12

Social Movements: Challenges and Opportunities

Silky Tyagi

We are going to enter into a life of contradictions. In politics, we shall have equality and in social and economic life, we will have inequality …we must remove this contradiction at the earliest possible moment or else, those who suffer from inequality will blow up the structures of political democracy, which we have so laboriously built up.1

—Ambedkar, 1950.

INTRODUCTION

In the 1980s, voices were raised by the Narmada Bachao Andolan activists against the Sardar Sarovar dam construction on the Narmada River. This led to large-scale displacement of adivasis who were neither relocated to a proper area nor granted proper compensation. Besides, the dam was causing serious environmental ...

Get Contemporary India now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.