ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the role of the movement to improve the rights of the Dalits (an oppressed caste formerly known as the “untouchables” in India) at the World Social Forum (WSF). In so doing, it serves to rectify the dearth of empirical studies of not only why and how locally based groups become part of the global justice movement and the WSF but the impact they can have on shaping the issue framing and organizing dynamics of Social Forums. The focus will be on one key organization in particular, the National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights (NCDHR). I begin with a brief discussion of the relationship between the global and the local and the centrality of networks as a link between the two. I then discuss how Karl Polanyi’s ideas help us to understand this dynamic between the global and the local, particularly the emphasis that Dalits place on the state to resist the “disembedding,” or the freeing, of the economy from social or political regulations. Polanyi’s analysis also permits us to better understand the dialectic of globalization within an Indian context first in terms of the impact of neoliberal globalization in the form of the new economic policy (NEP). I then discuss the impact of the NEP upon the Dalit community, including the Dalit countermovement and the NCDHR’s decision to “go global” and take their struggle against casteism and neoliberal globalization beyond the Indian state and to the WSF. I argue that in taking their cause beyond India and to the WSF, the Dalits have as a primary objective making the Indian state better serve the interests of the Dalit people. Their struggle, in turn, has contributed to the global movement’s articulation of critiques of, and demands on, the state.
