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The last two decades have witnessed a veritable mushrooming of NGOs in India. What, however, is inadequately appreciated is that the conversion of voluntarism into primarily a favoured instrumentality for developmental intervention has changed what was once an organic part of civil society into merely a sector --an appendage of the developmental apparatus of the state. Further, this process of instrumental appropriation has resulted in these agencies of self-activity losing both their autonomy and political-transformative edge. What is required, therefore, is to reorientate voluntarism from a framework of subserving the needs of delivery to one promoting self-governance in the widest sense.

The post-Cold War project of globalization is changing the established notion of liberal democracy and local governance. The political autonomy of the liberal state is being increasingly compromised in favor of market forces and local governance more and more exposed to direct penetration by global and corporate power structures. This change has far-reaching implications for the future of democracy, particularly in the Third World. Aware of this challenge, new social movements in India, active at the grass roots of politics, are resisting global penetration of local communities, using new political spaces opened up by the retreat of the state from socioeconomic arenas. Through an inventive politics of struggle over issues concerning local communities and their empowerment, they articulate a vision of democracy as a creative political process, operative primarily at the local level. Their politics are addressed to establishing direct access and control of people over their immediate environment—economic, social, and cultural. To ensure that, they seek to transcend old dichotomies between state and society, global and local, political and social—and open up new possibilities for democracy in India.

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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.