplines.

Contributions by: Amita Baviskar, Anuradha Chakravarty, Vivek Chibber, Gopal Guru, Patrick Heller, Ron Herring, Mary John, Mary Fainsod Katzenstein, Neema Kudva, Gail Omvedt, Raka Ray, and Tanika Sarkar.

Table of contents

• Asia/Pacific/Perspectives
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction - In the Beginning, There Was the Nehruvian State
• 1 - From Class Compromise to Class Accommodation: Labor’s Incorporation into the Indian Political Economy
• 2 - Problems of Social Power and the Discourses of the Hindu Right
• 3 - Reinventing Public Power in the Age of Globalization
• 4 - Feminism, Poverty, and the Emergent Social Order
• 5 - Who Are the Country’s Poor? Social Movement Politics and Dalit Poverty
• 6 - Red in Tooth and Claw?
• 7 - Farmers’ Movements and the Debate on Poverty and Economic Reforms in India
• 8 - Miracle Seeds, Suicide Seeds, and the Poor
• 9 - Strong States, Strong NGOs
• Archival Abbreviations
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Contributors