Grassroots Knowledge as a Weapon Against Authoritarian Populist Regimes: The People’s Rights Movement’s Campaign Against Aadhaar in India

Mainstream social movement theory has proven to suffer from two significant theoretical blind spots. Although the theoretical approach is apt to understand social movements in advanced capitalist countries at the peak of the growth of the welfare state, it is no longer sufficient in explaining contentious class mobilization in late neoliberal times (Della Porta, 2017; Cini et al., 2017). While social movement scholars have recently taken a renewed interest in class mobilisations, most of the literature focuses on urban and industrial settings in European contexts. Secondly, SMT has long been critiqued for its overwhelmingly western-centric bias, pointing towards the distinct nature of development in post-colonial societies as well as the characteristics of social movements within these contexts (Cox et al., 2017; Fadaee, 2017). Moreover, scholars have by now made abundantly clear the need to move away from overly structuralist approaches in favour of a more agency-oriented perspective in the study of social movement strategy. Additionaly, in this paper I suggest to adopt an equally finegrained, agentic and relational approach to understanding different regime types, which moves beyond the traditional concept of “political opportunity structures” (Tilly, 2015). In light of these gaps in social movement literature, this paper aims to understand how movements strategically respond to new forms of (technological) control employed by authoritarian populist regimes. In doing so, it adds to the scant literature on knowledge production and social movements while bridging it with literature on authoritarian populism by exploring how grassroots knowledge is strategically mobilized and used tactically against populist state narratives of anti-corruption and (neoliberal) development. I thereby aim to contribute to ongoing efforts of decentering Europe and Northern America/ the “Global North” in social movement studies by focusing my research efforts on social mobilisations in India. This paper is based on my PhD project which focuses more broadly on the strategies of resistance of landless peasant movements in the wake of solidifying authoritarian populism in India. For this particular paper, I adopt a single case-study design through an in-depth exploration of a campaign waged by key actors within India’s “people’s rights movement” space against the mandatory imposition of a national biometric identity system called Aadhaar (“foundation” in English). Data was collected through 10 interviews with key activists and human rights advocates and an additional document analysis.