Social Movements

Civil liberties are those rights which are regarded as indispensable to civilised existence, rights whose possession makes it possible for the individual to live a life of dignity and security within the state. The category comprehends the right to life, liberty and property, equality before law, and protection against arbitrary detention. The philosophical foundation of civil rights lies in liberalism, whose great concern is to check the arbitrary exercise of executive power and to secure the rule of law. On this account, civil liberties exist not as gifts of the state but as claims of the individual against the state, and the entire apparatus of constitutional rights may be read as the institutionalisation of this liberal concern.

Civil Liberties Movements

The Indian freedom struggle was not merely a movement for political independence; it was, in its deepest character, the largest civil rights movement in history. The early nationalist demands, for freedom of the press, for greater representation in the legislative assemblies, and for agitation against the Rowlatt Act, were all expressions of a civil rights politics conducted against a colonial state. The nationalist leadership framed its opposition to British rule in the language of rights, and the demand for swaraj was itself understood as the demand for the conditions under which civil liberties could flourish. The struggle thus performed a double task: it educated Indians in the vocabulary of rights, and it habituated them to the practice of organised, non-violent resistance against the violation of those rights.

Jawaharlal Nehru was among the most prominent civil rights activists of the nationalist generation. On 7 November 1936 the Indian Civil Liberties Union was established at his initiative, with Rabindranath Tagore as its president and Sarojini Naidu as its working president. The Union was conceived as an organisation that would defend civil liberties irrespective of the complexion of the government in power, and its establishment signalled the seriousness with which the nationalist leadership regarded the protection of rights under any future dispensation. Nehru's own promise, that there would be no black law in independent India, expressed the same conviction, and it is in this light that the constitutional settlement of the Constituent Assembly must be read.

The Constitutional Framework and the Paradox of Article 22

The Constitution of India is a revolutionary document, and it is perhaps the first constitution in the world to incorporate the full spirit of human rights within its fundamental law. Fundamental rights are available in India even to non-citizens, a generous feature not found in many constitutional systems. The Constitution also carries a scheme of social and economic rights, which goes beyond the traditional catalogue of negative liberties. Yet there is an unfortunate anomaly at the heart of this scheme: the provision relating to preventive detention was incorporated into the Constitution itself, and into Part III, the very chapter which is supposed to protect liberty. Article 22 offers certain safeguards to a person detained under preventive detention, but those protections are largely formal. In most countries preventive detention is confined to emergencies such as war, but in India it can be applied even in normal times, and it has been misused against political opponents to curb political dissent.

The trend of misuse reached even the colonial statute book. India continued to enforce Section 124A of the Indian Penal Code, the sedition provision, which outlaws any speech, written text, sign or visible representation calculated to bring hatred or contempt upon the government established by law in India, or to excite disaffection towards it. The penalty attached to the offence is severe: it is a non-bailable, non-compoundable, cognizable offence carrying up to three years or life imprisonment, with or without fine. The provision was used to silence critics of the state, and it sat uneasily with the democratic pretensions of the republic. The Nehru government itself became the first to deploy preventive detention law, using it against communist leaders such as A.K. Gopalan, whose case reached the Supreme Court and produced an early and important clarification of the scope of Article 21.

There has been some belated reform. Under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita Act 2023, which replaced the Indian Penal Code, the position on sedition stands clarified. The new provision carries an explanation affirming that comments expressing disapprobation of the measures or administrative or other action of the government, with a view to obtaining their alteration by lawful means, and without exciting or attempting to excite the activities referred to in the section, do not constitute an offence. The explanation restores to the law the distinction between criticism and incitement, a distinction which the old provision had allowed the executive to blur. Whether the new wording will be applied in that generous spirit remains to be seen, but the textual clarification is a genuine gain for civil liberties.

The New Phase of Civil Rights Activism

After independence there was a visible decline in the rule of law and the rise of what many critics called a police state. Executive high-handedness grew, corruption became pervasive, and the early idealism of the republic gave way to bureaucratic arrogance. Towards the 1970s, however, a new phase of civil rights activism began. By this time the nostalgia of the freedom movement had faded, the economic failures of the government had become manifest, and there was a surge of anti-price-rise agitation across the country. Jayaprakash Narayan's call for total revolution captured the mood, and his appeal to the armed forces not to obey orders of the government revealed the depth of the disillusionment. The government responded by imposing the Emergency on the ground of internal disturbance, and it demanded a committed bureaucracy and a committed judiciary. The Emergency was the darkest hour of Indian democracy, a trial period for its values; the suspension of civil liberties, the censorship of the press, and the detention of political workers without trial tested the constitutional order to its limits.

Fortunately, democracy survived, and the Emergency paradoxically strengthened it. There followed a proliferation of civil rights organisations, among them Citizens for Democracy, the Association for Democratic Reforms and the People's Union for Civil Liberties, led by lawyers such as Shanti Bhushan who preferred the path of the judiciary to secure the rule of law. The judiciary itself, chastened by the Emergency, became an active participant in India's civil rights movement. From the 1980s the growth of global human rights consciousness reached India, and a new phase of activism began, in which civil society and the higher judiciary worked in tandem. Activist judges such as P.N. Bhagwati institutionalised public interest litigation, the PIL, which proved a revolutionary step in providing access to justice to marginalised sections. The Supreme Court, which had long been reluctant with respect to Directive Principles, became the champion of social and economic rights. It gave a wide and substantive interpretation of the right to life, expanding it to include the right to education, health, a clean environment, safe drinking water, and a right not merely to animal existence but to live with dignity. The old jurisprudence of narrow textualism gave way to a jurisprudence of purposive reading, and the constitutional promise began, for the first time, to acquire substantive content.

Globalisation has since multiplied the number of advocacy groups in India. International NGOs such as Amnesty International have opened offices in India and participate actively in the human rights movement. The UN Human Rights Council conducts a Universal Periodic Review of member countries, in which India has so far undergone three cycles, in 2008, 2012 and 2017. The government has also established institutional mechanisms such as the National Human Rights Commission and the Right to Information regime. Yet India has not been able to meet many of the targets it accepted after the first UPR. The continuing deficits are grave: a large number of undertrials; the poor condition of prisons; human rights violations by members of the armed forces in insurgency-affected areas, and their protection under the Armed Forces Special Powers Act; an extremely slow judicial system; the misuse of preventive detention against political opponents; caste and religion-based violence and exclusion; a negative sex ratio; and hunger. The plain conclusion is that human rights activism in India has not yet produced any qualitative improvement in the condition of the most vulnerable. India's commitment to the protection of human rights remains more rhetoric than reality.

Two Critical Voices: Upendra Baxi and Nandita Haksar

Upendra Baxi has offered a sharp critique of the character of the Indian human rights movement. According to him, there is no human rights movement in India; what we find instead is a human rights industry. The advocacy groups are staffed by management graduates rather than social activists, and they operate with a corporate approach rather than an attitude of social service. They lack legitimacy because their approach is biased: they raise human rights issues concerning members of the armed forces, but are hardly vocal about the violation of the rights of innocent civilians by militant organisations, or about the killing of members of the armed forces and paramilitary forces by militant groups. The movement, on this view, has become selective in its compassion and professionalised in its methods, and has thereby lost the moral authority which a genuine mass movement might command.

Nandita Haksar, a lifelong human rights activist, has insisted that the human rights movement in India must work within defined limits. The Indian state does not tolerate activism which goes beyond the perimeter of national discourse; whenever the government adopts a policy of zero tolerance towards terrorists, it ends in zero tolerance towards human rights. The state is unwilling to countenance any questioning of its national security practices, and the space for dissent is correspondingly narrow. It must be acknowledged that so long as India continues to suffer threats to its territorial integrity, there will always be a justification for laws such as the AFSPA. But to enhance its credibility, the government must reform the NHRC, give it greater power with respect to violations of human rights even by members of the armed forces, ensure discipline among enforcement agencies, and undertake police reform, prison reform, judicial reform and criminal justice system reform. Without such institutional renovation, the commitment to human rights will remain an aspiration rather than an achievement.

The idea of human rights has a long pedigree in political thought. Locke argued that individuals in the state of nature are born with certain pre-existing natural rights, above all the right to life, liberty and property. Yet this classical definition has often been criticised for construing human rights too narrowly, and a need has been felt for a broader conceptualisation which would also cover the social, economic and cultural conditions of a dignified existence. The modern human rights movement, in India as elsewhere, is an attempt to give institutional form to this wider understanding, and the institutional architecture of the Indian human rights regime must be understood as the product of this debate.

Human Rights Movements

In 1993 the Indian government passed the Protection of Human Rights Act, which defined human rights broadly to include not only the legally recognised rights enforceable under domestic law, including the fundamental rights, but also the rights recognised under international conventions which India has not yet domesticated or constitutionalised. The Act was enacted in accordance with the Paris Principles, the international standards for the establishment of national human rights institutions. The envisaged institution was to perform three principal functions: it was to play an advisory role with respect to government policies in matters of human rights; it was to monitor allegations of violation of human rights by the state; and it was to be independent, autonomous and pluralistic in composition. On this backdrop the National Human Rights Commission was formed in 1993.

The NHRC has been given a wide range of responsibilities. It must inspect, on a regular basis, the state prisons and other institutions in which prisoners are confined, to ensure that conditions of detention conform to the requirements of human dignity. It must give its opinion on any key legislation and its human rights implications. It must engage in human rights education, spreading awareness of rights among the public. And it must review and proactively enquire into any allegations of human rights violations, even by taking suo motu cognizance of such incidents. The Commission thus operates on two fronts, as an advisory body guiding the state and as a watchdog holding the state to account.

The Scope of Human Rights Violations in India

The record of violations which the NHRC monitors is sobering. In 2016, some 3.38 lakh cases of violence against women were registered, of which 1.1 lakh were cases of violence by husbands and relatives, a figure which reveals the extent of domestic violence in India. A major concern remains the non-criminalisation of marital rape, notwithstanding the recommendation of the Justice Verma Committee in 2012. In the same year, 1.06 lakh cases of violence against children were reported. In 2016 India amended its labour laws to raise the minimum age for a worker from 14 to 18 years, but loopholes persist with respect to domestic enterprises, where child labour continues to be disguised. In 2021-22 the NHRC recorded 2,152 cases of deaths of persons in judicial custody and 155 deaths in police custody, pointing to excessive use of force and poor living conditions in prisons. India has still not ratified the UN Convention against Torture, which it signed in 1997, and has therefore not enacted a law to criminalise torture. Allegations of extra-judicial killings and fake encounters have surfaced from time to time in many states. State policies and policing actions have also violated the rights of indigenous communities: activists such as Medha Patkar have argued that the completion of the Sardar Sarovar dam in 2017 displaced some 40,000 families, mostly tribal, who were yet to receive full compensation.

The treatment of refugees raises further questions. Refugees are individuals who face persecution and an immediate threat to their life and property within their own state, and who escape to seek temporary shelter elsewhere. India has traditionally pursued a relatively open refugee policy, admitting Tibetan refugees, Chakma refugees and those from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. Yet in 2017 and 2018 there were reports that the Home Ministry was willing to deport 40,000 Rohingyas on grounds of security. Moreover, India has not signed the UN Refugee Convention of 1951, which would require it to undertake more legally binding obligations towards refugees. The resulting regime is one of administrative discretion rather than legal right, a situation which leaves refugees vulnerable to the fluctuating politics of the day.

The Autonomy Question and the 2018 Amendment

The autonomy of the NHRC has been a matter of persistent concern. The Commission is dependent upon the Law Ministry for its administrative and financial requirements, which compromises its independence. It is not eligible to enquire into any matter after one year from the date of the occurrence of the incident; activists have argued that this period is far too short, since oppressed individuals or groups facing an immediate threat to their lives may be unwilling to report violations within that timeframe. The advice of the Commission is merely recommendatory and not binding, and its reports are often subjected to deliberate neglect by state agencies; it has been urged that an action-taken report by the executive within a year should be made mandatory. The overlapping jurisdictions of the NHRC and other agencies can also leave victims uncertain which body to approach for grievance redressal.

The Human Rights (Amendment) Act of 2018 sought to address some of these concerns. It widened the pool of candidates eligible for appointment as chairperson of the NHRC, changing the requirement from a former Chief Justice of India to a former judge of the Supreme Court, thereby enlarging the field of selection. A similar change was made at the state level, where the condition of an ex-Chief Justice of a High Court was relaxed so that all ex-judges of High Courts would be eligible for the State Human Rights Commissions. The amendment reduced the term of the NHRC chairperson from five years to three, bringing it in line with other commissions. It also provided that the central government may confer upon a State Human Rights Commission the functions of a human rights commission in respect of a Union Territory, with the exception that in the case of Delhi the functions would be discharged by the NHRC itself.

The NHRC at Work: Landmark Interventions

Notwithstanding its structural limitations, the NHRC has on several occasions intervened with significant effect. In the case of the Chakma refugees in 1998, the Commission recommended against deportation, arguing that it would violate their right to life, and the state ultimately withdrew from considering deportation. The NHRC argued against granting vast policing powers over terror-related matters under the TADA and POTA legislation, and its recommendations became a crucial component in the Supreme Court's striking down of those acts as unconstitutional. In the aftermath of the 2002 Gujarat riots, the NHRC recommended the transfer of cases of riot victims from Gujarat to other states, on its finding that the atmosphere of fear and intimidation in the state could deny the victims a fair trial. These interventions show that the Commission, within the limits of its recommendatory jurisdiction, has repeatedly given weight to the claims of the vulnerable, and its record cautions against a purely dismissive reading of the institution.

The women's movement in India was inaugurated by the social reformers and liberals of the nineteenth century, above all Raja Ram Mohan Roy and Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, who fought against the disabilities imposed upon women by custom and scripture. The British colonial government supplemented this reformist impulse with legislation, including the Widow Remarriage Act, the Prevention of Sati Act and the Sharda Act, which raised the age of consent for marriage. The women's movement and the colonial state thus stood in an ambiguous relationship: the movement drew upon state power to overturn social evils, even as it protested the denial of political freedom. This double orientation, towards reform through law and towards self-emancipation through movement, has remained a constitutive tension of Indian feminism.

Women's Movements

The Gandhian movements were not directly aimed at women's concerns, yet they brought a profound consciousness among women and ended the stigma attached to the participation of women in the public sphere. By drawing women into the civil disobedience movements, Gandhi normalized their presence in processions, picketing and political organisation, and in doing so transformed the gender order of Indian nationalism. The most prominent organisation of this period was the All India Women's Conference, established in 1927, whose principal achievements included the Sharda Act of 1929 and the establishment of the Lady Hardinge College in Delhi. The AIWC brought together women from diverse regions and communities, and it articulated the demand for equal rights within the framework of the nationalist movement. Its work demonstrated that the women's question could not be postponed to a post-independence future, but had to be addressed as an integral part of the national struggle itself.

The Grey Years: Women's Movement After Independence

Aparna Mahanta has called the years immediately following independence the grey years of the women's movement. She suggests that there was greater activism in the women's movement before independence than after it; the activism which had flourished during the national struggle was abandoned once independence was achieved. The prevailing assumption was that there was no need for a movement against an indigenous government, and that the state would automatically take care of women's concerns. The Constitution of India, indeed, is a revolutionary document in many ways: it gave women equality of status and equal rights, including the right to vote and to stand for election on the same footing as men. But the constitutional settlement also encouraged a complacency which was soon to be shattered by the evidence of continuing and even worsening inequality.

Revival: Towards Equality and the Decade for Women

The revival of the women's movement came in response to two convergent developments: the declaration by the United Nations of the 1970s as the decade for women, and the accumulating evidence of the failure of the state to deliver on its constitutional promise. The UN declaration directed governments to prepare reports on the status of women, and the Government of India set up a committee to prepare such a report. The report, published in 1974 under the title Towards Equality, was an eye-opener, for it brought to light shocking facts about declining sex ratios, gender-based violence, discrimination and the declining participation of women in the political and economic sphere. It recommended the constitution of a watchdog body, a recommendation which eventually led to the establishment of the National Commission for Women. The report changed the approach of the government towards women, shifting the emphasis from welfare to development, and it coincided with the growth of women's organisations, including organisations of Muslim women such as Majlis and Awaaz-e-Niswaan, and organisations of Dalit women such as the All India Dalit Women's Conference.

The 1980s were full of activism. The prominent issues of the decade were the increasing number of dowry deaths, the Mathura rape case, the sati of Roop Kanwar at Deorala, and the Shah Bano judgement. Each of these issues revealed a distinct face of patriarchal power: dowry deaths exposed the murderous economics of the marriage market; the Mathura case exposed the failure of criminal law to protect women against custodial rape; Deorala exposed the revival of religiously sanctioned widow immolation; and Shah Bano exposed the conflict between personal law and the constitutional guarantee of equality. The agitation on these issues forced the women's movement to confront the state directly, and to demand legal reform as a matter of urgency. In this period the approach of the government also changed from development to empowerment; from the Sixth Five Year Plan onwards, the government introduced a gender component into every plan.

From the 1990s to the Present: Fragmentation and Challenge

By the 1990s a new trend had emerged under the influence of the worldwide growth of feminist movements. The nomenclature of women's organisations changed; they became more inspired by radical feminism, and adopted new names such as Saheli, Vimochana, Manushi and Jagori. Yet towards 1991 the women's movement began to divide on the lines of caste and religion, and the initial solidarity of the 1980s was lost. From 1990 onwards Indian politics came to be shaped more and more by caste and religion, and women's issues got mixed up in those larger currents. Madhu Kishwar has remarked, with characteristic sharpness, that the only achievement of the women's movement has been some bizarre pieces of legislation. Neera Desai and Usha Thakkar have catalogued the challenges facing the movement: the challenge of identity; the recognition that women's issues are never solely women's issues; division along ideological lines complicated by caste and religion; and the failure of the movement so far to present a comprehensive charter of demands. The movement, on this account, has been strong in protest but weak in programme.

Women in Local Government: The Panchayati Raj Experiment

The 73rd Constitutional Amendment introduced reservation for women at all levels of the Panchayati Raj institutions, including the office of chairperson, with not less than one-third of the seats reserved for women. Initially there was reluctance towards the approach of reservation; it was assumed that women would become the mouthpieces of male family members, or merely proxies for them. Sudha Pai coined the phrase Pati Panchayats, and her field studies in western Uttar Pradesh found that in reality the reservation of women in panchayats was hardly representing their own voice. Rohini Pandey, who also conducted field studies, found a lack of clarity even over the role of women in panchayats; it was assumed that women were present in panchayats only for women-related issues. These studies, however, captured only the reality of the first phase of reservations.

Later studies told a different story. A study conducted by the Ministry of Panchayati Raj showed that reservation is creating a favourable environment for women. There are examples of women resisting the efforts of male members to dictate terms; they have refused to be mouthpieces and asserted their autonomous view. Women's reservation has contributed not only to political empowerment but, most importantly, to cognitive and psychological empowerment. Families are now more inclined to send their girl children to school, and on the basis of these studies there emerged a strong case for extending reservation to Parliament and the state legislatures. Studies conducted by the UNDP show that women have not only empowered themselves but have also empowered the panchayats; panchayats headed by women representatives performed much better than those headed by men, and women took the issues of basic services, such as drinking water, more seriously and efficiently. The UNDP awarded Fatima Bi, a woman chairperson of a panchayat in Kurnool district of Andhra Pradesh, for her remarkable work in creating self-help groups among women, thereby providing a source of livelihood to a large number of extremely poor women. Despite this progress, the most important concern remains the capacity building of women representatives, and for this reason the government should continue programmes such as the Panchayat Mahila Evam Yuva Sashaktikaran Abhiyan.

Environmental movements in India revolve around two great issues: development and democracy. Environmental movements around the world have challenged the dominant model of development, but in India the environmental movement is distinctive in being led by the weakest sections of society. Its major participants are tribals and those whose lives depend upon nature. India has a long history of environmental movements; indeed, the tribal revolts against British rule were some of the earliest environmental movements anywhere, for they were fought largely over the dispossession of forest communities from the resources on which their subsistence depended.

Environmentalist Movements

Ramachandra Guha, one of the most noted environmental historians of India, has drawn a sharp comparison between environmentalism in the global north and the global south. Environmental movements in Western countries, he observes, are led by scientists, whereas movements in the south are led by the poor and the seemingly unlettered. Environmentalism in the north is a full-stomach environmentalism, the concern of societies which have already industrialised; environmentalism in the south is an empty-stomach environmentalism, the struggle of communities which depend upon nature for daily survival. Guha salutes the fighting spirit of the tribals of Odisha, who dared to challenge global giants such as Vedanta and POSCO. Indian environmental movements, on this account, challenge not merely particular projects but the entire development strategy of the Indian state. The same dilemma was expressed by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi at the Stockholm Conference of 1972: while the rich look askance at our continuing poverty, they warn us against their own methods; we do not wish to impoverish the environment further, and yet we cannot for a moment forget the grim poverty of large numbers of people. Are not poverty and need the greatest polluters?

The Indian environmental conflict has arisen between two broad groups. The first consists of those who have gained disproportionately from economic development whilst being insulated from ecological degradation, in particular industrialists, urban consumers and rich farmers. The second consists of the poorer and relatively powerless sections: small peasants, pastoral nomads, tribals and fishing communities, whose livelihoods have been seriously undermined by a combination of resource flows biased against them and a growing deterioration of the environment. The movement is thus a conflict of interests as much as a conflict of values, and any analysis which ignores the distributive dimension misses its central dynamic.

The Gandhian Foundations: Kumarappa and Elwin

The prologue of the environmental movement in India was written during the independence struggle. Most tribal uprisings in colonial India were centred upon the taking away of forest rights by the colonial powers for commercial purposes. Mahatma Gandhi called for a reversal of state priorities towards more directly serving the subsistence needs of the rural sector, and even today social action groups have relied to a considerable extent on the classic Gandhian techniques of the bhook hartal, the padayatra and satyagraha. J.C. Kumarappa, who joined Gandhi in the 1920s, worked out a coherent ideological framework in justification of a village-centred economic order, of which resource conservation was an integral part. Kumarappa's economic and ethical defence of agrarian civilisation hinged on a novel distinction between pack-type and herd-type societies. The pack-type groups, which he took to be exemplified by Western societies, are formed for selfish reasons, for aggression, and although people come together, each maintains his separate purposes. The herd-type groupings are purely defensive: their reason is also selfish, since their purpose is protection, but in the aggregate each has a duty in defending the whole. Guha calls Kumarappa the Green Gandhian, portraying him as the founder of modern environmentalism in India. We also have Verrier Elwin, who wrote extensively on the significance of the forest in tribal life; noting that a majority of tribal rebellions had centred on land and forests, he pleaded for the greater involvement of tribals in forest management in free India.

Forests, dams, water bodies and mining have been the prominent material causes of conflict dominating the Indian environmental protection discourse. The development of the railway network represents a significant turning point in the history of Indian forestry. Lord Dalhousie described how the building of railways served both as a conduit for British finance looking for lucrative investment opportunities and as a means of opening a market for British goods; more than 80,000 kilometres of track were built throughout the subcontinent between 1853 and 1910. In the early stages of railway development, India's forests came under brutal attack. Meanwhile, in 1864, the Indian Forest Department was established, and for its effective functioning it required a progressive curtailment of the previously untrammelled rights of use exercised by rural communities all over South Asia. The colonial forestry regime thus stands at the origin of the long conflict between the state and forest communities which persists to this day.

The Forest Movements: From Chipko to Beej Bachao

It is reasonable to attribute the beginnings of the Indian environmental movement to the most well-known forest conflict, the Chipko movement in the Central Himalayas. In April 1973, the peasants of the Garhwal Himalayan village of Mandal successfully stopped commercial tree cutting in a neighbouring forest by threatening to hug the trees. The hill peasantry had been harbouring a simmering but widespread animosity towards state forest policies which had continuously supported outside economic interests at the expense of their own basic requirements for fuel, fodder and small timber. So was born the Chipko movement, whose very name means to embrace or hug. The movement's methods, drawn from Gandhian satyagraha, transformed the vocabulary of environmental protest in India and inspired similar movements elsewhere.

The forest-based conflicts took many forms. In Karnataka, protesting against the allotment of village pasture land to a polyfibre industry which intended to grow eucalyptus on it, the peasants of Kusnur and surrounding villages organised a pluck-and-plant satyagraha demonstration on 14 November 1987, when they symbolically plucked a hundred eucalyptus saplings and replaced them with useful local species. The Beej Bachao Andolan, or Save the Seeds Movement, was launched in 1982 by local people in Garhwal, Uttarakhand, to revive the use of indigenous crops and cropping systems which had been destroyed by the introduction of high-yielding varieties. Similarly, the Navdanya movement has campaigned against mono-cropping and against the control over resources exercised by corporations. These movements connect the defence of biodiversity to the defence of the autonomy and livelihoods of peasant communities, fusing ecological and distributive concerns.

The Dam Conflicts: From Tehri to Silent Valley and Sardar Sarovar

In the Indian environmental issue, large dams have quickly occupied the space left by trees. Different river valley projects, from Tehri in the north to Silent Valley in the south, from Koel Karo in the east to Sardar Sarovar in the west, have been the focus of ferocious disputes throughout the 1980s and beyond. The Tehri dam, built on the river Bhagirathi in the Garhwal Himalaya, faced the most ardent opposition. The Tehri Bandh Virodhi Sangharsh Samiti, founded by Virendra Datt Saklani, fought against the construction of the dam for more than ten years, and Sunderlal Bahuguna, a revered leader of the Chipko movement, participated actively, undertaking a number of hunger fasts to pressure the government. The grounds of opposition were formidable: the seismic sensitivity of the fragile mountain chain and the potential for a dam break; the flooding of vast tracts of forest and farmland and of the ancient town of Tehri; and the threat that deforestation posed to the reservoir's life span.

The water-rich and heavily forested tribal areas of central India witnessed a similar surge of opposition to new hydroelectric projects. Two notable movements arose against the Koel Karo dam in Bihar and the Bhopalpatnam-Inchampalli project on the Maharashtra-Madhya Pradesh border. In both cases the threatened tribal groups put up a spirited defence, organising demonstrations and work stoppages. The Koel Karo struggle was coordinated by established left-wing political groupings such as the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha and the Communist Party of India, whilst opposition to the Bhopalpatnam-Inchampalli project was initiated by unaffiliated voluntary organisations and inspired by the veteran Gandhian Baba Amte. The abandonment of the hydroelectric project in Kerala's Silent Valley was a notable achievement: the proposed dam of 120 megawatts would have flooded one of the last remaining areas of rainforest in peninsular India, home to the largest population of the lion-tailed macaque. Although no human community was intended to be uprooted, the movement gathered a large social base, and opposition was spearheaded by the Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishad, an influential organisation devoted to popular science education.

The Narmada River Valley Project called for the construction of 30 major dams on the Narmada and its tributaries, in addition to 135 medium-sized and 3,000 small dams. The Sardar Sarovar reservoir, the largest of the project's separate plans, has been the centre of public criticism. The construction of Sardar Sarovar is unique in India's history of dam building because the command area for the majority of the beneficiaries lies in Gujarat, while the majority of the displaced people, 193 of the 243 villages that will be flooded, live in Madhya Pradesh. The project thus concentrates benefits in one state and imposes costs upon the people of another, a distributive injustice which the anti-dam movement, led by Medha Patkar and the Narmada Bachao Andolan, made the centrepiece of its campaign.

Fisher Movements and the Ganga Mukti Andolan

The third category of nature-based conflicts involves artisanal fisherfolk whose dependence on a living resource has been undermined in recent decades. The introduction of huge trawlers, which primarily caught fish for export, brought about significant changes in Kerala's fisheries ecology and economy. In the early years of trawling, fish landings increased rapidly, but this was followed by stasis and relative decline. While some artisanal fishermen were able to switch to a more resource and capital-intensive system, the majority were directly competed with by the trawlers. Small fishermen demanded restrictions on the use of trawlers, and the resulting conflict sparked a widespread movement of strikes, processions and sometimes violent encounters with trawler owners. The movement also called for a ban on trawling during the monsoon, the breeding season for several important fish species, and a partial ban imposed in 1988 and 1989 did in fact result in an increased harvest in the months following the monsoon.

In inland fisheries, there have been sporadic reports of localised pushback from fishermen affected by industrial contamination. In the Bihar district of Bhagalpur, the Ganga Mukti Andolan, a campaign to free the Ganga, engaged fishermen in a struggle on two fronts: against effluents and against an archaic system of monopoly water rights. Two lineages in a strange feudal relic claimed inherited authority over a section of the Ganga, and the 40,000 fishermen along the river were subject to fees from these waterlords, who claimed that their panidari rights dated back to Mughal times. Young socialists organised the fishermen into the campaign from the early 1980s, and the movement achieved a significant success in January 1991, when, following a protracted battle, the contract system and zamindari on the rivers were eliminated and traditional fishermen were granted unrestricted access to all the rivers of Bihar, including a 500-kilometre length of the Ganga.

The Mining Conflicts and the Risk Society

The Doon Valley in northwest India witnessed one of the most well-known mining battles. The expansion of limestone mining since 1947 caused significant environmental damage, including deforestation, the drying up of water sources, and the destruction of previously farmed areas through erosion and debris. Two groups opposed limestone quarrying, which gained momentum in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The Friends of the Doon and the Save Mussoorie organisations were established by retired executives and officials to protect the valley's ecosystem, and hotel owners from Mussoorie joined them, concerned that environmental deterioration would reduce the number of tourists. These groups may fairly be characterised as NIMBY environmentalists, preoccupied above all with protecting a privileged landscape from overcrowding and defacement. In Odisha's Gandhamardan hills, a movement against bauxite mining by the public sector Bharat Aluminium Company achieved a significant victory: after a persistent five-year campaign by local people, BALCO shut down its operation to mine 213 million tonnes of bauxite, a major win for the region's forest-dependent residents and for the vulnerable environment of western Odisha.

Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens have called modern society a risk society, a society in which social structures have become unstable and permeable. Risk is defined as a systematic way of dealing with hazards and insecurities induced and introduced by modernisation itself. Exponential growth in productive forces unleashes hazards, potential threats and risks; excessive production of hazards and ecologically unsustainable consumption of natural resources are the root sources of modern risks. The idea of the risk society is no longer an abstract concept: communities are everywhere gathering to fight for the future of collective humanity. In recent years environmental protest has spread to urban spaces, where people suffering floods and heat waves are compelled to come out of their comfortable homes to fight the fear of the future. The Ken-Betwa river linking project, approved despite protests over the deforestation it would require and the harm it would cause to the Panna Tiger Reserve; the Par-Tapi-Narmada river-link project, criticised for transporting surplus water from the Western Ghats to Saurashtra and Kutch; the proposed India Neutrino Observatory, opposed for its potential impact on the Mathikettan-Periyar Tiger Corridor; the proposed PCPIR petrochemical complex at Paradip, resisted by the people of Kendrapara; the Save the Sundarbans campaign after cyclone Amphan; the Aarey forest protest in Mumbai, where the arrest of activists who protected trees led to a Supreme Court intervention banning further tree-cutting; and the Aravalli Bachao Citizens Movement against the Aravalli safari park project, all testify to the continuing vitality of environmental protest in India.

The Pathalgadi movement represents a distinctive recent development: it is an indigenous tribal movement in which stone plaques or pathalgadis are installed to declare tribal areas as autonomous regions, governed by their own customs and laws. The movement asserts tribal rights, protects land and resources, and challenges external government authority, signifying the ongoing struggle for tribal autonomy and recognition within the Indian state. Campaigns for human rights, for equitable access to natural resources, and for environmental causes have increasingly come together in many parts of modern India. Millennials have begun founding collectives and local chapters of Western environmental organisations; Extinction Rebellion, a Western-led organisation, has around twenty chapters in India, although critics note that such communities often merely copy their Western counterparts, inheriting their methods without fully absorbing their context. As the movement matures, the challenge is to shift from the politics of blame and the politics of negotiation to the politics of collaboration, remembering that while economic growth is past and development is present, the environment is the future.

The social movements of the underprivileged in India have taken two great streams: the movements of adivasis and tribal communities, directed against dispossession of land and forest, the denial of cultural autonomy and the imposition of an alien administrative order; and the movements of Dalits, directed against the caste order and the accumulated humiliation and exploitation which it licensed. Since the end of the Cold War, ethnic movements and ethnic conflicts have become the most prominent form of political conflict across the world, and in India both tribal and Dalit assertion have increasingly taken the form of identity movements. Horowitz observes that since the 1990s research on ethnic issues has become the core field of social science research, and the Indian experience, with its immense diversity of ethnic, tribal and caste communities, has been central to that research.

Tribal & Dalit Movements

Ethnicity may be defined as a sort of collective consciousness which can arise from common descent, language, religion or history. Ethnicity lies at the core of the idea of the nation, yet there can also be multi-ethnic nations. While the European nations have been relatively homogeneous, built upon common language, India and the United States are multi-ethnic nations. Homogenous nations are cultural or natural nations, whereas multi-ethnic nations are political nations; they have to be built politically. The Indian Constitution sought to convert India into a nation through federalism, secularism and the welfare state, and the Indian model of nation-building has been called the salad bowl model, in contrast to the American melting pot model. James Manor, in his book Ethnic Politics in India, suggests four ways of understanding ethnicity in India: religion, language, race and caste. For Prof. S.D. Muni, ethnicity is not a challenge to territorial integrity because the identity markers of Indians are not permanent; they are fluid and can be changed by the political class as convenience dictates. If sections of Indians can be united on the basis of language, that unity can equally be broken on the basis of caste or religion.

Theorists have explained the salience of ethnic mobilisation in India in several ways. Rudolph and Rudolph, Atul Kohli and Rajni Kothari have pointed to the coexistence of modernity and tradition: when democracy is introduced into a traditional society, ethnic bases of mobilisation are taken up by elites. Charles Taylor looks at ethnic movements as assertions by marginalised communities, protest movements in which groups excluded from the mainstream demand recognition and respect. Neera Chandoke argues that the attempts of the state to homogenise the population, through actions such as ethnic mapping, make people conscious of their ethnic identities. Prof. S.D. Muni holds that ethnicity is not the choice of the people but the preference of political parties, a view echoed by Dipankar Gupta, who says that ethnicity in India is not a popular passion but the preference of elites. Atul Kohli, in his article Can Democracies Accommodate Ethnic Challenges?, has argued that democracy in a traditional society leads to mobilisation on ethnic lines, that the traditional elites fearful of losing their privilege try to mobilise people on ethnic lines, and that ethnic challenges, if not dealt with properly, can create a threat to territorial integrity. Yet he insists that democracy, which is one of the factors causing the problem, is also the only solution. He appreciates the democratic handling of Tamil nationalism by Nehru, which subsided the secessionist trends permanently, and the democratic handling of the movements in Assam and Mizoram by Rajiv Gandhi; he is critical of the coercive methods adopted by Indira Gandhi in Punjab. For Kohli, such aspirations can be dealt with democratically only when the leader at the centre has a democratic attitude and the ruling party is strong enough to take strong decisions. The Sarkaria Commission makes the related point that ethnic movements are never purely ethnic; there is always an overlapping of political and economic aspirations, and democratic decentralisation is the way forward.

Tribal Movements: From Colonial Uprisings to the Forest Rights Regime

The tribal movements of India have their roots in the colonial encounter. The earliest tribal uprisings were revolts against the taking away of forest and land rights by the colonial powers for commercial purposes, and they were, as Ramachandra Guha has shown, the earliest environmental movements as well. The rebellions of the Santhals, the Mundas and the Birsa movement, the great uprisings of the nineteenth century, all centred on land and forests, and they bequeathed to free India a legacy of tribal distrust of the state. The tribal revolts continued after independence, taking the form of demands for autonomy and separate statehood, for the recognition of customary rights, and against displacement by large dams and mining projects. The movements of the Nagas, the Gorkhas and the Bodos, the Jharkhand movement for a separate state, and the Naxalite insurgency in the tribal belt of central India, are all expressions of the same underlying grievance: the dispossession and marginalisation of tribal communities by a development model which treats their lands and forests as resources to be extracted rather than as homes to be protected.

The state has responded with a combination of constitutional protection and administrative reform. Jawaharlal Nehru formulated five principles, the Panchsheel for tribals, in his article The Right of Tribal People: people should develop along the lines of their own genius and the imposition of alien values should be avoided; tribal rights in land and forest should be respected; tribals should be trained in the work of administration and development; tribal areas should not be over-administered or overwhelmed with a multiplicity of schemes; and results should be judged not by statistics or money spent but by the human character that is evolved. The Constitution provides for the administration of scheduled areas under the Fifth Schedule and of tribal areas in the north-east under the Sixth Schedule, with special provisions under Article 371 for the tribal states. The Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act, 1996, institutionalised panchayati raj in the Fifth Schedule areas, requiring state legislation to conform to customary law, social and religious practices, and customary modes of dispute resolution. It empowered the gram sabha at the hamlet level to safeguard and preserve the customs of the people, their cultural identity and community resources, to approve plans and projects, and to own minor forest produce.

The Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006, marked a further step in the same direction. The rights recognised under the Act include land title rights, providing up to four hectares to families which have been living in the area for three generations or seventy-five years, subject to the land actually being cultivated as on 13 December 2005; use rights, including rights to minor forest produce, grazing routes and pastoral areas; relief and development rights; and forest management rights, including the right of communities to manage sacred groves such as the Niyamgiri hills. The Act also provides for relief and rehabilitation in cases of illegal eviction and past displacement. Yet the implementation has been marked by serious deficiencies: exclusion errors because of distress migration; the denial of community rights by categorising land as degraded; the neglect of the slogan of jal, jungle, jameen, water, forest and land, on which tribal livelihoods depend; denial of development rights; delays in rehabilitation; and the continuing vulnerability of tribal communities to the exploitation of their resources. Critics have demanded increased powers for the gram sabha in cases of land acquisition, the transfer of mining rights to tribal cooperatives, the use of acquired but unused land for tribal rehabilitation, an end to provisions for big dams on tribal lands, and a judicial commission to investigate Naxal offences. Nehru's Panchsheel remains the benchmark against which the actual treatment of tribal communities must be judged.

The Pathalgadi Movement and Contemporary Tribal Assertion

The Pathalgadi movement represents the most dramatic recent form of tribal assertion. It is an indigenous tribal movement in which stone plaques or pathalgadis are installed to declare tribal areas as autonomous regions, governed by their own customs and laws. The movement asserts tribal rights, protects land and resources, and challenges external government authority; its symbolic plaques, inscribed with constitutional provisions, are a claim that the Constitution itself guarantees the autonomy which the state is violating. The movement signifies the ongoing struggle for tribal autonomy and recognition within the Indian state, and it has spread across the tribal belts of Jharkhand, Odisha and Chhattisgarh. Alongside it, the environmental movements of the tribal regions, from the Chipko movement to the anti-dam struggles at Koel Karo and Sardar Sarovar, and the resistance of the Dongria Kondh against bauxite mining in the Niyamgiri hills, have repeatedly demonstrated that for tribal communities the defence of the forest and the defence of autonomy are one and the same struggle.

Dalit Movements: Co-option, Autonomy and Radicalism

Dalit mobilisation in India goes back to pre-independence times. It is an assertion of the Dalits against their exploitation by the upper castes and caste Hindus, and the biggest contribution towards the politicisation of the Dalits was made by B.R. Ambedkar. Within the Dalit movement there have traditionally been three choices for upliftment. The first is co-option, the choice of remaining with the Congress: leaders such as Babu Jagjivan Ram preferred co-option, and in the present there is even a rightward shift, symbolised by leaders such as Ram Vilas Paswan and Udit Raj, who believe that the annihilation of caste is a utopia and that it is better to work with the major parties to gain tangible benefits. The second is autonomy, the approach of Ambedkar himself. Ambedkar preferred the constitutional path, but insisted that the Dalits should be an autonomous political force. This approach is represented by Kanshi Ram, the founder of the Bahujan Samaj Party, whose slogan was that the work of Baba remained unfinished and Kanshi Ram would complete it. The BSP adopted a blue flag with an elephant: the blue flag represents the sky, and the elephant represents numerical strength. Mayawati has been an example of the success of the autonomy approach; Ajay Bose, in his biography Behenji, suggests that Mayawati successfully implemented Ambedkar's approach when, after three short stints, she won a comfortable majority in 2007 in Uttar Pradesh, this time through a social engineering which included an alliance with Brahmins. Later, however, she suffered from megalomania and delusions, and at present she has been reduced to a leader of the Jatavs only; this section of autonomous Dalit leadership is on the decline. The third choice is radicalism, inspired by the Marxist idea of struggle and revolution, an approach which Ambedkar himself had rejected. Inspired by the Black Panther movement in the United States, and disappointed with the politics of co-option, certain sections of the Dalits formed the Dalit Panthers, whose leaders included Namdeo Dhasal, Raja Dhale and J.V. Pawar. The Dalit Panthers aimed to counter the Shiv Sena, but the movement could not continue, largely because some of its leaders, such as Namdeo Dhasal, were co-opted by the Congress. In recent years there has been a revival of radicalism, symbolised by the Elgar Parishad and by the Bhim Army led by Chandrashekhar Azad.

The New Dalit Challenge and the Democratic Upsurge

Pratap Bhanu Mehta, in his article The New Dalit Challenge, written in the context of the Bhima-Koregaon incident, has suggested that the new generation of Dalit politics reflects profound changes. Dalits are no longer satisfied with winning constitutional recognition. There is a rejection of the managerial approach, the upper caste strategy of co-opting Dalits into the symbolic order without any real shift of power; managerial politics creates a class of beneficiaries in order to exhaust the question of social justice and diffuse conflict, as when a Dalit is made speaker or president while the structures of power remain unchanged. Dalits are building counter-hegemony, going beyond the politics of survival to challenge history and rewrite it, and they are taking more antagonistic postures: at Bhima-Koregaon, instead of saying we won, they said you are defeated. According to Mehta, the pressure of the new Dalit imagination is colliding against the upper caste strategy of containment. C.P. Bhambri welcomes the increasing consciousness but warns that the Dalits should make alliances with progressive forces, otherwise they will limit the scope of their own struggle. The deepening of Dalit assertion is also registered in Yogendra Yadav's account of the democratic upsurge: the first democratic upsurge of the 1960s brought the OBCs out of the Congress, and the second democratic upsurge of the 1990s saw the Dalits leave the Congress and form their own parties. When caste enters politics, it develops into a new consciousness; the consciousness gets politicised, the lower castes become aware of their importance, and they go for autonomous mobilisation, as when the Dalits, initially led by the Congress, gradually formed their own party, the BSP. The Dalit movement, in both its tribal and its caste streams, thus exemplifies the deepest tendency of Indian democracy: the entry of the dispossessed into the political arena, not as clients of others but as masters of their own destiny.