Grass-Roots Stirrings and the Future of Politics
This paper explores the possibility of the prevailing widespread frustration and disillusionment with modern politics, as much for its failure to make good the promise it had held out as for the incapacity of its structures and institutions to find even token solutions to the problems and crises which beset the present-day world, being canalized towards a new politics of the future. Frustration and disillusionment are all too plain to be either ignored or denied; they are writ large in the world-wide discontent, unrest, turbulence and turmoil. They find expression in a variety of popular movements focused on particular issues, for the most part spontaneous and lacking formal organizations but all having broken out of the conventional framework of modern politics. The bankruptcy of modern politics is equally plain; it is writ large in the crisis of global economy, world-wide stagflation, low growth rate even in ‘advanced’ capitalist countries which swear by growth rate, rising unemployment everywhere, fast growing disparity between the North and the South and between the rich and the poor in both North and South, and the resource crunch which has propelled militarization and arms race to the point where the survival of the human race is at stake. That the straining at the leash should be the hardest at the periphery of periphery is not surprising; for it is there that the combined structural weight of inequity, injustice, exploitation, oppression and social terror bears most heavily; but popular movements have sprouted also in societies of the centre. The case study of one particular Third World country presented here is only illustrative. The paper examines a number of grass roots movements, classifies them by the issues they agitate and by the forms agitations take and speculates about how far, with their growing awareness of the vertical links between the structure at the micro level and macro level, and under what conditions, they may be said to be moving towards laying the foundations of new politics.