Emilia Lewartowska and Lone Riisgaard
Vikalp Sangam (or Alternatives Confluence) is a national platform and process established in India in 2014 to document, network, and create collaborations amongst grassroots movements and groups constructing alternative frameworks for justice, equity, and ecological sustainability. Last November, authors Emilia Lewartowska and Lone Riisgaard attended the VS General Assembly meeting in Shoranur, Kerala. In this article, they offer reflections on participatory democratic processes within multi-level alternative organising, illustrating how the VS process connects the global level with the local experimentations on the ground. Rather than aiming to scale up and provide a unified front, the VS process seeks to scale out and deep, interconnecting a pluriversality of experiences, practices voices and justice demands.
Let us start from the end, with the very last shared moment between the participants of the Vikalp Sangam General Assembly meeting held in Shoranur, Kerala, in November 2023.
It is a moment of collective offerings, where members share material and non-material objects and symbolic creations that represent their communities and the attachment they have to them. We all stand in a circle, with people coming forward one by one to say a few words about their offering. Participants share indigenous seeds only found in a particular region of the Himalayas, hand-woven piece of fabric made of organic khadi cotton, leaves and flowers that appear in special moments of the cycle of life, or personally designed postcards with colourful doodles picturing alternative futures. Other offerings encompass local food items, culturally significant handmade objects, or creative expressions like a photo album featuring the participants from the gathering. Not only do people share stories and curiosities around their offerings, but they also express wishful thinking for the future of the Vikalp Sangam process, filled with gratitude, hopefulness, and care.
This very special sharing circle concluded a 3-day long gathering of more than 40 grassroots organizations and people’s movements (members of the Vikalp Sangam General Assembly) working on alternative organizing in different realms of socio-ecological just transformations. It illustrates not only the vast diversity of the participating organizations but also how the Vikalp Sangham gathering establishes a space that celebrates pluriversality, open participation, and sharing.
This article is based on the joint fieldwork of the two authors during the meeting, including observations and interviews, offering some reflections on multi-level alternative organizing and the role of the participatory democratic processes in it. We start by introducing the global context in which our discussion is situated. We then zoom in on the Indian dimension more specifically, to later illustrate how the Vikalp Sangam process connects the global level with the local experimentations on the ground. Rather than aiming to scale up and provide a unified front, they seek to scale out and deep, interconnecting a pluriversality of justice demands.
Global dimension and the crisis of liberal representative democracy
There is widespread recognition that the liberal representative democracy model is facing immense challenges in adequately addressing the rapidly expanding global polycrisis, and that it is increasingly unable to sustain cohesion and legitimacy. Calls are ramping up for deeper and more participatory forms of democracy and they are often rooted in a deeper critique of the imposition of Western liberal democracy, presented as the only legitimate mode of governance globally, and the ensuing process of often violent marginalization of other forms of governance. Across the globe, a multitude of grassroots movements are working to revive and regenerate traditional governance forms building on shared authority and grounded in collective management of the local commons (Conway & Singh, 2011).
This global resistance and quest for more participatory and direct forms of democracy – often named the alter-globalisation or the global justice movement – dates back to the Zapatista uprising against the Mexican government and the North American free trade agreement in 1994, along with the establishment of La Via Campesina and later on the World Social Forum. While it was the indigenous people and small peasants that initially fronted this international mobilization, with the world-wide economic crisis of 2008 followed by the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement its global nature was thoroughly cemented as not only denouncing the neoliberal order but importantly also seeking to renew, revive and experiment with more direct democratic forms of governance. Hence, despite the immense varieties of local manifestations, this global phenomenon is characterized by a strong belief in bottom-up social change, where the goal is not to take over the state, but rather to create autonomous and prefigurative spaces through direct democratic practices.
Zooming in on the Indian context
While it is important to understand initiatives like Vikalp Sangam in this global context, it is also essential to shed light on the more localized and grassroots visions of democracy which (re)emerge around the world and often revitalize much deeper roots of emancipatory democratic experimentalism. In fact, the pursuit of political decentralization has a long history within the Indian context. As an example, one can invoke the Gandhian philosophy of swaraj, popularized during India’s struggle for independence, and roughly translating into ‘self-rule’. Gandhi’s vision of Free India was based on strong political and administrative decentralization with the village unit at the core, following a long-standing tradition of ancient Indian Village Republics and tribal communism. Gandhi’s notion of democracy was one characterized by non-violence, based on decentralization of economic and political power in the form of, more or less, self-sufficient and self-governing village communities, adapted according to the modern circumstances and needs while recognizing their shortcomings (for a comprehensive overview of Indian Rural Republics, see Gandhian Constitution for Free India, 1946, SR.43-76). A more recent reworking of the Gandhian notion of swaraj includes an alternative framework emerging from grassroots practices in India called Radical Ecological Democracy (RED) or eco-swaraj, which further extends the democratic responsibility towards the rest of nature (Kothari, 2014; Shrivastava & Kothari, 2012).
Local materializations of radical ecological democracy have been long mushrooming all over the country, taking different shapes and forms. One such example can be found in “sangha”, or a loosely defined village-level community governance model practiced in some parts of India within alternative organizing. While the origin of the term can be traced back to the religious Buddhist community of monks with the goal of spreading democracy in early India (between approx. 600 B.C. and 400 A.D), today sangha represents a vibrant site of participatory democracy in various alternative communities and across different levels. Such grassroots expressions of democracy represent possible openings for the devolution of power to the smallest unit of people’s collectives and they differ from (although are not necessarily in opposition to) the formalized state-led local governance systems like the Panchayati Raj. All in all, they revitalize traditional conceptions of democracy while taking up the democratic processes as tools of resistance for broader transformation (Bajpai et al., 2022).
Connecting the global with the local
So, how do we connect these two levels, that is the global picture with the sites of grassroot democratic experimentalism? This is where the Vikalp Sangam network may be positioned.
Vikalp Sangam (Hindi for ‘Alternatives Confluence’) is an evolving process and platform started in 2014 that brings together over 90 movements and grassroots organizations in India. Their work includes documentation and research, outreach and advocacy, networking on both local, national, and international levels, as well as organization and coordination of Sangams, and physical gatherings for people working on similar issues. VS is democratically governed in a decentralized manner. Its governance structure includes the General Assembly (comprised of all member organizations), a Facilitation Team (a handful of organizations anchoring the main processes), and several task and working groups. It combines locally grounded cases working on specific issues and brings them together around a common set of visions and values articulated in the Alternative Transformation Framework (ATF), an evolving document currently in its 7th avatar (Vikalp Sangam, 2024)[1].
Intersectionality for multi-dimensional justice
Through collaboration between different movements, a lot of VS members emphasized how the exposure to diverse topics and themes has broadened their personal and professional intellectual horizons and allowed them to expand further than just “their own cause”. Being part of VS feeds new concepts into the work of member organizations and helps them understand interconnections between different spheres of transformation, as well as between sources of oppression. Exposure to a whole range of diverse issues fosters intersectional perspectives and makes the members look outside their “bubble”, providing new information and learning, and creating broad-case perspectives and visions. It creates a collective intelligence about constructing alternative models through different levels and across thematic sector relations. “Before joining VS, I would label people as “environmentalist”, “Dalit activist”, or whatever that category was. This approach creates divides. Coming together in a network allows you to challenge these divisions and have open dialogues with each other”, one member said. By bringing representation of different social groups to the network, members create enhanced sensibility, visibility, and awareness around issues pertaining to their area of work.
What is more, the intergenerational character of the network was highlighted as particularly valuable, as more experienced members can pass on their wisdom while youth can share their enthusiasm, passion, and experiences, while taking up leadership roles. As one member put it, “Whatever I do know, I have to lean on younger shoulders. (…) I feel by connecting to them, I’m able to see further.”. In addition, members reported that exposure to realities on the ground helps them to translate abstract theories into grassroot-level evidence, and vice versa – frame the issues they encounter in their work in more abstract, theoretical terms.
The intermediary nature of the network also presents some challenges, especially when it comes to the ambition to bring the grassroots closer to its work. Right now, VS comprises of members of organizations working with people on the ground, but often not the actual communities in question. As one member put it, the themes and inquiries in the VS process should surface “in conversations with communities at the community’s sites, at the community’s terms, in the community’s language”, and the ATF itself should be updated with community inputs. There are certain barriers for this to happen, such as the incredible diversity of the Indian language landscape and localized contexts in the first place, which would require a substantial human power, time, and resources to process. In that sense, scaling deep processes require more effort. Other aspects consist in not fully accessible language and forms of knowledge creation, having a fairly academicized and intellectualized nature which creates a gap between member organizations and the grassroot communities they represent. Nonetheless, VS actively creates spaces that aim at countering some of these dynamics, for example through the coordination of regional Sangam gatherings, held in local languages and inviting more grassroot representatives, as well as some thematic ones, i.e.: Traditional Worldviews sangham (2022), or Traditional Governance sangham (2024), where majority of participants were from communities. In addition, a number of documentation and research outputs on alternative organizing is done in a participatory manner with the central involvement of the communities on the ground (e.g.: Kothari et al., 2019).
Local food is always a source of joy during VS gatherings, as well as moments of socializing through games, leisure activities, and visits
So, why be part of a network? Collaborative nature and enhanced impact of Vikalp Sangam
When asked what motivated different members to join the network, many reported that Vikalp Sangam is a space for collaboration between like-minded organizations working on alternatives, in a collective exercise of envisioning the future. Nowadays, as local-level issues are intimately connected to the bigger, global picture, networking at different levels is essential. VS connects grassroot struggles with a larger context and it gives visibility to the issues that individual organizations care about. The network widens the impact of a single organization, and it allows members to strengthen their voices in a collective effort, including influencing policy. VS also helps with the spread of contacts and collectivization of funding among members to organize activities. It facilitates ground for action – if one organization wants to start working in a region, they do not have to start from scratch; there is already an existing network that they can refer to, as well as learning models, a reference space, and a knowledge base they can use from other aligned partners and internal resources of the network itself.
What really matters is the enhanced impact of the collective work. As one member put it, “So you have a network already there to widen your impact. I mean, it doesn’t have to be…in our example, it doesn’t have to be (org in question) going out and doing that. We just care about the work being done and there being impact for communities in new regions. If it’s done by a Vikalp Sangam member, why not? I think the more the merrier. There’s so much work for all of us to do.” Member organizations can use VS networks and contacts, therefore establishing collaborations with other national and international entities from the realm of alternatives. On the other hand, members bring to the table their competencies, contacts, and networks that they make available. This results in opportunities to foster collaborations, get involved in projects, participate in events and international networking. This notwithstanding, one of the key challenges that the members shared is the time constraint and the mostly voluntary engagement that often hinders the ability to actively participate in the network. People struggle to dedicate enough time to the network on top of their full-time NGO jobs, and they might participate in other, thematically focused networks already.
Finally, VS is a safe space for activists to share their concerns and ideas, to get inspired, and to attain the much-needed energy from the collective. This is facilitated through the practice of non-hierarchical direct participation, where most discussions are held in plenary sessions or smaller working groups to encourage inclusive participation for all. Although it might be challenging at times to reach total horizontality as participants have different public speaking experiences and skills, and there are inherent differences in people’s authority due to – for example – age, disagreements are welcome and there is no pressure to necessarily reach uniform solutions. For many, it’s a space of hope, but also source of critical feedback so that “we don’t remain too enamored of our own alternatives” and challenge each other constantly, as one member said. The internal culture of the network seems to be particularly valuable to the members, as it is based on sharing, recognizing, but also questioning each other. It is also strongly anchored in the strive for diversity (i.e.: language), even though sometimes at the expense of ‘efficiency’, resulting in more time-consuming deliberations.
Scaling out for pluriversality
In the context of the rapidly expanding global polycrisis, local grassroot alternatives are commonly considered naïve curiosities as they fall short when assessed on their ability to rapidly scale up and provide a united counterpower to capitalist exploitation. But transformation processes like those facilitated by Vikalp Sangam do not have an ambition of scaling up to provide one unified solution. Rather, and in line with the spirit of non-hierarchical direct democratic governance forms, they seek to scale out and facilitate growth and interconnections of a multitude of diverse initiatives. Such loose organizational structure and form of governance is not immune to vulnerability, especially due to its large dependence on invested individuals and organizations. However, it is an experimentation ground in which direct democracy is the format and practice through which a pluriversality of justice demands coexists and feeds into each other. This process helps to connect deeply historically rooted ecological and radical democratic local governance forms with like-minded initiatives. The networking happens across India and importantly also beyond, as VS helped initiate and participates in global networks such as the Global Tapestry of Alternatives.
The insistence on prioritizing direct democratic practices over more short-term notions of efficiency ensures a space where the diversity of the participating initiatives is not infringed on, but rather seen as a key strength. This is because the quest is not for uniformity but rather for a pluriversality of experiences, practices and voices. Taking inspiration from the Zapatistas, it is a shared ‘No’ and a plurality of ‘Yeses’ that bring the member organizations together. Since there is no pressure to reach homogeneity, there is also no risk of being absorbed by others, and this opens a space where experiences of interconnection and intersectionality thrive. Such a process is necessary if we wish to create building blocks for collective intelligence about constructing alternative models intersectionally through different levels and across thematic areas.
This year marks the 10th anniversary of the Vikalp Sangam process. Read Ashish Kothari’s reflections on a decade of exploring alternatives in India.
Emilia Lewartowska is a PhD student at Roskilde University in Denmark. She investigates alternative communities that challenge mainstream ideas about development at the intersection of post-development and degrowth studies. Her dissertation focuses on radical democratic practices in grassroot communities in rural India, and their role in spurring social change and prefiguring sustainable futures.
Lone Riisgaard is an Associate Professor at Roskilde University in Denmark. She has a long standing interest in workers collective agency as well as a broader interest in collective agency, in particular in combination with more radical alternative visions of societal relations. She is principal investigator of the collaborative research project Producing alternative green futures: Exploring interconnections between green transitions and socioeconomic and political organization which explore cases in India, South Africa and Denmark of alternative initiatives which share a holistic understanding of links between environmental sustainability and more participatory democratic modes of socioeconomic and political organizing.
[1] The note offers a solid common ground of values and principles that the members follow; however, its application for an internal analysis in each individual organization remains limited, as members report.