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The Andhra Pradesh Zero Budget Natural Farming project was implemented by India's State of Andhra Pradesh in 2016 and renamed AP Community Managed Natural Farming (APCNF) in 2020. APCNF is recognised as a sucessful example of peasant-led agroecology by social movements, multilateral UN bodies, governments, and researchers. We offer more critical perspectives here, and argue that this agroecology model deepens inequality and dispossession. Despite claims to the contrary, APCNF is locked in an unchanged productivist paradigm controlled by capital in collaboration with the state. By co-opting agroecology, APCNF closes down options for a just transformation of the dominant agri-food regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This letter is an expression of gratitude, from two students of social movements in India who are currently working in the USA, to the thousands of unknown Indian kisans (peasants). In 2020-21, peasants from across the country protested and participated in a movement widely known as anti-farm law movement--which was, in turn, triggered by the passage of three laws, together known as the farm laws, that aimed to liberalize agricultural commodity production and marketing. But what started out as a movement with a limited purpose soon morphed into a statement against the high-handedness of the Indian state. Through this letter, we pay a tribute to the farmers who drew inspiration from diverse intellectual strands including Gandhiism and Ambedkarite philosophy to craft a profound statement to highlight the precarity experienced by the farmers and in defense of India's democratic ethos. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the Global South, non‐governmental organizations (NGOs) face criticism; staff employ strategies to mitigate it. What happens when NGO staff express different levels of awareness about such criticism? How are these differences shaped by whether staff identify themselves as 'community' members the NGO serves or 'non‐community' members whose work serves the community? How do these identities impact NGOs? Through an 18‐month ethnographic study at a large NGO in Bangalore, India, I show that NGO staff members' identification as 'community' or 'non‐community' members shapes their perceptions of the NGO, their work and the NGO's work. I trace these differing perceptions to mission creep. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reimaging environmental communication as not only a "crisis discipline" but also as a "care discipline" opens up new possibilities for research and praxis. It challenges environmental communication scholars to rethink – and the funding bodies and institutions to reimagine – how an issue and discipline as central to humanity as the environment could progress. This article highlights key findings from women farmers-led environmental campaigns in India to challenge assumptions that might move us to overlook them. The article hopes to help us rethink the concept and practice of care through collaboration and ongoing relational research. Overall, this essay hopes to reimage the genesis and the future of the discipline of environmental communication as embodied in the everyday struggles and victories of women farmers at the forefront of environmental protection and social justice movements in the Global South and transnationally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Divestment is a prominent strategy championed by activists to induce positive social change. For example, the current fossil fuel divestment movement includes over 1,500 institutions that control $40 trillion in assets. A primary pathway through which divestment is theorized to be effective is by influencing public beliefs and policy preferences, thus pressuring policymakers to take action. However, prior research only tests this argument via qualitative case studies. We assess the impact of exposure to information about fossil fuel divestment on public opinion through the use of national survey experiments in three major greenhouse gas emitters: the U.S., India, and South Africa. We find surprisingly little evidence that exposure to information about the fossil fuel divestment movement can increase public support for policies that address climate change. Our findings suggest that divestment movements may be less effective at changing beliefs and policy preferences than previously realized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article details the politics of scale manifest in Dignity March, a grassroots speak-out movement against sexual violence that occurred at the same time as the #MeToo movement in India but was not part of the mainstream discourse. The spatial concept of scales explains the production of different spaces and their mutually constitutive nature. Building on the concept, scales are used here as an analytical framework to explain the intersectional and spatial nature of sexual oppression and resistance. Based on ethnographic research and in-depth interviews of sexual violence survivors from mainly oppressed-caste communities in rural India, this article demonstrates how speak-out movements help build communities of resistance. These forged communities, imbued with an understanding of intersectional, lived experience from the margins, create spaces of radical openness across multiple scales, be it at the level of the body, community, or regional/national. This article explores the many abolitionist practices of transformative justice__ a mode of justice that addresses the systems that produce impunity and marginalisation__ that become possible in spaces of radical openness. It argues for reimagining transnational solidarities in the fight against sexual violence and rooting it in an understanding of resistance movements in the margins of the geo-political South. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on qualitative fieldwork with two Islamist movements in India since 2011, this article contributes to a better understanding of how Muslim community leaders try to spearhead third front alliances with secular and religious minorities through discourses of shared political and economic victimhood and the provision of protection against the assertions of Hindu nationalists in an era of unprecedented Hindu vote consolidation. While such alliances exist, the paper analyzes a new trend within Muslim politics that promotes a political departure from the traditional patronage of the Indian National Congress (INC) and other low-caste and socialist parties, which have historically represented the Muslim masses. I then discuss the limitations of these third front leadership ambitions, whereby Islamist movements are seen as incompatible with gender equality and secular norms. Theoretically, the paper informs the academic debate on coalition-building processes within social movement theory (SMT), which has partially ignored the role of conservative religious actors in democratic as well as authoritarian systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jörg Nowak's book, "Mass Strikes and Social Movements in Brazil and India: Popular Mobilisation in the Long Depression," challenges Eurocentric perspectives on class struggle and labor movements. Nowak examines mass strikes in Brazil and India, highlighting the ways in which workers came together and fractured apart in their struggles. He proposes a new theory of strikes that goes beyond traditional trade unions and workplace-focused organizing. The book also explores the politics of knowledge production and the role of the researcher in shaping the narrative. Nowak's research sheds light on the violence and power dynamics within workers' movements and challenges assumptions about migrant workers' participation in labor action. The book concludes by discussing the larger implications of these strikes and the rise of right-wing authoritarianism in both countries. Overall, this book is a significant and essential read for those interested in contemporary labor movements. [Extracted from the article]

Looking at the early educational activities of the anti-caste movement in the Western Indian Bombay Presidency (1848–1882), the article sheds light on the diverse, and sometimes contradictory social effects of the colonial encounter. The military defeat of the Maratha Empire, the setting up of colonial educational governance, and the emergence of missionary education had disrupted social and religious certainties. In this moment of crisis, reformers turned to education to intervene in the ongoing social transformation processes. From the perspective of the shudra-atishudra – the serving, labouring, and untouchable castes, who formed the lowest stratum of Western Indian society – the new political situation provided a space to challenge the established structures of caste and gender domination. The article starts with a discussion of colonial-governmental and missionary educational interventions, and proceeds to analyse anti-caste radicals' educational activities against this background. Schools, popular literature, and public performance aimed to create a reflexive knowledge among the shudra-atishudra about their own position in society, and the ways to change it. Finally, the article explores the anti-caste movement's varying interpretations of the changes in education and society. While anti-caste writers of the 1850s welcomed the new educational opportunities, their voices were highly critical of colonial education policy in the 1880s. In the nineteenth century's struggles over caste, gender, and education, privileges and exclusions had been reworked in a colonial-modern framework. Still, important steps had been taken towards democratising and universalising Indian education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study an attempt has been made to explore the revolutionary trends in India, exploring their ideological diversity, historical contexts, motivations, organizational structures, impact and influence, and forms of collective resistance. The study employs an analytical and exploratory approach, combining historical, and qualitative research methods. It aims to give readers a thorough comprehension of the ever-changing character of Indian revolutionary movements by drawing on a wide variety of primary and secondary sources, as well as archival records. This study aims to chart the ideological terrain, place contemporary events in their proper historical context, examine organizational structures, evaluate the influence and effect of revolutionary movements, and investigate different types of collective resistance. The methodology involves a systematic analysis of scholarly works, historical records, and firsthand accounts. The findings reveal the diverse range of ideological frameworks adopted by revolutionary movements in India, the socio-political conditions shaping their emergence, the motivations behind participation, the organizational strategies employed, the transformative impact on society, and the various forms of collective resistance utilized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

India witnessed massive rallies and protest marches in response to the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), a controversial 2019–2020 legislation that grants citizenship to all migrants except Muslims coming illegally from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. As people turned to creative means of voicing their opinions, placards became important tools of questioning the government and the bill. Based on framing and the vernacular rhetoric of social movements, this study examined how placards used in anti-CAA movement in India expressed their disapproval of the discriminatory law. In an era of digital activism, this study attempts to emphasize the relevance of traditional media, especially the media of the protest emanating from the anti-CAA movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The success of the Kisan movement during 2020-21 has been due to the unique character of the movement based on leadership not affiliated to any political party. This movement was able to mobilise different classes of farmers and also enlist the support of agricultural labourers and other sections of society. The secular, humanitarian and egalitarian nature of the movement provided it much needed strength and sustenance and saved it from the ideological slights of the government and the ruling party. The lack of partial non-implementation of the agreement by the Union Government has the potential for revival of the movement in the near future. This paper is an attempt to bring out the lessons of this movement both for the social movement as well as for the government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since Indian Administered Kashmir's (IAK) 'summer of unrest' of 2010, greater attention towards the contemporary Kashmir azadi, or freedom, movement has led to more active transnational organising by Kashmiris studying abroad as well as other young people who sympathise with this movement. Indian political elites have predominately framed the azadi movement as a separatist movement. However, this perception had not been shared by many Kashmiris who argue the territory has never legally been a part of India. The perception of being a separatist movement from outside of Kashmir has also shifted with a growing body of literature documenting human rights abuses alongside raising awareness to an international community of activists, which has led to an evolution of the azadi movement into a movement for social justice and human rights. This has been facilitated by social media spaces and heterogeneous activist groups framing their movement as aligned with other social justice movements and anti‐discrimination campaigns. Framing the Kashmir self‐determination movement as a human rights issue appeals to a wider spectrum of non‐Kashmiri activists, especially those already involved in campaigns against the marginalisation of certain groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, online election campaigns in India have evolved beyond using only Twitter and Facebook to take advantage of the population's continuing interest in other social media platforms. Hashtag campaigns are now found on other platforms, such as Instagram, WhatsApp, and YouTube. With this development, online discourses on political campaigns have matured and become diverse. Several social movement issues in India, such as the anti-corruption movement, anti-caste movement, citizenship movement, and the #MeToo movement, have developed and been sustained on social media platforms in the past eight years. Since 2014, some of these movements have coexisted and intersected with election campaigns in India. This qualitative mixed-method study is an analysis of the influence of sexual assault narratives on online political campaigns in India. This study concerns the intersection of the theoretical frameworks of hashtag activism and locational identity, and it is based on the extensive interviews of eight citizen political volunteers and the thematic analysis of 60,195 Facebook posts during the election campaigns in Bihar and West Bengal elections in 2020 and 2021. The study finds that the political campaigns integrate sexual assault narratives into their online discourses if those narratives promote scandal frames and/or revenge frames. The campaign discourses on social media platforms seldom focus on the policy-related issue of sexual assault. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I examine the linkages between the online activism and offline protests against the anti-Muslim, Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) passed in India in 2019. Muslim women initiated a 101-day sit-in protest at Shaheen Bagh in Delhi, India to challenge both the anti-Muslim rationality of CAA and the ruling party in India. I analyze how the experiences of Muslim women in physical sites of protests are tied with the presence of digital feminist networks which foster translocal connections and sustain the movement through online activism. I study both the corporeal street protests where the female body is physically deployed as an instrument of dissent and the virtual presence of cyberfeminists who use digital platforms to create and circulate discursive and everyday experiences challenging the surveillance of the precarious female body. In unpacking the connections between body-offline-online, I bring to the surface discussions on the pervasiveness of violence against Muslims, especially women, in India and how they are subjected to instances of discrimination manifest in the form of corporeal punishment as well as discursive vitriol and ridicule. I argue that a protest led by Muslim women in India challenges the majoritarian masculinist assumptions about public spaces, politics, and processes of meaning-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Connective action, or individuals networking with each other online to form social movements, rarely leads to lasting change. In this study, we argue that such movements are ultimately ineffective because they struggle to sustain themselves over time and identify the reasons behind their transience. Our analysis focuses on Twitter conversations about Aadhaar, a biometric ID project that has raised concerns about data privacy and civil liberty in India, the world's largest democracy. A computational mixed-methods approach incorporating social network analysis, sentiment analysis, and structural topic modeling demonstrates that connective action against Aadhaar failed to produce a sustained discourse of resistance, with people's feelings toward and beliefs about Aadhaar vacillating sharply. The analysis draws attention to the power of brick-and-mortar social institutions, including the state and its agencies, political parties, courts, technology companies, and 'legacy' news media, in shaping and reshaping seemingly bottom-up discourses on digital platforms. It also identifies three interlinked weaknesses of connective action – the individualized nature of mobilization, excessive flexibility of social networks, and a negative emotional culture. We contend that in order to be effective, contemporary social movements need to utilize digital technologies for 'collective' action by forging collective identities that bind participants affectively and cognitively, empower them against structures of social control, and enable them to commit to non-personal and long-term objectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article shows how the international nuclear disaster in Fukushima affected the antinuclear movement in Koodankulam by using the cross-national diffusion model proposed by Kriesi, Koopmans, Duyvendak and Giugni (1995). It examines the impact of the international disaster on the antinuclear movement and its subsequent expansion in terms of protest events and organizational trajectories. It also describes the new participants and actors in this antinuclear power issue. The research questions are addressed through archives, handbills, unpublished documents, and semi-structured interviews. I argue that diffusion of information and domestic opportunities helped the antinuclear groups erect a protest camp that offered manufactured vulnerability. This induced several meso and micro level social movement organizations and political parties to join the antinuclear movement, leading to expansion at the organizational level and the formation of coalitions. Further, the participation of newly joined social movement organizations and political parties in the mobilization helped the movement expand its protest events and led to an increase in the level of contention. The study contributes to the study of antinuclear movements and cross-national diffusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the hagiographical writings of two religious communities, that is, the Dadu Panth and the Niranjani Sampraday, in what is now known as Rajasthan, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in order to illuminate how their monastic and lay members, particularly merchants and 'scribal' communities, imagined their religious, social and political worlds. The role of merchant and scribal groups in the origin and development of such so-called 'nirguṇ sant' bhakti movements has been largely overlooked, the assumption being that these movements drew their following primarily from members of subaltern communities. Yet a close reading of these hagiographical sources reveals that merchants and scribes played a central role in shaping the theological and literary character of these movements, and in turn these movements reorganised the social and financial relationships within these mercantile communities. By focusing on such 'middle' groups—that is, groups that mediated intellectual, literary and economic exchanges between different spaces and institutions such as the monastery, the court and the bazaar—historians, as well as scholars of literature and religion, can gain insight into how merchant and scribal groups helped to re-form notions of the individual, community and polity in early modern North India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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In this paper, I propose a different classificatory lens to analyse the collective action of civil rights groups in India. To date, this collective action has been variously classified as 'non-party groups,' 'macro initiatives' for grassroots groups, 'action groups or support groups,' as part of an emergent new left citizen's initiatives, but mostly as a 'social movement' or 'human rights movement.' These differences in classification are not due to a considered disagreement; but because this activism is acutely understudied. Examining the history of such groups and the activist interviews I conducted, I argue for a re-classification of civil rights activism as ally activism i.e. they are allies of several, rather than a party to any particular social movement. Ally activism needs to be understood on its own terms to reveal their role in democratic deepening within South Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Land dispossession is a major source of protest in many countries. This article asks, How common are cases of mobilization against land dispossession relative to cases of nonmobilization? Why do we see protests against land dispossession for some projects and not others? These questions are taken up in the context of India, a major global hotspot for land dispossession protest. Using a database of all major capital projects in the country, the article looks at the effects of project characteristics and context on incidence of delays or cancellations due to land acquisition problems. The findings demonstrate that a project's sector and subnational location affect the emergence of opposition to land dispossession. Further, differences in political competitiveness and agrarian social structure are significant factors driving subnational variation. By identifying important factors shaping opposition to land dispossession, the article aims to stimulate comparative research that can advance a political sociology of dispossession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the rise of Hindu nationalist statecraft under the Modi regime, India finds itself at a perilous conjuncture that compels a critical rethinking of the political economy of the world's largest democracy. In this article, we propose a conceptual framework for doing so, centered on a Gramscian rethinking of the relationship among law, social movements, and state formation in the longue durée of Indian democracy. Working across three hegemonic transitions in Indian democracy, we argue that social movements and the state have constituted each other across this longue durée, and that this co-constitution has been both mediated by and inscribed in law. Crucially, we focus on the making and unmaking of compromise equilibriums between dominant and subaltern social forces in state-society relations in and through law and legal formations from the transition to independence, via the unravelling of the Nehruvian state, to the present moment of neoliberalization and authoritarian populism. The article is organized around three analytical concerns—law and hegemony, state formation as a hegemonic process, and the dialectic of power and resistance in passive revolution. In the conclusion, we bring our reflections to bear on the current conjuncture in Indian democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review of Jörg Nowak's Mass Strikes and Social Movements in Brazil and India highlights the book's ambition and hopefulness. It ambitiously explores an area of labor- and social-movement theory in which powerful minds have offered insights but important leaps forward are necessary to make sense of the current moment. The book is additionally ambitious because it tackles recent phenomena in two disparate, enormously complex, and influential countries: Brazil and India. The book is hopeful in its identification of patterns and openings, seen through the lens of mass strikes in these countries, by which working classes might lead a transition from the current "long depression" into a more socially just and equitable socialist future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In India, domestic workers' movements advocated for their own and other workers' rights both before and during the pandemic. Over the course of the pandemic, however, the political landscape and degree of disunity among workers changed. Despite dwindling resources and a hostile political environment that offered paltry prospects for success, domestic workers persisted in protesting for improved conditions. We argue that while domestic workers' organising prior to the pandemic may be accounted for by standard theoretical approaches, the onset of the pandemic presents challenges to these same theoretical approaches. The domestic workers' movement in India has transitioned from its pre-pandemic opportunity-based activism to what might be better characterised as threat-based collective action. Further, an intersectional analysis of these threats suggests that domestic worker protests are driven not only by strategic considerations about how to craft alliances in a shifting political field, but also by a need to assert an identity and to demand inclusion in the category 'worker,' from which domestic workers are often excluded by gender and caste bias. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The idea of "dominant caste" has been important in the discourse of caste that saw the movement from social intercourse (hierarchy, purity-pollution) to political mediation (representation, demand for positive discrimination) in various literature. This paper offers a longitudinal study of caste relations in and around Varanasi in North India, focusing on the Brahmin caste vis-à-vis another dominant caste (non-Brahmin). It combines historical material with individual-level data set, the findings of which are presented as a case study. The essay's objectives are as follows (a) description and analysis of two different "dominant" castes to understand the functioning of the caste identity in contemporary India. This is done to reevaluate how the castes have sought to convert their historically accrued caste capital into social or political capital; (b) the relationship between the two "dominant" castes. It was found that dominance was regionally located in both cases, but in the colonial period, it depended on caste hierarchy, unlike in post-colonial/modern days. This recreated a sort of discrimination manipulated by the dominant castes at their respective levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rates of farmer suicides are skyrocketing among agrarian societies. We analyze the role of Zero-Budget Natural Farming as a form of grassroots intervention in this crisis. Leaders of an Indian agrarian social movement known as the Karnataka Rajya Raitha Sangha argue that educating farmers about Zero-Budget Natural Farming (ZBNF) has the potential to improve financial autonomy, mitigate the farmer suicide problem, and ultimately contribute to food sovereignty. Synthesizing insights from the political ecologies of health and education, our analysis suggests that farmers' livelihoods are more resilient following their transition to ZBNF, and that their wellbeing is improved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper locates the emergence of critical pedagogy (CP) as praxis in the protest movements in New Delhi, India, against the new citizenship amendment laws that were brought about by the Indian government. The ruling government in India brought amendments to the existing provisions for citizenship, such that persons from Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi and Christian religious communities from neighbouring Afghanistan, Bangladesh or Pakistan were allowed Indian citizenship. Muslims, however, were excluded from this. This exclusion, coupled with the national project established for finding illegal immigrants in India - called the National Citizenship Registry project - affects the Muslim communities in South-Asia and has been widely resisted across India, by Muslims and other social and political organisations. This paper traces the development of such a struggle in Shaheen Bagh, New Delhi, and proposes that CP as a critique of the social, emerged from the specificity of the Shaheen Bagh movement. Shaheen Bagh gives critical insights into rethinking CP whenever its foundational tenets, seem to have been lost, merely subsumed by disciplinary compartments within academia. This struggle offers us insights toward returning to the insurrectionary character of CP, by locating CP within the context of such struggles. At the same time, this study of Shaheen Bagh and the specific form of CP that emerged in that context, also shows us the limitations of contemporary social movements to take CP to its logical conclusion, to where oppressive class relations are undermined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article takes a historical view on the Indian civil society; its actors, strategies and issues, and evaluates its democracy-promoting resistance, and the impact from globalization. After a brief overview of the pre-independence context, and the early post-independence developments, the period of advanced globalization from the 1990s is focused. India is a country with a strong social movement culture, formed through its history of anticolonial struggle. The civil society is vibrant, diverse and conflictual, with a multitude of groups. Key examples are the anti-colonial movement, the land reform movement, the mobilization for "Total Revolution", as well as alliances of movements and recurrent mobilizations by peasants, women, Adivasi (Indigenous), Dalits ("untouchables"). The analysis outlines four historical periods with very different conditions for democracy-promoting resistance. The conclusion is that resistance has been very successful, especially initially. However, the analysis also shows how the counter-mobilization by Hindu nationalists grew strong and more impactful during advanced globalization. The result is that Indian democracy has been undermined. Thus, despite initial and fundamental impact, it is the Hindu nationalist counter-resistance to the resistance of pro-democracy civil society groups, that is impacting contemporary democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I analyze the mass mobilizations mounted by Indian farmers against three pro-corporate agricultural bills passed by the far-right government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. I argue that the discourse of civil protest is insufficient to understand these mobilizations. On the contrary, they embody the principles of mutual aid, direct action, and intersectional and international solidarity, pointing to the possibility of collective life beyond the limits imposed by neoliberal Hindu nationalism. At the same time the emancipatory possibilities offered by these practices are qualified by persistent social divisions and the hegemony of nonviolence, alongside pressing circumstantial factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on Indian tech-workers' views on labour and social movements in the context of precarity, digital globalism, and the neoliberal transformations of the culture and economy. Based on interviews of twenty information technology (IT) workers in India, conducted in 2018, I found that they inhabit the liminal spaces between precarity and privilege. I call it the precarity of liminality. This ambiguous status, combined with the assumption of white-collar prestige, prevents tech-workers from defending their labour rights. Indeed, even the trade unions formed exclusively for tech-workers are constrained by their members' assumption of privilege. I hold that this is the case because the neoliberal market has transformed the local underpinnings of culture into a homogeneous simulacrum and codified performance, so that even the cultural diversity of these workers fails to resist their co-option into the global logic of labour and capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In early June 2020, the union government of India enacted three legislations concerning agriculture. The new laws were intended to open up the farming sector to an increased commercial engagement by the big corporates, who could purchase, store and even decide through contract farming what crops to produce. Together they were designed to fundamentally change and reorient the pre-existing regulatory framework of Indian agriculture. The farmers, particularly those from the north-western regions see these laws as an attack on farming cultures and their livelihoods. They have been demanding withdrawal of the new laws and an extension of price security for all agricultural commodities. These protests have been on for more than a year. This paper provides a brief overview of the context and the possible implications of the ongoing farmers' movement, the biggest ever in the recent history of India, and perhaps also one of the biggest in the recent past, anywhere in the world. The paper focuses primarily on the agrarian context of Punjab, where it all began and where it remains most pronounced and popular. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The right‐wing Hindu nationalist "Hindutva" movement in India has political control of the world's most populous democracy. To gain insight into the tools of the movement, this paper examines Hindutva framing rhetoric. Social movement framing entails the crafting of movement messages to motivate collective identity and collective action. This paper takes a new approach to studying social movement framing by using the social psychological principle of metacontrast as an organizing theoretical framework. Metacontrast involves minimizing differences within the group (intragroup homogenization) and maximizing differences between groups (intergroup polarization). We argue dual homogenizing‐polarizing frames work in concert to construct a unified collective identity and mobilize concerted collective action. Using qualitative content analysis of two Hindutva organization websites, we find Hindutva framing rhetoric simultaneously homogenizes and polarizes through two framing strategies: a threat‐counter threat frame that portrays an antagonistic outgroup that must be countered with a unified ingroup, and a striking positive‐negative intergroup contrast that paints the ingroup as a moral protector and the outgroup as a vilified adversary. Notably, key to these efforts is the minimization of deeply entrenched, rigid caste differences. Our findings have implications for the study of social movements, nationalism, collective identity, collective action, and intergroup relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The "AIDS industry" has been a contested topic for scholars of sex work and sexuality in India. Predictions of an AIDS crisis in India in the 1990s led to an influx of global funding for HIV prevention programs targeted toward sex workers, sexual minorities, and transgender people. These programs were managed by a state agency, the National AIDS Control Organization, but implemented through non-governmental and community-based organizations (NGOs and CBOs). Existing scholarship shows that this incorporation of civil society into state programs both furthered epidemiological surveillance into intimate life and created openings for activist claims on the state. In this article, I argue that HIV prevention programs, as mediators of state public health imperatives and the everyday lives of "at-risk" targets, became sites for cultivating new ways of naming, embodying, and practicing sexuality. Drawing on ethnographic and in-depth interview fieldwork in Bangalore, I show how HIV prevention workers cultivated respectable ways of dressing, speaking, soliciting clients, and moving through public space, while learning how to speak openly in the right contexts and at the right times. HIV drop-in centers became a route to respectable sexuality, an index of class and caste, that enabled new individual and collective engagements with the state while generating room for collective care. As sociologists increasingly turn to the state's production of legible subjects, HIV prevention programs in India provide an instructive site for demonstrating how, at the interface of state and civil society, sexual respectability was central to both surveillance and the formation of collective demands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aftermath of protests triggered by a brutal gang-rape in New Delhi in December 2012 was archetypal of the broader women's movement in post-independence India. The primary demands of the social movement to address sexual violence against women were wrapped in the language of rights-based reforms in criminal law provisions. The state responded to the social mobilization in the form of criminal law amendments, while blindsiding key recommendations from feminist groups. This Article revisits pertinent Law Commission reports, subsequent criminal law reforms, and case law on sexual violence against women to analyze how the negotiations between the women's movement and the State on the seemingly irreconcilable demands of sexual autonomy and punishment for sexual violence. We take account of the intended and unintended consequences of this reliance on criminal law as one of the primary tools in the arsenal of Indian women's movements. We argue that engagement on the plane of criminal law to address sexual violence against women is a case of limited imagination at best and counter-productive at its worst. This approach of the movement and feminist groups is to react to the "crime" of sexual violence after the fact, leading to distraction from much warranted structural responses. We argue that this approach makes it harder to conceptualize and implement more forward-looking relational models of responsibility that are necessary to address the structural injustice of systemic sexual violence against women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite nearly three decades of ostensibly pro‐employer economic reforms in India, trade union membership and density in India appear to have risen. Although similar trends have been reported and investigated in other emerging economies such as China and South Africa, the union revival thesis in India is yet to be fully explored. Using large‐scale official survey data from 1993–1994 to 2011–2012 and primary data collected through 56 interviews with key stakeholders, this paper investigates the patterns of union membership growth in India. Findings indicate varying degrees of growth in union membership across all industrial sectors and employment types. We draw upon theoretical insights from economic theories of union growth, comparative politics and social movement unionism to explain union membership growth in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"A Nation that has not taken its education into its own hands cannot soon rise in literary, social or political importance" -- LokmanyaTilak LokmanyaTilak was the pioneer in promoting quality education in India. Although India has been on the path of ensuring quality education to all the children, it is the recent COVID pandemic that has derailed this development path. The pandemic has thrown out key loopholes in our educational system where the children from the vulnerable and marginalized sections of the society have been pushed out of the education system. It shows that there is still a long path towards realizing LokmanyaTilak's vision of universal education. It is in this context that a study was undertaken to bring focus on the challenges faced by the vulnerable children in pursuing education in the time of COVID pandemic. Maharashtra has a long history of progressive movements and social work. It was found that the NGOs and social workers played an important role in reaching out to these children even in the Pandemic. Hence, the paper specifically focuses on the role played by these NGOs. A total of nine NGOs participated in this study. Telephone interviews were conducted with the social workers of the NGOs. The study provides an important account of the challenges of the vulnerable children and the methods in which the NGOs attempted to address these challenges. The study shows how the challenges were multidimensional in nature. The education of these children was adversely affected due to highly vulnerable livelihoods of their parents, the digital divide, and also the gender divide. The paper further provides accounts of the innovative methods employed by NGOs to overcome some of the challenges. Finally, the paper provides suggestions towards developing a more resilient educational system for the vulnerable children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the knowledge-practices used by rural activists to raise public concerns about the use of water and land resources by a Coca-Cola bottling plant in Uttar Pradesh, India, between 2004 and 2014. These knowledge-practices included the use of semiotics and carefully crafted discourses—such as slogans and protest songs—to produce knowledge about villagers' rights to rural subsistence and survival. An aim of this paper is to show the impressive ways in which the social movement persevered by building both public claims to a moral economy as well as village-level practices and institutions that helped to enact visions of what a moral economy could or should be. Of particular significance were activists' efforts to frame rural water extraction and water rights through a subsistence-focused morality of rural development. This moral economy underscores villager-articulated desires for beneficial forms of economic activity that support rural livelihoods rather than prioritising environmentally destructive corporate activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On September 6, 2018, homosexuality was decriminalized in India. It was the result of a rights mobilization that started almost two decades ago. From the start, Indian lesbian, gay, bi, trans (LGBT) activists tried to influence society and the judges directly, not least through contact with other judges who happened to be gay. This article is a first attempt at understanding the mobilization and decriminalization in light of contact. It is also a first attempt at combining contact theories from both gestalt and the social sciences, including Allport's (1954) contact hypothesis. It seems quite plausible that contact of a certain kind played an important role in the Indian case. Other social movements could learn from this case. Gestaltists, as contact artists could have much to contribute, especially if they also draw upon social sciences and recognize that status, social identity, and power play a role in contact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper probes the historical and cultural-utopian rationale behind the wide acceptability of "Kiss of Love" (KoL) movement in India that sprang up during 2015 and assesses its theoretical significance as a heterotopic social movement. Heterotopia embodies tensions between place and non-place in public spaces. In the Indian context, streets have been places of extreme social segregation in terms of caste, gender and sexuality. Heterotopia does not mark "liberation" or "confinement," but produces sites porous with openings so that the possibilities of alternate lives remain open. In this reconstitution of public spaces for resistance, "a passion for improvisation" articulates acts of resistance in the mediated environments of post-civil society social movements that remain absorbent, always in flux, always contested and never predetermined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Online social movements have taken root and flourished in the last decade due to online communication networks attributed to Social media. In this paper, the mixed-method approach is utilized for qualitative and quantitative analysis to investigate the efficacy of social media in propounding the outcome of online social movements in India. Further, several factors which have a definite impact on the outcomes of such online social movements are highlighted. This study concludes that online social media campaigns can be viewed as an extension of 'social norms media campaigns'. Further, it establishes that the internet penetration in India coupled with 'online peer pressure' accompanying such movements has effectively aroused the consciousness of users towards such campaigns. It also highlights the alteration in the process of diffusion of ideas in society due to the advent of social media platforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the representations of the religiosity of the indigenous Dongaria Kondh community in India by international and domestic activists. The Dongaria Kondhs live on and worship the Niyamgiri Mountain on top of which a bauxite mining project was planned. The community's religiosity became the primary focus of what became known as the Niyamgiri Movement. Activists at local and international scales employed different representations of the Dongaria Kondhs' religious relation with their land, which facilitated different groups' identification with the Dongarias' religiosity, and consequently enhanced the support for the Niyamgiri Movement, which was ultimately successful. The paper uses Spivak's theorisation of subalternity and Baudrillard's theory of enchanted simulacra to conduct its analysis. It finds that the representational strategies of the Niyamgiri Movement created space for the Dongarias to voice themselves—in opposition to oppressive power structures and beyond the strategic narratives delineated by the activists who represented them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

[Display omitted] • The paper shows how spirituality strategically supports an Adivasi self-empowerment movement in India. • Spirituality provides motivation, makes groups' indigeneity visible, and protects their activities against reprisals. • Tribal groups in India using this strategy can escape debt bondage and gain their own land. • Action organisations working with subaltern groups can orchestrate spirituality to achieve progressive goals. Spirituality strategically enables self-empowerment in a clandestine movement of Adivasis which this paper calls 'the Programme'. To explain how social movements and action organisations can orchestrate spirituality, this paper examines how the Programme helps landless rural people overcome debt bondage and gain land by employing spiritual repertoires. The paper addresses the question how, in the context of an increasingly tribalised politics in India, spiritual orchestration allows some Scheduled Tribes to make substantive economic gains, especially on debt freedom and land rights. The paper draws on an analysis of qualitative data collected through workshops, interviews and visits to villages across several Indian states, which has been anonymised to protect identities and avoid divulging sensitive information. The study finds that spirituality supports self-empowerment in three ways: first, it provides motivation and ideological reinforcement for people engaging in struggles against debt bondage and for land rights; second, it makes tribal identity more visible and helps groups make claims as indigenous owners; third, it offers groups protection from reprisals and creates platforms for engaging powerful actors. These findings are significant because, for activists and scholars who work with subaltern groups in India or other contexts, they demonstrate that the orchestration of spirituality can strengthen action repertoires for self-empowerment and help groups secure or protect economic and social gains. The paper adds insights to research on social movements and organisations on how to strengthen the 'weapons of the weak'; it contributes empirical knowledge about how strategies to overcome debt and exploitation can succeed; and it underscores the importance of protecting freedom of religion and belief in development practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the implications of the growing presence of the Tablighi Jamaat in Joygram, a Muslim-majority village in rural West Bengal, India, drawing on fieldwork conducted between 2011 and 2013. The analysis of reformist Islam as a moral regeneration movement embedded in dharma and catalysing an alternative modernity contributes to the scholarship on lived experiences of Islam, modernity, and ethics. The Tablighi Jamaat in Joygram gains popularity in a political economic context of moral degradation and marginalization, which inspires engagements with globally resonant modern and anti-modern models of the self enveloped in the practice, discourse, and performance of Islamic reformism. These models mutually interact and conflict with locally particular practices and exclusionary categorizations. On the village level, the drive towards modernity ensues in conflicts over moral personhood and social exchanges. On the societal level, the modern aspirations of Joygrami Tablighis go beyond piety to 'good culture' and respected citizenship, and are embedded in anti-modern critiques of the hegemonic categorizations of the secular nation-state by which they are nevertheless confined. It is suggested that reformist Islam should not be misunderstood as pre-modern, anti-secular, or secular, but might better be called 'post-secular' because it encompasses those ideologies in vernacularized forms on the basis of a different ideal conception of society. Islamic reformism in Joygram may resonate with moral regeneration and reactionary movements elsewhere. This analysis of the Tablighi Jamaat demonstrates the potential challenges social movements face in the transition to alternative modernities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Donor‐funded development NGOs are sometimes portrayed as co‐opting, privatizing or depoliticizing citizen action or social movements. This much is implied by the term 'NGOization'. Alternatively, NGOs can be seen as bearers of rights‐based work increasingly threatened by tighter regulation or substitution by corporate social responsibility models of development. This article engages critically with both perspectives. It traces the role of NGOs and their funders in agenda setting, specifically in bringing the previously excluded issue of caste discrimination into development policy discourse in the form of a Dalit‐rights approach in Tamil Nadu, south India. The authors explore the institutional processes of policy making and NGO networking involved, the alliances, entanglements of NGOs and social movements, and the performativity of NGO Dalit rights. But at the same time, the article illustrates how NGO institutional systems have constrained or failed to sustain such identity‐based claims to entitlement. In Nancy Fraser's terms, the article explores success and failure in addressing 'first‐order' issues of justice, that is rights to resources (in this case, land), and in tackling 'second‐order' injustices concerning the framing of who counts (who can make a claim as a rights holder) and how (by what procedures are claims and contests staged and resolved). This draws attention to the important but fragile achievements of NGOs' discursive framings that give Dalits the 'right to have rights'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anti-Special Economic Zone (SEZ) mobilisation in Haryana failed to generate a mass movement. This is despite the political strength of farmers and their deep resentment of the government's policy to build up land reserves for industrial purposes. This article argues that there are two main reasons for this outcome. First, the state government put in place a series of significant policies to compensate landowners and give them a stake in the industrial project, primarily through payment of an "annuity." Second, the main anti-SEZ movements were led by dominant landowning castes who did not incorporate the concerns of landless labourers and tenant farmers who faced equally or even more dire consequences from the government's land acquisition policy. Moreover, mobilisation relied on traditional caste institutions such as khap panchayats and farmer unions strongly associated with Jats, rather than adopting a more broad-based approach. Entrenched caste animosity and pre-existing conflicts of interest between landed Jats and Dalits, who have traditionally worked as agricultural labourers, further explain the limited scope of the mobilisation among rural groups. The analysis underscores how hierarchical relations shape social movements, define the claims they make and ultimately impact their effectiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the first two decades of Indian independence, members of the Sarvodaya movement—India's popular, non-state program for Gandhian social uplift—sought to partner with representatives of Israel's developmental apparatus to build a communal agricultural settlement at Gandhi's former ashram. Working against the lure of large-scale, Nehruvian development, Cold War politics, and cool formal diplomatic relations between the two countries, Indian votaries of small-scale rural uplift saw in Israeli collective agriculture the chance to give Gandhian "constructive work" a practical program rooted in voluntary, village-based socialism—a goal that eluded Gandhi himself. Israeli planners saw their work with Indian civil society as a means of securing the formal diplomatic sanction largely stymied by India's relationship with the broader Muslim world. Gandhi's vision of the Indian "village Republic" and the Israeli model of agrarian collectivism both owed their origins to nineteenth-century utopian thought, and both projects felt anachronistic by the time of their decade-long joint effort, whose initial promise succumbed to realpolitik and the hegemony of the developmental state. Yet their work foregrounds the enduring international stake that Indian civil society maintained in development and nation-building, long presumed to have withered with the arrival of the nation-state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Civil society engagement around health care and population health improvement is an important driver towards Health for All. Research can improve the effectiveness of health activism by examining the resources, structures and strategies of civil society engagement. However, research to support such engagement faces epistemological and methodological challenges which call for specific research strategies. A four year multi-country study was undertaken by the People's Health Movement, a global network working for health for all. The research took place in six countries (Brazil, Colombia, DR Congo, India, Italy, South Africa) and globally, and was directed to understanding five domains of civil society engagement: movement building; campaigning and advocacy; capacity building; knowledge generation, access and use; and engaging with governance. The research plan and methods of data collection and analysis were tailored to address the objective of improving activist practice, while negotiating research challenges identified during the design phase. Results include insights into the practice of civil society engagement in relation to the five domains of activist practice, as well as experience gained in managing six methodological challenges which we describe as: making meaning, aligning research and action, managing power relations, valuing experiential knowledges, chaos and contingency, challenging preconceptions. Researching activism can produce useful insights into practice as well as support continuous improvement in the effectiveness of such activism. However, there are significant methodological challenges that can be addressed through appropriate strategies. More research, building on the approach described in this paper, can contribute to more effective civil society activism for health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to understand the role of land use planning in India's neoliberal regime of dispossession. Analyzing the relationship between planning and land dispossession in the state of Goa, we view planning processes and documents as constitutive parts of state-specific regimes of dispossession. We argue that planning in Goa emerges as a terrain of struggle between a state-capital nexus seeking to dispossess and convert land, and an organized citizenry seeking to use planning for alternative purposes. We show how the long-term trend in regional planning is one in which planning documents function predominantly to assemble land for private investments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]