Social Movements in India Poverty, Power, and Politics

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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.

Raka Ray is associate professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley.

Mary Fainsod Katzenstein is professor in the Department of Government at Cornell University.

This book, like all other collaborative efforts, has a long history. In April 2001, most of the contributors came together for a workshop on Social Movements and Poverty in India at the University of California at Berkeley cosponsored by the Center for South Asia at Berkeley and Cornell University's Department of Government and South Asia Program.

My only excuse for taking up poverty as an area of concern so late in my life, despite my knowing that it is a vast and complex subject, is that those who should be concerned about it are moving further away from either diagnosing and analyzing the phenomenon of poverty and the new depths of destitution and untold human suffering to which it has sunk, or providing new thresholds of understanding which can enable the poor them- selves to overcome it.