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daily12013-04-16T03:42:17ZWhat's in a Name? Or Why Clicktivism May Not Be Ruining Left Activism in India, At Least For Now
https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/revolution-2.0/whats-in-a-name-or-why-clicktivism-may-not-be-ruining-left-activism-in-india-at-least-for-now
<b>In a recent piece in the Guardian titled “Clicktivism Is Ruining Leftist Activism”, Micah White expressed severe concern that, in drawing on tactics of advertising and marketing research, digital activism is undermining “the passionate, ideological and total critique of consumer society”. His concerns are certainly shared by some in India: White's piece has been circulating on activist email lists where people noted with concern that e-activism may be replacing “the real thing” even in this country. But is the situation in India really this dire?</b>
<p align="JUSTIFY">Among those
who consider themselves activists in a more traditional fashion,
critical debates on what it means to be an activist certainly remain
alive and well. Among India's social movements, perhaps most
prominent, over the past decade, have been those that protest against
large-scale “development” projects and the displacement they tend
to cause – projects of which especially India's tribal people, or
<em>adivasis</em>,
often are the victims. In these circles, arguments against the use
of the Internet for activism often focus on the elitist character of
this tool: in a country where Internet penetration rates continue to
hover around a meagre five percent, frequently neither the people
affected nor the wider groups that need to be mobilised have access
to this resource. Clearly then, organising online is never
sufficient and, perhaps not surprisingly, debates about what is
called “armchair activism” consequently are both common and
intense. In a recent <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTnncO8kc-Y">video</a>
posted on YouTube, for example, the respected Himanshu Kumar – who
everyone will recognise as a grassroots activist –
called on the nation to support the <em>adivasis</em>
and their causes. In the same video, he also explicitly requested
people to get off the Internet: </p>
<blockquote>
<p align="JUSTIFY">
<em>Is
me jo shehero me rehne wale log hai, mujhe unse khas tor se kehna hai
ki aap sheher me baithe rahenge, net par thoda sa likh denge – usse
sarkar ko koi farak padne wala nahi hai. Na janta Internet padthi
hai na sarkar Internet padthi hai. Hum jo activist hai wohi aapas
mein Internet par pad lethe hai. Usse sarkar ki koi policiyan nahi
badal payenge, sarkar par pressure nahi create kar payenge. Jab tak
ham aam janta ke beech mein nahi jayenge, na to hame desh ki problems
pata challenge, na ham desh ke logon ko jaga payenge. </em></p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">
[To
the people in the cities, I want to especially say that, you keep
sitting in the cities, you write something on the Internet - it
doesn't make any difference to the government. Neither do people read
the Internet, nor does the government read the Internet. Only
activists like you and me read on the Internet. Through that, we
cannot change the policies of the government, we cannot create
pressure on the government. As long as we don't go among/approach
the common people, neither will we come to know the country's
problems, nor will we be able to awaken the people]. </p>
</blockquote>
<p align="JUSTIFY">Not
everybody I spoke to would have agreed with Kumar's argument. The
importance of mass mobilisation and the need to be in touch with
grassroots realities are recognised by all movement activists, as is
consequently the requirement to get active offline as much as online.
But whether mass mobilisation at the grassroots is the <em>only</em>
way forward is not something that everyone is convinced of. In the
context of the <a href="http://www.binayaksen.net/">Free Binayak Sen
campaign</a>, for example, there is considerable recognition that the
website was a vital complement to a well-organised offline campaign
to free Dr. Binayak Sen from jail, which kicked off in the spring of
2008. Sen is a community health doctor and civil liberties activist
who had worked for more than twenty five years among the <em>adivasis</em>
of Chhattisgarh, the heart of the current Maoist conflict, when he
was arrested on the basis of what many considered completely
baseless, yet non-bailable charges of being a Maoist himself, and
left to languish in jail for two years. A regularly updated website,
and related Facebook group and email list, soon became the focal
point for a massive outpouring of support for Sen from different
parts of the world, including in the form of a letter from twenty
Nobel Prize winners, as well as an important source of information on
the campaign for activists within the country. In May 2009, the
Indian Supreme Court finally released granted bail to Dr. Binayak
Sen. The Doctor's trial is currently ongoing.</p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">In
this context of critical debates, how do those who do see themselves
as activists, yet draw on the Internet as a significant tool to
publicise struggles, justify themselves? If the Internet can play a
role in changing matters at the grassroots, and has proven to do so
in the past, does it become possible to intensely use this tool and
still be recognised as an activist in a more traditional reading of
this word? The fact that most middle-class English speaking cadres
of movements are online, despite their protestations against online
activism for being elitist, may well play in the favour of advocates
of online protest: it does open up a space to argue for the relevance
of this medium, even if for a limited group, and for the importance
of its responsible use. Indeed, it may well be for this reason that
it is possible to watch on YouTube a number of videos in which
Himanshu Kumar shares his experiences at the grassroots, his own
discomfort with the medium notwithstanding. But it is not this
ambiguity that is at the heart of the claims to credibility of
advocates of online activism. Rather, as has always been the case,
it is their continued connectedness to the grassroots. How much you
are in the know of what happens at the grassroots; whether you have
physically joined struggles; to what extent you get your hands dirty
offline and show up for meetings, rallies, poster pasting, rather
than limiting your engagement to the online route – these are the
kind of elements that determine whether you are an online <em>activist</em>.
What you do offline remains as important as ever. To only
work online is not sufficient. </p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">Importantly,
such readings are frequently mirrored by those who do not have such
connections to the grassroots. In my research, I have more than once
come across “online activists” who started their conversation
with me by stating that they were not, in fact, activists at all.
Interestingly, Maesy Angelina has observed a similar reluctance to
identify as an activist among participants in the <a href="http://www.blanknoise.org/">Blank
Noise</a> project (personal communication and Angelina, forthcoming),
a campaign to combat street sexual harassment and, with its extensive
use of online tools over the seven years of its existence, one of the
paragons of online activism in India. While Maesy herself will blog
more about how Blank Noise participants understand activism later on
<a href="https://cis-india.org/research/dn">here,</a> (earlier
posts are available as well) at least in my research, the reason why
people refused the “activist” label was generally not because
they disapproved of what it might stand for. Rather, they saw a
clear difference between their own contribution and that of the
full-time activists who ceaselessly mobilise and organise people on
the ground, those who in many cases draw on a distinct and
easily-recognisable language of protest that infuses everything from
the shape protests take to activists' dressing sense in the process –
the “jholawallahs”, as
one person I follow on Twitter calls them, after the trademark cotton
bag that they often carry around. Those who refused the namecard of
an “activist” were clear that they would never have chosen such a
full-time activist's life; what new technology allowed them to do,
however, was to nevertheless make a contribution, even if often on a
smaller scale, of their own. As one person put it quite movingly:</p>
<blockquote>
<p align="JUSTIFY">
I believe that, I think that ordinary people, and I am <em>convinced</em>,
that they can do, can use this medium to actually make a difference,
you know or bring about change, to change the world. You know, these
dreams that you have sometimes, “I want to change the world in some
way” [laughs]. You know? I do believe that... it's possible. And
you don't have to be an activist or working in an NGO. You can be
working anywhere, you can be doing anything as your day job, you
know, or your regular job. But, you can contribute.</p>
</blockquote>
<p align="JUSTIFY">Clearly,
then, critical readings of what it means to be an activist are common
not only among those who are activists in a more traditional sense,
but among those who focus on exploring the use of new tools for
social change as well: the kind of credibility, based on offline
experience, that attaches to more traditional activists is not
something they claim for themselves. But what they understand is
that new technologies have facilitated a qualitatively new kind of
engagement with movements, with activism, with social change. And
what such “not-activists” do claim is that this has made it
possible for ordinary people to now also make a difference, even
though small that difference often may be. </p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">In
many ways this type of involvement is actually not new, as
contributions of non-activists have always played an important role
in the survival and evolutions of movements, especially at times of
great urgency: doctors who are ready to treat patients for free;
lawyers who supply legal advice without expecting anything in return;
people with comfortable jobs in the private sector who one knows one
can rely on for donations when required (most movements in India
survive financially by relying solely or mostly on donations by
private persons). What is new with the introduction of the Internet
is that the possibility of contributions by people who are not
activists are now extended into new areas, as it has become much
easier to contribute to publicising and building community around
issues that are close to movements' heart as well.</p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">So
how to evaluate White's claim that clicktivism is ruining Left
activism in the Indian context then? For one thing, it is important
to remember that we simply do not – or not yet at least – have
platforms such as <a href="http://moveon.org/">MoveOn</a> or <a href="http://avaaz.org/">Avaaz</a>,
that draw, as White explains, on market ideology to conveniently
break down a seemingly endless number of political campaigns into
little bites for easy individual consumption with the click of a
mouse button. Left activism in India, even online, remains firmly
embedded in <em>communities</em>
of engagement. Surely e-petitions, for example, are popular here as
much as elsewhere. But the point to remember is that they rarely
circulate in isolation. Instead, they emerge from the email lists,
from the postings and repostings as well as conversations on
Facebook, from the blogs around which much Left activism online
revolves. And crucial to these uses of the Internet as a tool for
social change is not clicking, but engagement and conversation.
Perhaps it is for this reason that even a landmark campaign such as
Free Binayak Sen has hardly received any attention in the
international online activists' arena: campaigns such as this do not
revolve around the number of clicks they get, nor around flash-points
or events shaped to satisfy the hunger of the international media,
valuable as some may argue these can be; rather, they are intended
for the long haul, as they attempt to build on existing collectives
to extend the communities of solidarity around issues that move and
drive the Left in this neoliberal age. Even online, the politics can
and does infuse the method, at least for now. </p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">This,
then, gives something to ponder over. It is true that working among
people, offline, remains of crucial importance if Left movements in
the country are to achieve their goals. But perhaps it is worth
considering more seriously the value and role of this pool of people
willing and available to help building such communities in a more or
less sustained fashion online (I am not talking about the accidental
activist here), without necessarily wanting to take on a core
“activist”'s role. Yes, perhaps their work does not amount to
activism as we know it. But nevertheless, it may well be that in
many cases the efforts of these committed individuals do not amount
to distractions, but to gravy: extras that help ensuring that more
and more people start to care as the message of social movements is
amplified to a much larger audience than might have otherwise been
the case, perhaps even getting many more people involved, while also
acutely aware of their own limitations when it comes to achieving
fundamental, lasting social change. In fact, perhaps the Left would
also do well to wonder whether it can afford to lose this valuable
support: as I will document in a future blog post, with the rise of
the Internet in India, online initiatives have also emerged that take
neither of the stances described above, but that instead explicitly,
and at times aggressively, seek to present themselves as a
forward-looking <em>alternative</em> to the existing progressive
politics in this country. A lack of engagement on the part of the
Left with supporters online would effectively entail a ceding of the
space to such challengers. </p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">The
point to remember for now, however, is that many of those active in
online campaigns are acutely aware themselves not only of the
potential of their work, but also of its limitations. What we do
need to do, however, is to keep firmly alive this tension and debate
surrounding what it means to be an activist, as well as to remain
vigilant that the dazzling charms of the tools do not, in the long
term, blind us to our politics. At the moment, it seems to be the
continuing vibrancy of the Left in India that makes it difficult for
anyone who wants to get seriously involved with movement politics to
consider online activism a sufficient replacement. It is the
endurance of these attitudes of continuous critical inquiry that will
ensure that, clicktivism or not, Left activism will remain firmly
alive in this country in the future as well – in the hearts and
minds of activists and non-activists alike. <br /></p>
<p align="JUSTIFY"><br /></p>
<p align="JUSTIFY"><em>With
thanks to Prasad Krishna for assistance with the translation.</em></p>
<p align="JUSTIFY"> </p>
<p align="JUSTIFY"><strong>References</strong></p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">Angelina,
M. (forthcoming). 'Beyond the Digital: Understanding Contemporary
Youth Activism in Urban India' (working title). MA thesis. The Hague,
International Institute of Social Studies – Erasmus University of
Rotterdam.</p>
<p align="JUSTIFY"> </p>
<p align="JUSTIFY"> </p>
<p align="JUSTIFY"> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/revolution-2.0/whats-in-a-name-or-why-clicktivism-may-not-be-ruining-left-activism-in-india-at-least-for-now'>https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/revolution-2.0/whats-in-a-name-or-why-clicktivism-may-not-be-ruining-left-activism-in-india-at-least-for-now</a>
</p>
No publisheranjahistories of internet in IndiaDigital ActivismmovementsResearch2011-08-02T09:25:39ZBlog EntryInquilab 2.0? Reflections on Online Activism in India*
https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/revolution-2.0/digiactivprop
<b>Research and activism on the Internet in India remain fledgling in spite the media hype, says Anja Kovacs in her blog post that charts online activism in India as it has emerged. </b>
<p>Since the late 1990s when protesters against the WTO in Seattle used a variety of new technologies to revolutionize their ways of protesting so as to further their old goals in the information age, much has been made of the possibilities that new technologies seem to offer social movements. The emergence of Web 2.0 seems to have only multiplied the possibilities of building on the Internet's democratising potentials, so widely heralded since the rise of the commercial Internet in the 1990s, and since then, the use of social media for social change has received widespread media attention worldwide. From Spain to Mexico, activists used the Internet as a central tool in their efforts to organise and mobilise – be it to express their stand against a war in Iraq, against a Costa Rican Free Trade Agreement with the United States, to mobilise support for the Zapatistas of Chiapas, or more recently, to push for a change of guard in Iran.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>In 2009, when Nisha Susan launched the Pink Chaddi campaign, the 'ICT for Revolution' buzz finally seemed to have reached India as well. Phenomenally successful in terms of the attention it generated for the issue it sought to address, the campaign sought to protest in a humorous fashion against attacks on women pub-goers in Karnataka by Hindu right wing elements. In only a matter of weeks, Facebook associated with the campaign – 'The Consortium of Pub-going, Loose and Forward Women', which gathered tens of thousands of members. It was ultimately killed off when Susan's Facebook account was cracked by rivals. The campaign was perhaps the singular most successful account of ‘digital activism’ in India so far, and an impressive one by all measures.</p>
<p>The creativity of the campaign should not come as a surprise to those familiar with the long and rich history of activism for social change in India. Organised social actors have been critical influences in the emergence of new social identities as well as on critical policy junctures from colonial times onwards, developing a fascinating and unmistakably Indian language of protest in the process (see Kumar 1997 and Zubaan 2006 for examples from feminist movement).</p>
<p> </p>
<p>As Raka Ray and Mary Faizod Katzenstein (2006) have pointed out, in the post-independence period, such organised activism for long was connected by at least verbal – if not actual – commitment to the common master frame of poverty alleviation and the ending of inequality and injustice, and this irrespective of the particular issues groups were working on. Since the late 1980s, however, a number of far-reaching changes have taken place in India. This period has been marked by the definite demise of secular democratic socialism as the dominant script of the Indian state and its simultaneous replacement by neo-liberalism. Moreover, in the same period, Hindu nationalism as an ideology too has gone from strength to strength, with only in the last five years a slowdown in its ascendancy. While for many traditional social movements of the Left the commitment to social justice remains, in this context a space has undeniably been created for groups with a very different agenda. The considerable popularity of organisations such as Vishwa Hindu Parishad and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, both Hindu nationalist organisations, are prime indications of these transformations. However, the fragmentation of the activist space did not only benefit reactionary elements of society. The final emergence into visibility of a well-articulated middle class queer politics, for example, too, may well in many ways have been facilitated by the evolutions of the past 20 years. Although this point has been mostly elaborated in the context of the US (Hennessey 2000), in India, too, this seems to ring true at least in some senses.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>The general shape-shifting of activism in India since the 1990s is not the only contextual factor that deserves obvious consideration in a study like this. In addition, since independence a close link has been forged in policy and people's imagination alike between science and technology on the one hand and development paradigms in India on the other. Not everyone agrees on the benefits of this association: all too frequently, the struggles of grassroots social movements are directed precisely against the outcomes or consequences of a supposedly 'scientifically' inspired development policy. The neo-liberal era is no exception to this: as Carol Upadhya (2004) has shown quite convincingly, the economic reform policies that are at the heart of neo-liberalism have been inspired first and foremost by the information technology sector in India, which has also in turn been their first beneficiary. And today as earlier, Asha Achuthan (2009) has pointed out, in the resistance to these policies, the subaltern who is the agent of grassroots social movements is frequently associated with a pre-technological purity that needs to be maintained in order to resist discourses and material consequences of technological change themselves. In popular discourses, at least, attitudes towards technology inevitably come in a binary mode.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Seeing the context in which digital activism in India has emerged, a number of pressing questions regarding the new forms that even progressive activism takes as it adopts new tools and methods, then, immediately offer themselves. Leaving aside the activities of right wing groups in India, who are the actors that occupy this space for activism and what are their relationship with offline activists groups? Which are the issues online activism seeks to address, and what are its master narratives, goals and audiences? Where does it locate problems in today's society, and what kind of solutions does it propose? How does it posit its relation to the global/international and to the offline-local; to dominant understandings of science and technology, development, or desirable social change? How are these understandings reflected in online activism, including in the choice and use of technologies but also in the discourses that are deployed and the audiences that are targeted? What are its methods, its strategies, its ways of organising? What role is played by organisations, collectives, networks, individuals? In what ways is the field marked by the conjuncture at which it emerged? Do those who first occupy (most of) it also set the parameters? Or do its tools fashion online activism's very conditions of existence?</p>
<p>The value of greater insight into these issues is not immediately apparent to all. For one thing, some would argue that, as connectivity in the emerging IT superpower remains limited, the importance of these questions to those concerned with social justice in India is really marginal. It is true that while commercial Internet services have been available in the country since 1995, for long the number of connections remained abysmally low. Even today, the number of subscriptions has only just crossed the 14 million mark, and barely half of these are broadband subscriptions, severely limiting the usefulness of a wide range of potential online activism tools (Telecom Regulatory Authority of India 2009 – figures are for the second quarter of 2009). According to I-Cube 2008 report (IMRB and Internet and Mobile Association of India 2008), there were an estimated 57 million claimed urban Internet users in the country in September 2008 and an estimated 42 million active urban Internet users. Corresponding figures for Internet users in rural areas in March 2008 were 5.5 million and 3.3 million respectively. Almost 88 million Indians were believed to be computer-literate at the time. Clearly, then, online activists are a tiny section of an already fairly small, privileged group, and at least in a direct sense, the availability of new tools is thus indeed unlikely to affect all activists or activism in the country.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Some of my own starting points while embarking on this study may seem to further give fuel to arguments against the value of this research. The idea of investigating online activism in India as it emerges followed from my observation – and a troubling one at that for me – that so far, and despite all the hype internationally, more traditional grassroots movements in India seem to have been slow to embrace the Internet as an integral part of their awareness raising and mobilisation strategies. Although they may attract the largest numbers of activists offline, the many so-called 'new' social movements that have emerged since the 1970s and that remain important actors pushing for social change seem most conspicuous by their relative absence online. This is especially true of those critical of current development paradigms and practices: movements fighting against dams, special economic zones or land acquisitions for “development” purposes seem visible only in relatively fragmented and generally marginal ways. Instead, middle-class actors addressing middle class audiences on middle class issues seem to be the flag bearers of Internet activism in India – the Pink Chaddi campaign or VoteReport India, a “collaborative citizen-driven election monitoring platform for the 2009 Indian general elections” (see votereport.in/blog/about) perhaps among the most well-known illustrations of this argument.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Both points are valid, and yet, while inquilab it may not be, to conclude from this that the study of online activism automatically is of only very limited value would be short-sighted. Indeed, even if the hypothesis that Internet activism is dominated by middle class actors who address middle class concerns is validated (note that in any case considerable segments of the leadership and cadre of grassroots movements, too, tend to come from middle class backgrounds), this is likely to affect all those interested in affecting social change, even if perhaps in varying degrees. For one thing, it would mean that as the public sphere is reshaped, important new quarters of its landscape are inhabited only be the elite, contradicting the still widely popular and even cherished belief (at least among those who are familiar with the Internet) that the Internet is a democratising force. Instead, the proportional visibility in the public sphere of dissenting viewpoints on development, science, neo-liberalism, progress, the state will only decrease. In addition, then, it may also indicate a further refracting of the activism landscape and its master narratives and methods, where different segments of activists increasingly need to vie with each other for recognition and validation of their respective understandings of political processes and of appropriate forms of engaging with these. As such battles intensify it is not too risky to make a prognosis on who will be the main losers. If, in an era in which the old activist master narrative of justice for all remains under strident attack, civil society has come to occupy at the expense of political society (a useful distinction first made by Parth Chatterjee in Chatterjee 2004) a whole arena of activism, this would indeed need to be a cause of concern for all. In order to gauge its ramifications, it is however, crucial to first of all understand in which ways and to what extent this statement rings true.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>The current study may well not be able to fully develop all the above and other theoretical strands as they emerge in the course of this research. But what it does promise to do is to outline the breaks and continuities that mark the make-up, strategies, audiences and goals of those who embrace the new possibilities that the Internet provides at the same time as the information age so fundamentally reconstitutes our society. As a starting point for the analysis, this research will therefore, attempt to map the online activism that has taken place in India so far, focusing more specifically on the forms of activism that leave a public record on the Internet (a more extensive debate of various definitional issues is in order – I will take this up in a separate blog post, to follow later, however). At the core of the research will be the construction of a database pertaining to online activism in India with links to email lists, blogs, Facebook groups, popular hash tags and the like. Although much of the activism I will be looking at will be centred around what has come to be known as 'social media', my focus is thus broader than that, as older tools such as e-petitions, discussion boards and list servs, too, will be included in this study. The aim is to be as comprehensive as possible, although for the database to ever be complete will, of course, be an impossibility. Moreover, since only data available in the English language will be collected, the database will automatically have its limitations. The database will be further complemented by interviews with activists who have been involved in key online campaigns and, where appropriate, case studies. It is the data thus gathered that will form the basis of our analysis.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>While the scope of the study is thus admittedly ambitious, the fact that online activism in India is a fairly recent affair – little happened before 2002, and it has only really taken off in the past three years or so – makes this venture not an impossible one. The contribution I hope to make through this research is not simply to work on the Indian context, however. Despite the media hype surrounding the possibilities of the Internet for social change, research on the Internet and activism more generally remains limited so far. The paucity is perhaps particularly acute where activism and social media are concerned (Postill 2009). Moreover, the work that does exist, I argue, tends to look mostly at activists' use of one particular tool, for example YouTube, or Facebook. Sight is thus generally lost of the larger cyberecology of communication in which this use must be located, preventing an opportunity for genuine insight into the ways in which activism is reconfigured from materialising. By using a much wider lens, this research hopes to make a beginning to correcting this lacuna. It is in this way that the importance of the changes that are underway in the Indian activist landscape as elsewhere can be appropriately assessed.</p>
<p> </p>
<p align="JUSTIFY"><em><strong>*
Inquilab means revolution</strong></em></p>
<p align="JUSTIFY"> </p>
<p align="JUSTIFY"><strong>References</strong></p>
<p align="JUSTIFY"> </p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">Achuthan, Asha (2009).
Re-Wiring Bodies. Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore.
<a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/rewiring/review">http://www.cis-india.org/research/cis-raw/histories/rewiring/review</a>,
last accessed on 15 January 2010.</p>
<p align="JUSTIFY"> </p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">Chatterjee, Partha
(2004). <em>The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular
Politics in Most of the World</em>. Delhi: Permanent Black.</p>
<p align="JUSTIFY"> </p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">Hennessy, Rosemary
(2000). <em>Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism</em>.
London: Routledge.</p>
<p align="JUSTIFY"> </p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">IMRB and Internet and
Mobile Association of India (2008). I-Cube 2008: Facilitating Citins,
Altins, Fortins (Faster, Higher, Stronger) Internet in India. IMRB
and Internet and Mobile Association of India, Mumbai. <a href="http://www.iamai.in/">www.iamai.in/</a>,
last accessed on 15 January 2010.</p>
<p align="JUSTIFY"> </p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">Kumar, Radha (1997). <em>The
History of Doing: An Illustrated Account of Movements for Women's
Rights and Feminism in India 1800-1990</em>. New Delhi: Zubaan.</p>
<p align="JUSTIFY"> </p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">Postill, John (2009).
Thoughts on Anthropology and Social Media Activism.
<em>Media/Anthropology</em>,
<a href="http://johnpostill.wordpress.com/2009/11/14/thoughts-on-anthropology-and-social-media-activism/">http://johnpostill.wordpress.com/2009/11/14/thoughts-on-anthropology-and-social-media-activism/</a><a href="http://johnpostill.wordpress.com/2009/11/14/thoughts-on-anthropology-and-social-media-activism/">,
</a>last accessed on 15 January 2010.</p>
<p align="JUSTIFY"> </p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">Ray, Raka and Mary
Fainsod Katzenstein (2006). Introduction: In the Beginning, There Was
the Nehruvian State. In Raka Ray and Mary Fainsod Katzenstein
(eds.). <em>Social Movements in India: Poverty, Power, and Politics.</em>
New Delhi: Oxford University Press.</p>
<p align="JUSTIFY"> </p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">Telecom Regulatory
Authority of India (2009). The Indian Telecom Services Performance
Indicators, April-June 2009. Telecom Regulatory Authority of India,
New Delhi. <a href="http://www.trai.gov.in/">www.trai.gov.in</a><a href="http://www.trai.gov.in/">,
</a>last accessed on 15 January 2010.</p>
<p align="JUSTIFY"> </p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">Upadhya, Carol (2004). A
New Transnational Capitalist Class: Capital Flows, Business Networks
and Entrepreneurs in the Indian Software Industry. <em>Economic and
Political Weekly</em>, 39(48): 5141-5151.</p>
<p align="JUSTIFY"> </p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">Zubaan (2006). <em>Poster
Women: A Visual History of the Women's Movement in India</em>. New
Delhi: Zubaan.</p>
<p align="JUSTIFY"> </p>
<p align="JUSTIFY"> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/revolution-2.0/digiactivprop'>https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/revolution-2.0/digiactivprop</a>
</p>
No publishernishanthistories of internet in IndiaSocial mediaDigital ActivismCyberspaceAccess to Medicineinternet and societyResearchCybercultures2011-08-02T09:25:30ZBlog Entry