Social Movements in India

Components of Social Movements Social movements possess five ingredients: Objectives, ideology, programmes, leadership, and organization. They are interdependent and inter related. Repulsive public protest in an unorganized manner does not resemble social movement. Social movement is associated with social and political change. Therefore it has a direct and persistent objective. The urgent objective may be to handle a particular issue or remonstration contrary to the decision of the authority. But such a collective initiative does not terminate there. It undertakes a number of concerns and continues towards a consistent objective of altering authority, power relationship, dominance and political system. The movement originates policy for the long-term objective. It assigns precedence to specific course of actions over the rest and also concentrates on a selected direction, energizes several groups. The course of initiative is closely connected to re get dimension with the perception of the desired social transformation. It engages certain parameters; premises and standards endow to contemplate in a preordained manner social reality. The parameters and ideals constitute ideology. The ideology in not necessarily systematic or preconceive. In some cases, ideology champions the movement and in other cases ideology gets to be moulded and authorizes the movement. Leadership plays dominant part in formulation of ideology and constructing strategies for action. Social movement entails activation of people who duly get involved with the objective of the movement. They interchange values and start to interchange impression of common realization of social reality. This too needs some or other form of organization. The organization may be loose or compact with centralized or decentralized decision-making mechanism for introducing programmes. None of theses components are deductive and stationary. They gradually change. Their nature and function differ between movements. They are found to be elementary in some movements whereas in some others they may be considerably matured. These factors – leadership, organization as well as ideology get rotated in due time of the movement. In certain cases the objective may even alter and circulate in different direction in contrast to the previous ones.