Thesis advisor: Thibaud Marcesse / This is a case study of the 2020-21 Farmers’ Movement in India which brought an alliance among farmers who belong to historically different social groups by their social status, land ownership, and amount of land owned. It also brought together farmers and laborers as a united front, and for the first time, an alliance of urban-based individuals and civil society groups, workers, students, and opposition political parties came together to support the farmers and their cause. How do people of different social groups and ethnicities construct common interests and act collectively? I review the literature on the structural and historical theories of peasants’ uprisings, the collective action theory, and the political opportunity structure to explain why the movement emerged and how it emerged. I argue that the movement emerged as a consequence of economic grievances and the potential for mobilization which is determined by the political opportunity structure. Farmers feared that the Farm Laws that were intended to liberalize agricultural marketing by facilitating intrastate trade, contract farming, and direct marketing would lead to the collapse of the state government-regulated marketplaces and eventually to the collapse of the minimum support price system. The discontentment of farmers, farmers’ unions, and opposition parties provided the political opportunity structure for the movement. I argue that economic grievances and political opportunity structure are necessary conditions for the emergence of social movements, but they do not explain how people of different social groups and ethnicities construct common interests and act collectively. Communities converge on a common frame through the process of frame alignment. Therefore, framing is a necessary and sufficient condition for participation in a social movement. The process of frame alignment creates common interests and non-monetary selective incentives like solidary and purposive incentives which are necessary and sufficient conditions for collective action. / Thesis (MA) — Boston College, 2024. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Political Science.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:BOSTON/oai:dlib.bc.edu:bc-ir_109939 |
| Date | January 2024 |
| Creators | Boodhoo, Rubyna |
| Publisher | Boston College |
| Source Sets | Boston College |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, thesis |
| Format | electronic, application/pdf |
| Rights | Copyright is held by the author. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0). |
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