ABSTRACT
Indeed, the rally at Harsud constituted a watershed in the trajectory of new social movements in India generally: never before, as Omvedt (1993: 269-70) points out, had new social movements in India managed to stage an event of such proportions, and never before had there been a nationwide alliance formed to champion their issues. The Harsud rally was an intimation of the emergence and crystallization of a politics that went beyond campaigns against destructive development strategies and interventions such as large dams, and articulated the connections between such strategies and interventions and the direction and meaning of development in postcolonial India. What is more, the rally at Harsud embodies the two constitutive features of a social movement project: first, the articulation of a challenge to the social totality – in this case, the postcolonial development project – and, second, the building of a capacity for hegemony – i.e. the construction of alliances between social movements from below – that would enable the realization of the challenge to the totality through the establishment of control over the self-production of society. In
this chapter, I present a detailed analysis of these two aspects of the movement process in the Narmada Valley.
