Just when the global discourse on democracy has become unidimensional, purveying liberal democracy as the one and universally desirable model, and when the Indian State has begun to link itself to the vertical hierarchy of global structures of economic and political power, strong countervailing political and social movements have emerged in India at the regional and local levels. These movements, active at the grass roots of Indian Politics for over three decades, are now confronting the Indian state on the issue of globalization even as they get directly involved into conflicts with the institutions and organizations representing the global economic and political power. In the process, they articulate a new political discourse on democracy and invent political practices with the aim of linking (local) governance directly to the people. The avowed goal of these movements is to bring the immediate political, economic, cultural and ecological environment in which people live within their own reach and control. In their own words: bringing democracy back to people. Their politics is about withdrawal of legitimacy to the hegemonic and exclusionary structures of political power and horizontalize the vertical structures of social hierarchy, through strengthening local democracy rather than bidding for state power, nationally.

In the other political discourse led by Indian metropolitan elites and its penumbra of a small but politically vocal new middle-class, all forms of governance other than the liberal democracy, particularly the local-communiterian ones, are deemed suspect. They characterize the micro-movements’ politics of protest against globalization- i.e. the movements’ demand for transparency, accountability, and a more direct role in decision making- as ‘anti-development’ and ‘anti-national’. The metropolitan elites see such politics of movements’ as asymatric and structurally incongruent vis-a-vis the macro institutional structures of the nation state and the market economy. Consequently, in the mainstream national discourse democracy is no longer seen as essentially a participatory process of decision making. Today it, (the liberal democracy) is viewed primarily as a form/instrument of governance which ensures pliability and predictability of governments, especially of the peripheral and semi-peripheral democracies, in the world arena and secures political and cultural hegemony of the globalized elites within a country.

The paper will analyze the above two discourses and the politics they have given rise to in a historical-analytical perspective. It is hoped that the analysis will unfold the dialectic between the working of liberal democratic state responding to pulls and pressures of globalization and the emergent politics of micro-movements seeking to redefine democracy in participative terms, and that it would enable a more substantive discussion on the future of Indian democracy. The emperical materials for the analysis will be drawn from available case-studies of movements’ and from the survey-studies of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies.