7 Leadership and Ideology in Social Movements

Contents

1. Objectives of the Module

2. Learning Outcome

3. Introduction

4. Role of leadership

5. Levels and types of leadership

6. Leadership in Indian social movements

6.1. Leadership in Peasant Movement

6.2. Leadership in Tribal Movement

6.3. Leadership in Dalit Movement

6.4. Leadership in Backward Caste Movement

6.5. Leadership in Bhoodan movement

6.6. Leadership in Ethnic movement

6.7.  Leadership in New Social Movements

7. Relationship between leaders and masses

8. Ideology and social movement

9. Summary

1. Objectives of the Module

The objective of themodule is to provide a reading on the meaning, role and types of leadership in different manifestations of social movements. Another objective is toenable you in understanding therelationshipbetween ideologyand social movements.

2. Learning Outcome

After having gone through this module you should be able to grasp the significance of leadership in social movements and be able to distinguish between types of leadership that are manifest in different stages of a social movement. You will learn about different social movements that occurred in different phases of Indian history and also their forms of leadership. In the final reading, you will learn how ideology plays a crucial role in social movements.

3. Introduction

Studies on leadership generally come under the purview of organizational behaviour. The processes of leadership have also been invoked in the study of social movements. However, systematic elaboration on this dimension is still very limited. The position of leaders in a social movement is all the time a crucial factor. The basic premise behind the analysis of leadership is that they are the chief architect of the phenomenon we call social movement and that social movement can never occur in a vacuum. Movement without organization or mobilization can hardly be thought of. The individual who performs this task of mobilizing people for action is called the leader. Although we are accustomed to identify a social movement with a single leader, it is more accurate to think in terms of a group of leaders often organized in a hierarchy (Kilian 1969). Many of the studies of social movements indicate that their leaders come from a cross-section of humankind or are a cut above the average in social background, intelligence and skill. In fact, the upper and middle strata in society supply the substantial bulk of opposition leader to all manners of social movements. The upper strata people also lead New Social Movements of today’s world. Even the so-called ethnic or backward class movements are led by the people who were not so backward but relatively forward-looking and economically solvent. Leaders are more than ordinary participants of a movement. They are exposed to risks and often have to pay high costs for their commitment.

4. Role of Leadership

Processes of mobilization and the organizational structure of a movement are fuelled by the action of the leaders. It is the leadership which promotes the pursuit of goals, develops strategies and tactics for action, and formulates an ideology. The penetration of the movement in the society, the loyalty and involvement of its members, and the consensus of different social groups all depend upon leader’s actions (Melucci 1996: 332). Leaders are basically the agents of mobilization of a movement and are the promoters of its organizational structure. What a leader could do may be well ascertained by referring to the role played by Lenin in case of Russian Revolution. Lenin falsified Marx and Engels’ prediction that socialism would appear first in Germany where production process has had highest concentration. Being among the movement participants, leaders are the most active and committed participants in social movements. Leaders emerge from a certain social base, have certain interests, and may possess certain personality traits that render them the capability to serve the role of leadership in movement situations. Using Weberian terminology, we may say that leaders must also be both charismatic and rational, even though there are other qualities of leaders.

Melucci further suggests that in any movement situation, leadership has certain specific roles to perform. The first task of leadership is to define objectives of the movement, which implies that the ability of the leaders is not only to formulate the aims of the movement, but also to establish a system of priority and adapt them to the changing conditions. Secondly, leaders have to provide the means for action. They have to gather and organize the available resources and channelize them towards the realization of movement goals. Thirdly, the leaders have to maintain the structure of the movement by guaranteeing the interaction and cohesion among the movement participants. Fourthly, leaders are also responsible for mobilizing the support base of the movement. They are to preserve constituency’s consensus over objectives of the movement and to attract growing investments from members. Finally, the leader has to maintain and reinforce the identity of the group. S/he has to furnish incentives of solidarity. The expressive function of the leader is her/his ability to offer symbolic objects for identification, around which the solidarity of the members and their individual identities solidify (Melucci 1996: 3339-340). The various functions of the leadership complement each other and they make their presence in movement situation in an intertwined manner.

5. Levels and Types of Leadership

As the movements mature they require different kinds of leadership. Following Dawson and Gettys (1935) if we divide the life cycle of a movement into four stages, we can describe the kind of leadership needed at each level of movement’s biography. During the first stage, when the movement is marked by social unrest, it needs the leader more to act as an agitator—a person who stirs up things. The second stage is the stage of popular excitement that demands a prophet to spread the message and stimulate enthusiasm among the followers. The third stage is marked by formal organization and thus an administrator is called for. Leaders much like an administrator organizes the division of labour, defines the requirement of membership besides coordinating the movement from all possible direction. The final stage is the stage of institutionalisation when the leader has to play the role of a statesman—someone who understands political realities and can take the full advantage out of it (Lang & Lang 1961).

Besides the various levels of its operation, leadership can be classified according to its style and function. For style, we shall draw upon the classical formulation of Max Weber. Weber pointed to three different types of authority upon which leaders could base their capability to which their followers comply with. The first type (i.e. Charismatic) is especially common among leaders of new movements. It is derived from the personal charisma of the leaders. Charisma, a Greek word, is a kind of extraordinary power or influence, sometimes appearing mystical or supernatural. To what extent charisma comes from a leader’s own personality traits, or to what extent it is projected by a membership or by a certain crisis, is not clear. However, the one who has it is followed because the membership believes that they have truth and justice on their side and that they have the right to lead the movement. In case of charismatic leadership, collective mobilization tends to be spontaneous. The second variety—the rational legal type leadership – is the characteristic of modern corporations, bureaucracies and other formal organizations. In fact, this type of leadership emerges as a social movement grows and matures, and develops within it some form of formal organizations. Traditional leadership—the third type—is rarely found as part of any social movement, because by definition it takes time to develop and most social movements are short lived. Traditional leadership is the kind represented by kings, chiefs, patriarchs and similar leaders who get their authority by means of a system of succession not through training, skill, expertise or charisma. An element of traditional leadership, however, could be found in any movement by way of the association of the ‘elder statesman’, or ‘elder members’ of the society with the process of movement.

While these three types of leadership can be distinguished and discussed as ideal types, they are frequently mixed in actual practice. All three types can be useful in the same movement: the ‘old man’ to give the movement a continuity and venerability; the efficient bureaucrat to keep it organized and supported and the charismatic ‘firebrand’ to capture the public imagination. Leaders, charismatic or not, are needed for different purposes at different stages of movement’s history. Thus, based on the functions, Smelser (1993) suggests that there are usually two basic types of leadership: leadership in formulating the beliefs and leadership in mobilizing the participants for action. Sometimes the same person performs both these functions, in other cases a division in the leadership roles appears within the movement. 

In case of New Social Movements (NSMs), what we find is a shift in the worldview of the leaders. The leaders in case of NSMs, are projecting a public domain instead of private one and more particularly the issues of global civic concern. That is to say, the leadership is able enough to transcend the local issues to the global platform. Though typology of leadership is yet to be ascertained with adequate precision, we can devise a typological framework based on the public – private domain of leadership pattern. That is to say, if the demands raised by a movement fit well within the private domain, then the leadership tends to flow from within the groups, and if they fall within the domain of public then the leadership would generally be from the outside. To say it in another way, the greater the movements are falling within public sphere, the larger the potentiality of the leadership from outside. This internal and external typology is again not an exhaustive one. Since both the internal and external leadership can even found in one single social movement if it is a long stretched one. Whatever may be the pattern of leadership, one point is clear that leaders are not rooted with the community life of which s/he is a leader. The leaders, in most cases, are a bit different from the general masses. The point is that the section capable of producing competent leaders is cut from the base in every locality. This thus necessitates the relationship between the leaders and the masses—of which they are a cut above—be explored sociologically (section 6.6 addresses this issue in some detail).

6.  Leadership in Indian Social Movements

After having discussed the pattern and typology of leadership rather theoretically we will now examine the leadership issue with reference to Indian social movements. This section will focus on the leadership question as it evinced in the contexts of movementslike peasant, tribal, dalit, backward class, and Bhoodan movements.

6.1. Leadership in Peasant Movement

Teodor Shanin (1972) has pointed out that peasant struggles can never assume a genuinely political character unless they were taken over by leaders belonging to social layers politically more advanced than the peasants themselves. The leaders of peasant movements in India were mostly from urban educated middle class background. This point was made amply clear by other scholars like Kapil Kumar (1984), Jacques Pouchepadass (1999), and Partha Chatterjee (1984). Even the most radical among the peasant movements like the Naxalite movement is no exception to this trend. P.N. Mukherji (1987) in his study has pointed out how the urban based leadership invoked more sophisticated ideology among the masses in the name of Naxalite movement. They claimed superior knowledge and status with regard to the manner in which the movement should be conducted.However,recent studies on social movement duly inspired by the subaltern theoreticians have highlighted on the role of the tribes, and even of tribal women in providing leadership in case peasant movements in India. David Hardiman (2006), GyanendraPandey’s (2011) writings are of this genre.

6.2. Leadership in Tribal Movement

The studies on tribal movements almost kept mum on the issue of leadership. Tribal movements are considered more or less as spontaneous phenomenon. However, the leadership factor in case of tribal movements in India has been addressed by some social scientists. Following K.S. Singh (2002) we can say that the tribal leadership of the Santhal, Oraon and the Munda rebellions came from religious leaders. BirsaMunda is such an example. A similar case is that of Sidhu and Kanhu, the leaders of Santhal rebellion who claimed that they received messages from supernatural being or God. They exerted tremendous influence upon the tribal folk and often demanded heroic sacrifices from their followers.

Much like the subaltern theorists, Arundahti Roy has highlighted the involvement of tribal people in the Maoist movements. In fact she has acknowledged that the tribal people in Central India have a history of resistance that even predates Mao (Mao Zedong of Chinese Communist Revolution of the 1949) by centuries. The collective of several tribes in Central India have a history of rebellion against the British, the zamindars and the moneylenders. In today’s scenario, she highlights that the common looking tribal people – both men and women – are providing leadership to the Maoist movement in various parts of the country (Roy 2011). Anthropologists like Alpa Shah and Judith Pettigrew while pinpointing the significance of tribal leadership in case of Indian Maoist movement, have acknowledged the cliché that tribal people possess revolutionary potential as “natural vessels of a revolutionary consciousness”. They have also recognized the substantive presence of the tribal people as the common participants and even at the position of leadership (Shah & Pettigrew 2011).

6.3. Leadership in Dalit Movement

The most important leader of the Dalit movement in India was B.R. Ambedkar. Ambedkar’s programmes were intended to integrate the untouchables into Indian society in modern ways. Thus, he stressed on the issues of education and legal and political rights so as to free his brethren from the dehumanization and slavery emerging out of the traditional Hindu caste system. Apart from Ambedkar, there were no such all India Dalit leaders. Mongoo Ram, the leader of the Adi Dharma in Punjab had influenced the Dalits there. It is significant to note that Dalit movement since its origin has been under the indigenous leadership. But the Dalit movement in post-independence era has experienced outside leadership mostly hailing from urban middle class background.However, the experience of Uttar Pradesh (UP) state politics gives us an altogether different picture regarding Dalit movement and its leadership pattern. UP state politics has shown how with the passage of time Dalit movement got enmeshed with parliamentary democracy and in the processboth Dalit movement and the state politics of UP assumed certain new directions which are worth considering sociologically. The UP experience has increasingly shown that Dalit politics not only received a thoroughly indigenous leadership (political leaders like Mayawati, Kanshi Ram are the cases in point) pattern but also it has become successful in influencing the mainstream politics in its own terms. Indigenous Dalit leadership has relegated parliamentary democracy in the context of UP towards a new direction of patronage politics. Kanchan Chandra (2004) has commented that patronage politics and expectations of ethnic favouritism tend to go together in UP politics and this has largely defined the Dalit voting pattern and the success of Dalit leaders within the limits of parliamentary democracy. He has labelled that the institutional implication of such practices is the tendency to create a new form of democracy called ‘patronage democracy’.

6.4. Leadership in Backward Caste Movement

M.S.A. Rao (1979) classifies backward-caste movements in India into four types on the basis of structural cleavages and manifest conflicts. The first type is that of the movements led by upper non-Brahmin castes such as the Vellalas, the Reddis and the Kammas of old Madras Presidency. Ramaswamy Naikar of Tamil Nadu launched the Self Respect movement in Madras in the late 1920s to perform marriage ceremonies without Brahmin priests. The non-Brahmin movements in Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu raised cultural issues. The leaders of non-Brahmin movements attacked caste and condemned it as a tool of Brahmin oppression (Hardgrave 1965). These are known as non-Brahmin movements against the Brahmins. Such movements are not found in north India because the Brahmins were generally backward with regard to modern education and government employment (Shah 2004). More particularly the leadership for the Yadava movement in Bihar and the non-Brahmin movements in Maharashtra cropped up from the well-off castes and people of upper stratum of the castes concerned. The second type of backward class movements hinge on the cleavages within the non-Brahmin castes, mainly led by intermediate and low castes such as the Ahirs and the Kurmis in Bihar, the Noniyas in Punjab, the Kolis in Gujarat, and the Malis in Maharashtra. It is in this context the role played by Jyotirao Phule, the ideologue of non-Brahmin movement in Maharashtra needs a brief elaboration. Phule stressed on the cultural and ethnic factors rather than on economic or political factors so as to justify his stand to the masses. He rejected the Hindureligion and caste system since they were the means of suppression and the cause of poverty of the low castes. More particularly he founded Satyashoddan Samaj in 1873 so as to raise non Brahmin voice in Maharashtra. The movements by the depressed classes or untouchables against upper and other backward castes are the third type of backward caste movements. The fourth type is that of the tribal movements. We have treated the fourth types of movements separately. 

On the basis of ideological tenets both the backward class/ caste movements and Dalit movements may be distinguished. While the backward class movements are mainly aimed at reinterpretation of myths of origin or of one’s own religion and aspiring for uplift one’s place within the given caste hierarchy, the Dalit movements emphasizes on the rejection of Hinduism and/ or Aryan religion and culture. Backward class/ caste movements are in this sense oriented more towards the sacred domain of social life while the Dalit movements are oriented towards secular aspects of social living. While the backward caste movement endeavors to dismantle the traditional caste hierarchy or in other words aimed at achieving social emancipation, the Dalit movements, on the other hand, attempt to safeguard the politico-legal status of the Dalits. However, it needs to be mentioned that the attempt to differentiate between backward class/ caste and Dalit movements is more heuristic in nature. In actual reality there exists a great deal of overlapping between the issues and agendas that both the types of movements uphold.

6.5. Leadership in Bhoodan movement

Bhoodan movement emphasizes on charismatic leadership. This movement led by charismatic leaders was leader centric. As a corollary, the intensity and spread of this movement largely depended upon how the leaders perceived the issues and how they could mobilise the masses. Oommen (1972) has dealt well with the Bhoodan movement and the leadership offered by the charismatic leaders like AcharyaVinoba Bhave. Bhave’s saintly gesture and appeal towards the landlords brought some success in the accumulation of lands in the name of donation (bhoodan) which he later redistributed among the landless people of Telengana region of Andhra Pradesh during the early 1980s. In a country like ours it was really a difficult endeavour for Bhave to appeal the masses. Yet, he became successful. Here lies the efficacy of charismatic leadership. Vinoba believed and strongly preached the point that the movement was inspired by God and he projected himself as saint towards the masses and maintained a saintly style of life. The greedless life processes of the saints did receive tremendous amount of respect and honour from the general masses in Indian public life and Vinoba Bhave was not an exception. His appeal appeared more alluring and more abiding. This was at the core of charismatic leadership of Vinoba Bhabe and the temporal success his Bhoodan movement.

6.6. Leadership in Ethnic Movement

Leadership constitutes perhaps the most significant aspect of an ethnic movement. It is often said that leaders of ethnic movements are a ‘conscious’ category since ethnic movements by definition have their enemies clearly identified and their grievances are firmly rooted in the history and culture. In this sense leaders in case of ethnic movements only bring forth the already existing discontentment on the surface. They channelize the existing grudges to set the overtone of the movement. The subjective orientations relating to culture, tradition and history are given an objective basis in the domain of agitational politics. Some extreme instrumentalist versions of ethnicity do hold the view that the leaders are in fact, the matchmakers of ethnic movement, they are instrumental in making people believe and understand as to how mundane cultural practices assume ethnic connotation and why such ethnic qualifications are needed to be asserted in order to secure the community’s stake in the burgeoning resource competition at the local/ regional level. Arguably then, ethnic movements depend upon leaders who are primarily indigenous and spontaneously grown out of the ethnic groups themselves. In case of a long drawn ethnic movement we can even experience almost all the possible phases of leadership that characterise the life cycle of a movement. The dynamics of Gorkhaland movement in Darjeeling hills, West Bengal, India may be worth noting a case here. Began in the early twentieth century the Indian Nepalis/ Gorkhas are still agitating for securing the political claim of a separate state within Indian Union for the ethnic Gorkhas. The century long biography of Gorkha agitation has not only surfaced the different phases of leadership—prophet, agitator, administrator—but also recorded the emergence of alternative leadership discrediting the stronghold of the already existing ones (the rise of Bimal Gurung, in case of Darjeeling’s Gorkha agitation, by displacing the one time infallible leadership of Subhas Ghising is a case in point).

6.7. Leadership in New Social Movements(NSMs) in India: Anti-Corruption, Chipko Movement, Narmada BachaoAndolan, SEWA

The emergence of New Social Movements (NSMs) in India is linked with the concept of civil society which opposes the states’ policies and their adverse effect on the people by mobilising its supporters for political actions under non-party banners. Anna Hazare’s leadership in India Against Corruption (IAC) movement of Spring 2011 is considered to be a charismatic one that attracted the peoples’ attention in a sufficient manner. Hazare, a self-styled Gandhain had opted for fasting until death demanding the enactment of long pending Jan Lokpal Bill. His non-party IAC campaign landed a significant movement against the corruptions of the bureaucracy and the political parties of India.

Anti-corruption movement was a new type of civil society movement that India saw in the recent past. However, post-independence India had witnessed many such civil society movements that focused on the conservation of environment and peoples’ livelihood. Chipko movement, a forest saving movement that thrived under the leadership of Sundarlal Bahuguna, also had many women leaders from the local marginalised groups as it started to spread over regions. The movement was influenced with the Gandhian notions of non-violence towards the environment. The Narmada Bachao Andolan (Save Narmada) that attracted the participation of the adivasis, farmers, environmentalists and human rights activists was against the large dams built across the river Narmada which gained its momentum with the leadership provided by Medha Patkar in 1985.MedhaPatkar also had followed Gandhian way of voicing out the dissent by fasting and other non-violent means of protests. Ela Bhatt, another woman behind the inception of India’s one of the largest women’s organisation—Self Employed Womens’ Association (SEWA, 1971)—also brought forth and led the economic empowerment and financial inclusion movement quite in Gandhian fashion especially his socio-economic philosophy of trusteeship.

7. Relationship between Leaders and Masses

Sociological treatment of the problem of mass-leader relationship is available in the contributions of Alberto Melucci (1990; 1996). He elaborated the ‘leader-constituency relationship’ in relational terms and argued that leadership is basically a relation between chief and his followers in which each party gives and receives certain goods and values (Melucci 1996: 337). Melucci is of the view that the foundation of leadership should be sought not in the qualities of the leader or in the dependency of his followers, but in the relationship, the types of relations that link the actors together. Leadership, according to this view, is then a form of interaction in which each of the actors makes specific investments and gets back specific advantages. This relationship persists as both the parties find it mutually advantageous. A continuous bargaining takes place in this otherwise mutually advantageous relationship as each seeks to reduce its costs and maximize benefits. The leader engages in this bargaining process from an advantaged position as most of the resources are under his/ her control—this also constitutes the power of the leader. If either of the parties feels that the relationship is not equitable, there will be attempts to restore the balance or to break off the relations. Issues like this give birth to situations like factionalism, alternative leadership or the dissolution of the movement itself.

Following Armand Mauss (1975), the relationship between leadership and masses may be explained through a series of three concentric rings or circles. The outer most rings represents a kind of public whose sympathies definitely lean in the direction of the particular movement’s programmes or ideology. However, they are not the enthusiasts of a movement, for their interests are not critically involved. Their support waxes and wanes with the movement’s own success and with the amount of pressure applied to the movement from outside. That is why they are often considered as the ‘fair-weather-friends’ by the more deeply committed members of the movement. Nevertheless, they can be very important in two respects: a) in providing a good deal of the financial support and other resources that the movement needs, and b) in using their votes and sheer numbers to add political strength to the movement. The next ring is consisting of individuals and organizations that have definite interests in the success of the movement, but these interests are not specifically focused on the movement. Nevertheless, these are very important members of the movement. They are frequently well educated and skilled in committee work and other kinds of organizational behaviour. They are often influential people whose public support for a movement will help to give it legitimacy and acceptance, especially if it begins as an unpopular movement suffering from repressive efforts by the government or by other traditional institutions. The inner most ring of a social movement is its heart or core. It contains the principal leaders and organizations having their goals exclusively in the success of the movement. The most zealous and committed members are also found in this core. If there is central coordinating organization committee, or other steering body for the movement, it is also located here. 

The success of the movement depends upon the quality of the membership distributed among the three rings, as well as upon their sheer size. Mere size in the outer most circles is very important, but it is no substitute for the commitment and skill required from the part of the members of the inner two circles, and especially the core one. A small public can give the appearance of a powerful mass movement, if it has a committed leadership, skilled in propaganda. The optimum circumstances for a movement would be a large outer circle of sympathizers, mobilized by an able and committed inner circle, which is surrounded by an aroused and influential middle circle (Mauss 1975: 38-71).

What is interesting is to note that the term ‘relationship’ in sociological parlance always involves two-way-traffic. Hence the relationship between the leader(s) and the masses should also be a dyadic one. However, the studies on social movements usually depict the relationship as a one-dimensional phenomenon. Conventional literature invariably argue that the aim of the movement participants—the general members of a movement—are basically to attain the goal set forth by their leaders in a movement situation. As if the masses were there just warming up before starting a race whistled out by the leaders. This is the picture to which most of the studies on social movement—those highlight leadership issue are amenable to. How the leaders have become successful in mobilizing the masses, how the leaders are changing or are forced to change their strategies, symbols and even agenda to enliven their project and to reinstate their mass base are some such critical issues whose exploration are rarely been made in sociology. Such an exercise, on the contrary, might lead one appreciate that the masses are neither silent spectators nor even their presence in the social movement is at all passive in nature. We can understand the relationship between two segments where the one segment, numbering a few or at times only one soul, is having an overpowering presence over the other segment usually as greatly numbered as the whole community / society itself. The masses in such depictions were represented merely as checkers within the check board where the leaders are the players. What actually happens in such one way production of relationship is that the voices of the masses get either submerged or they remain unheard of and therefore unattended. The point is that they were never silent but their silence is constructed as omnipresent in the overall biography of a movement—which at its best could be a partial reality. Their incapability is basically the incapacity of those who wish to ignore the agency of the masses. Overall, it is argued that the general mass—as represented in the relationship between followers and the leaders—are not at all in an underdog position. In fact, their voice needs careful listeners. The plea is therefore for the construction of sociology of social movement that could well address the issue of the relationship between the leaders and masses without bracketing, submerging, or even reifying the position of the masses in the overall progression of a movement. Sociology in this respect has many things to learn from social history. 

Some such efforts to reread the social history that guarantees agency to mass consciousness is made popular through the approaches like ‘history from below’ and ‘subaltern studies’ since the 1980s in Indian social sciences. Sumit Sarkar’s endeavour to construct ‘the history from below’ (Sarkar 1985) merits attention here. The history from below project as elaborated by Sarkar is an attempt to strike hard into this largely unexplored area. Such an approach would put greater emphasis on the forms of consciousness and self-activity of the general masses, without belittling the indispensable and often heroic role of the leaders. He went on substantiating his argument by picking up examples from the sphere of labour movements during the early 1920s. For example, the general strike in Bombay textiles of January 1919 was basically spontaneous, and labour rallies repeatedly rejected the counsels of moderation offered by Home Rule League Leaders. Sarkar further argued that the popular pressures in 1945-47 played an extremely important role in determining the cause of events that led to the coming of freedom with partition. Sarkar’s findings run contrary to the commonplace tendency of the historians to observe and study these facts as the results of top-level negotiations in isolation.

In a similar vein subaltern historians have also tried to develop the autonomy of the mass movements / subalterns from the grand nationalist elitist positions. The followers of subaltern approach argue that these movements—led by poor farmers, shepherds, workers, labourers, tribal people, and oppressed caste women—were relatively free and hardly influenced by the outside leadership. The consciousness and autonomy of these people is the foundation of Subaltern studies. Although they do not wipe out the question of leadership altogether, what they tried to develop is a critique to the conventional history writing that regarded people’s action as external to their consciousness (Guha 1999).

8. Ideology and Social Movement

Historically, the role of culture in social movements has been subsumed under the heading of ideology. Ideology is usually conceived of as a relatively stable and coherent set of values, beliefs, and goals associated with a movement or a broader, encompassing social entity, assumed to provide the rationale for defending or challenging various social arrangements and conditions (Snow 2004: 396). At the most general level, the ideology of a social movement always includes, as Touraine has pointed out, a more or less clearly articulated definition of the actor her/himself, the identification of an adversary, and the indication of ends, goals, objectives for which to struggle (Touraine 1977).

Ideology is considered to be a key analytical level for the understanding of social movements. The critical significance of ideology in the analysis of social movement has been elaborately discussed by M.S.A. Rao (2000). He was of the view that it is ideology that distinguishes a social movement from other varieties of collective behaviour. Rao, however, pursued the issue of ideology not in Marxian sense (ideology is located within the class structure and is the instrument of the ruling class to dupe the working class), nor even he followed Mannheim’s (who considered it as a means of discrediting an adversary) argument. Rather his treatment of ideology bears resonance with Clifford Geertz’s conceptualization. Following Geertz (1964), he considered ideology as a system of interacting symbols. As a symbolic system, it acts as a bridge between source analysis on the one hand and consequence analysis on the other. It interprets the environment and self-images of the movement participants. It codifies and organizes beliefs, myths, outlook and values; defines aspirations and interests and directs responses to specific social situations. Hence ideology in the context of social movement has to be treated not merely as a framework of consciousness, but also as the source of legitimizing actions. This notion of ideology more as a cultural system sets out the goals of a movement, maps the paths to be pursued to attend those goals. Ideology also distinguishes a social movement from other collective efforts which lack such content (Rao 2000: 6-8).

As the movement matures, two important aspects of ideology are thus called into play. Melucci mentions that a movement is subject to strong centrifugal pressures, due to both its own internal fragmentation and the initiatives of the adversary. The need to maintain organizational unity becomes stronger as the movement grows. Ideology, in this context, fulfils two important functions: first, the function of integration with respect to the movement as a whole. By the integrative function Melucci wanted to mean the role being played by ideology in controlling the deviant behaviour of the members and stabilizing certain rituals which could consolidate the movement. Ideology’s second important function, according to Melucci, is directed towards a strategic process through which movement mediates with the political system on the one hand and widens the support base by including those who were previously outside the conflict (Melucci 1996: 352).

9. Summary

Both the issues leadership and ideology are of crucial significance for the origin and sustenance of a social movement. In fact, a well-organized leadership and a consistent ideological frame distinguish social movement from other forms of collective behaviour. It should be noted that much like the concept of social movement, which is by definition a dynamic process, the relationship of both leadership and ideology to a movement is also not a static phenomenon. We have already noted how the pattern of leadership changes with different social movements. It is also possible that the nature of leadership may get changed so does its ideology especially in case of a long drawn social movement. The questions of ideology and leadership contribute not only to the sustenance of the movement but also to the different dynamics that a movement has to experience, which may even go on discounting its basic concerns. A movement may start with a specific leader and leadership pattern and also an ideology or it may acquire the same in the course of its development. Leadership and ideology thus continue to reflect upon the biography of a social movement as the most crucial factors that in fact feeds its dynamism.