Meena Menon – författare

This book examines the social movement landscape in Independent India by conducting a comparative study of the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA - Save the Narmada Movement) and the POSCO Pratirodh Sangram Samiti (PPSS - Anti-POSCO Campaign Committee). It explores their modes of political articulation and the forms of democratic participation that they have cultivated. The book addresses a gap in comparative studies of social movements, and employs a qualitatively different approach by situating the analysis in two periods, one a few decades after Indian Independence in 1947 and the other during economic liberalisation, which accelerated in the 1990s.Meena Menon employs an ethnographic approach, drawing on over 180 interviews that provide a granular insight into the structure, functioning and decision-making in the two social movements. Menon also considers the class and caste configurations of the leadership and the implications of these configurations.Social Movements in Independent India demonstrates the importance of institutional engagement by social movements and uncovers a disaggregated picture of the state and its arbitrary and punitive character in criminalising dissent. It exposes the textures of inequality that permeate movements of this kind, as well as addressing patronage and its role in the deification of the leadership, as in the case of the NBA leader, Medha Patkar. The book contributes to an enhanced understanding of the importance of social and cultural capital, which the movement leadership possessed in good measure, in contrast to the status of the project-affected who existed as subjects, not citizens. Significantly, it provides a commentary on citizenship, the precarity of resistance and the challenges to movements in contemporary India.

The book relates three years of history of social movements from Asia and Europe who work on social justice, as a rough overview. The work for the book is mainly done on the ground, day after day, working in villages and cities, with people and their organisations, organising resistance and preparing alternatives. It is based on the fact that European and Asian concerns are identical, in spite of divergent levels of development and wealth, and that the existing international initiatives, such as the ILO’s social protection floors, or the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals are perfectly compatible with neoliberal policies.The book goes beyond and sees social commons as a strategic tool for transforming societies. It is basically a project for the sustainability of life, of humans, of societies, and of nature. The book describes the ideas at the basis of the work in different sectors. It is not about the practice of social policies but about the ideas and discourses that can inthe end shape the political practices. In sum, this book, presents a new social paradigm. It concretely shows how social justice and environmental justice do go hand in hand.