Social Movements Against Neoliberalism Surge in India

This book was written in response to the long, fraught, tumultuous decade of 2010-2020, in India, with the concern that its memories may fade as years pass. It is centered almost entirely on the movements among workers, students, youth and farmers that occurred through the decade and into the next. In the same decade, all over the liberal demo­cratic world and even in the not so liberal and democratic zone, there were multiple and large public uprisings that shook power centers, if only briefly. These public protests were unlike protests in the previous century, both, in their speed and spread. This book describes them and their latent, potential and weakness. It seats the decade in the context of social movement theory and history at large. It dwells on the current circumstance, the collapse of the neoliberalism, marked by series of economic crisis, wars and the rise of authoritarianism. The special story in the book, in my opinion, is the one told by the questionnaire based survey at the end. The aim of the survey was to understand the impact of a decade of large scale public action, by way of social movements, on public consciousness itself. That is, the story of the process of becoming by doing. The survey is small but indicative of the great change that may have occurred in India during and after the decade. An overwhelming, indeed, thumping majority of respondents want public as against private, provisioning for education, health, trans­portation and other public utilities. There also seems to be, in sentiment at least, a thrust towards egalitarianism. This has occurred in a society that has experienced forty years of neoliberal policies and has hitherto been deeply, socially hierarchical.