Movements Generate Movements: Intertwines of Issues, Organizations and Ideologies

The present paper examines the intertwines among three movements led by an environmental movement and the impact of interweaves on the nature and aspects of democratization in a northern province of India in the last three decades of the last century. Firstly, the paper explores the broader sociopolitical context of protest waves giving rise to the environmental movement and thereafter a chain of movements in the region. Secondly, the emphasis of the paper is on the articulation of other interrelated issues in other movements leading eventually to a demand for political autonomy and the right to self-development of a regional community, which broadens the scope people’s intervention in public policy. Thirdly, the paper focuses on the pathways of the growth of specialized (in people’s mobilization) organizations, which ultimately evolve into the pressure groups and help the interconnections among the assortment of people’s struggles at a local level over a short period of time. Lastly, the paper explains the course of the eruption and dissemination of partial and total ideologies and debates which provoke the conditions of mass awakening and thereby enlarging the public sphere and motivating people to react, agitate and participate in democratic processes. It is argued that the construction and reconstruction of history (democracy) are marked by people, enlarging the public sphere, on the one hand, and on the other, by the state limiting people’s collectivization and protests through the process of institutionalized sequestration. The argument of the paper is that people’s struggles as collective-agencies have their distinct accounts, nonetheless, they are interlinked in an order of coexistence as well as in an order of succession.