Averting the Apocalypse: Social Movements in India Today - Softcover

Bonner, Arthur

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822310481 ISBN 13: 9780822310488

Verlag: Duke University Press, 1990

Inhaltsangabe

There are two Indias: the caste and class elite who hold all power and make up 10 to 15 percent of the population, and everyone else. Averting the Apocalypse is about everyone else. Arthur Bonner, a former New York Times reporter with long experience as a foreign correspondent in Asia, conducted interviews over many months while traveling almost 20,000 miles within India seeking out the underclass and social activists who together are beginning to mobilize for social change at the bottom of Indian society. Working in areas torn by violence, Bonner offers a terrifyingly accurate portrait of a society bloodied by decades of unequal social structure and the absence of a civil society and political mechanism capable of responding to the exploitation of the poor and weak.
Bonner finds that India's inability or refusal to address its debilitating social structure may be the precursor to an apocalyptic social upheaval unless heed is paid to the social movements that his first-hand investigation reveals.

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""Averting the Apocalypse" is an important work. It is synthetic, broad, readable, and addressed to absolutely critical issues. It gives a good feel to the gritty reality of India in all its sadness and promise. The accounts of social activists draw the reader in and deliver a sure sense of competing values in human terms. It is a real page-turner."--Robert Herring

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Averting the Apocalypse

Social Movements in India Today

By Arthur Bonner

Duke University Press

Copyright © 1990 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8223-1048-8

Contents

1 A Longing for Freedom, 
2 A Missed Tryst, 
3 The Rich and the Poor, 
4 We, the Invisible, 
5 The Rescue of Bishnu and Uma, 
6 Sister Rita's Report, 
7 Devadasis and Hijras, 
8 Female Feticide, 
9 The Goddess of Food, 
10 Tribal India, 
11 A Truck and Some Cows, 
12 Creating a New Revolutionary Class, 
13 The Mutiny of the Innocents, 
14 Save the Western Ghats, 
15 The Wandering Charcoal Makers, 
16 The Failure of Charisma, 
17 The Golana Massacre, 
18 Temples and Toilets, 
19 A Museum of Living Fossils, 
20 Temples or Tombs?, 
21 Pragmatic Activists, 
22 Population and Sterilization, 
23 A Model for Community Health, 
24 Working for Women, 
25 Slaves of Sabarmati, 
26 The Rape of Guntaben, 
27 The Mystic Dancer, 
28 Bihar: Blindings and Massacres, 
29 The Role of Activists, 
30 Nonviolent Melodrama, 
31 Journalism and Its Perils, 
32 We Have a Dream, 
33 Myths and Identity, 
34 The Front Paw of the Revolution, 
35 From Revolt to Renewal, 
36 A Civilization That Doesn't Work, 
37 Death by Encounter, 
38 A Village Confrontation, 
39 A Man with Faith in India, 
40 Broken Promises, Broken Children, 
41 The Little Carpet Makers, 
42 The Little Match Girls, 
43 Riddles of Hinduism, 
44 The Conversions at Meenakshipuram, 
45 Manipulating Myths and Symbols, 
46 The Juggernaut Claims Its Victims, 
47 The Politics of Passion, 
48 The Fiery Swami, 
49 The Triumph of Gandhi's Assassin, 
50 Averting the Apocalypse, 
Glossary, 
Notes, 
Bibliography, 
Books, 
Pamphlets, Mimeographs, Offsets, 
Periodicals, 
Newspapers, 
About the Author, 

CHAPTER 1

A Longing for Freedom

The most revealing recent image of our global society was the picture of Chinese students in Beijing's Tiananmen Square rallying around a copy of the Statue of Liberty—a gift of the French sculpted to welcome to New York immigrants from many nations and cultures. The fact that the scenes were seen simultaneously on television screens in every part of the world, and that people of many different cultures and economic conditions reacted to the poignancy of the events, reinforced the universality.

Throughout the world there is a longing for democracy in the American and French revolutionary sense of men and woman able to control their own destinies and of open debate and freedom from fear. People everywhere saw parts of themselves in the pictures from Beijing.

Existing systems—whether the capitalist system in Western society, the Marxist system in Eastern Europe and China, or the caste system in India—are decaying. There is a universal pattern of conflict, taking different forms according to local conditions. The growth of social movements is an indication of this decay and conflict.

When the leaders of social movements speak of conflict, they do not mean the destruction of authority. They realize power is needed to regulate complex systems. For them confrontation is designed to expose invisible power: to force ruling groups to innovate and admit persons and issues previously excluded from the decision-making process.

Social movements have many names: the women's movement, the ecology movement, the peace movement, the democracy movement in China, the ethnic nationality movement in many parts of the Soviet Union, the antiapartheid movement in South Africa, the civil rights movement among blacks in the United States, and the wide variety of movements for better health and safety and a more equitable distribution of economic resources. The variety is misleading, for they all share a resistance to modern processes that have led to economic stagnation, ecological crisis, deepening deprivation amid increasing prosperity and alienation manifested by racism, alcoholism, and drug addiction.

Alberto Melucci, a professor of sociology at the University of Milan in Italy, describes social movements as "laboratories in which new experiences are invented ... to challenge the dominant codes of everyday life." He says they are different from traditional forms of collective action in that they have no universal plan of history:

Contemporary social movements operate as signs, in the sense that they translate their actions into symbolic challenges to the dominant codes.... Collective action is a form whose models of organization and solidarity deliver a message to the rest of society.... Contemporary social movements stimulate radical questions about the ends of personal and social life, and in so doing, they warn of the crucial problems facing complex societies.

Social movements are radical but without the Marxist obsession with class and the struggle over production and distribution of goods. Activists are equally concerned with how society or a group generates and distributes information about itself and the surrounding structures.

In the West this is often carried too far: activists are so concerned with the larger problems of peace, the environment, and intellectual freedom that they are out of touch with—and at times antagonistic to—the bread and butter issues of factory and farm workers.

This is not true in India, where the social movement is concerned entirely with the poor. Its actors strive for immediately realizable benefits: a better place to live; improved medical care; more food and nurseries for children; and they don't expect this generation to be deprived for the promises of the future. The key word is empowerment: the poor must have rupees in their pockets so they are no longer bound to the local moneylender and landlord. The poor must also learn to shed the inferiority born of centuries of caste oppression and the belief in karma (inherited fate). Empowerment means ending hierarchies and bringing everyone into the decision-making process. A major characteristic is the high percentage of women as members and leaders. With their criticism of patriarchal oppression, women heighten the suspicion of hierarchy.

Sunita Narain: An Environmental Activist

Sunita Narain, coeditor of a four-hundred-page report on the state of the environment in India and codirector of the Center for Science and Environment in New Delhi, typifies the difference between the Indian approach to the environment and that of the West: Indian activists are concerned with the equitable use of the land, not with the mere preservation of beauty.

When I called on her at her office in New Delhi, she said she was twenty-five and had been in the environmental field for seven years and with the center for five years:

"In his early book, Hind Swaraj, Mahatma Gandhi said it took Britain half the world to feed itself. He asked: 'If India became like Britain, how many worlds would it need?' We quote that often. We don't have the rest of the world to rape, so we rape our own countryside. If you set up a paper mill, it wastes the entire forest around it, and the forest moves farther and farther away so now paper mills are going to the Northwest or the Andaman Islands to get supplies. The forests are disappearing, with a tremendous impact on the lives of the poor who live around them.

"For a long time people...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1990
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822310481
• ISBN 13: 9780822310488
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 476
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar