Gandhian Civil Society’s Response to Globalisation and Corporate Power

When India opened its economy to the world in 1991, the change was sudden and far-reaching. Markets were deregulated, foreign companies arrived, and the state stepped back from sectors it had long controlled. For many people in cities, this meant new products, jobs, and opportunities. But for farmers, tribal communities, and the rural poor, the same policies often meant displacement, debt, and the loss of livelihoods built over generations. Out of this tension grew a wave of movements that questioned the direction of globalisation, and many of them reached back to an unlikely source for their language and their methods: Mahatma Gandhi.

Globalisation arrives in the 1990s
Why Gandhi spoke to the anti-globalisation moment
The critique of Western modernity
Swadeshi, decentralisation, and self-reliance
Karnataka Rajya Raitha Sangha and the fight over seeds
The seed satyagraha and the attack on Cargill
The Narmada Bachao Andolan and the cost of development
A long Gandhian struggle
Gandhian tactics in a globalised age
Sustainable development, culture, and justice
A debate worth noting

Globalisation arrives in the 1990s

The trigger for India’s economic transformation was a crisis. By 1991, the country faced a severe balance of payments problem, with inflation peaking and foreign reserves nearly exhausted. Under Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao and Finance Minister Manmohan Singh, the government adopted a sweeping reform agenda known as the LPG reforms – liberalisation, privatisation, and globalisation. The reforms were not fully voluntary; they were undertaken partly under pressure from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, which tied loans to structural changes in the economy.

The results were uneven. The reforms created opportunities for skilled workers, entrepreneurs, and those with access to capital, while leaving behind people in traditional sectors like agriculture and small-scale manufacturing. A dual economy emerged, where modern, globally connected industries existed alongside low-productivity rural sectors. This gap is central to understanding why resistance to globalisation took root so strongly among farmers and rural communities.

Why Gandhi spoke to the anti-globalisation moment

Decades before “globalisation” became a household word, Gandhi had already developed a detailed critique of the system that produced it. His objection was not to trade or exchange between nations, but to a particular model of civilisation that he believed measured progress purely in material terms.

The critique of Western modernity

Gandhi argued that Western civilisation treated economic growth as the measure of progress, mistaking material comfort for genuine advancement. For him, true civilisation rested on moral character, decentralisation of power, and balanced development rather than on machinery, mass consumption, and the domination of weaker cultures by stronger ones. This was not a blanket rejection of everything modern. Gandhi was clear that he did not want his country sealed off from the world. He wanted the cultures of all lands to circulate freely around his house, but he refused to be swept off his feet by any of them.

This distinction matters. Some scholars point out that Gandhi did not see globalisation itself as evil, but warned that it would breed environmental damage and consumerism. Others, reading texts like Hind Swaraj, see a sharper anti-technology stance, where the ease that modern machinery provides erodes the moral purity that comes from honest labour. What unites these readings is Gandhi’s insistence that means and ends are inseparable – a development model that harms people and nature cannot be justified by the wealth it produces.

Swadeshi, decentralisation, and self-reliance

Gandhi’s positive vision centred on the village as the unit of economic and social life. He advocated decentralisation to bring prosperity to rural areas and to make communities self-reliant. His promotion of khadi was not simply about cloth; it was a socially oriented campaign meant to create dialogue in a divided society and to keep economic power in local hands. This emphasis on small-scale, locally rooted production gave later activists a ready-made framework for opposing an economic order built around large corporations and global supply chains.

Karnataka Rajya Raitha Sangha and the fight over seeds

One of the most visible anti-globalisation movements emerged among farmers in Karnataka. The Karnataka Rajya Raitha Sangha (KRRS) was part of a wave of farmers’ movements that arose in the late 1970s and early 1980s as a response to the Green Revolution, and from its early days it recognised the international causes of local struggles. Its charismatic leader, Professor M.D. Nanjundaswamy, was a law academic and self-described Gandhian socialist.

The seed satyagraha and the attack on Cargill

In 1992, KRRS led the nationwide Beeja Satyagraha, or seed freedom movement, and farmers targeted the Bengaluru office of Cargill Seeds India, a multinational agribusiness. The campaign opposed the patenting of seeds and the entry of genetically modified crops, framing these as threats to farmers’ control over their own livelihoods. According to Nanjundaswamy, the action against Cargill was primarily meant to spark a public debate about what globalisation meant for the Indian farmer. His position was nuanced: he accepted globalisation with diversity, but rejected what he called globalisation in uniformity, where local crops and practices are replaced by standardised, corporate-controlled inputs.

The movement’s activities extended well beyond Karnataka. KRRS members burnt trial fields of genetically modified seeds, protested against the Dunkel Draft that became the foundation of the World Trade Organisation, and organised an Intercontinental Caravan that took hundreds of Indian farmers to protest at WTO meetings in Europe. The organisation later joined the transnational peasant network La Via Campesina, linking village-level struggles in India to a global movement against corporate agriculture.

The Narmada Bachao Andolan and the cost of development

If KRRS focused on agriculture and trade, the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) confronted the question of large-scale development projects head on. The movement began in the mid-1980s to oppose the Narmada Valley Development Project, especially the Sardar Sarovar Dam, which promised irrigation, drinking water, and electricity but also threatened to displace hundreds of thousands of people, most of them Adivasis and farmers.

A long Gandhian struggle

Led by Medha Patkar, the NBA has been described as perhaps the longest-running Gandhian non-violent movement of its kind, deliberately reinterpreting forgotten Gandhian tools for a new era. The movement was at once a critique of the Western and capitalist model of development and an argument that human society and nature can only be reconciled through decentralised, small-scale alternatives – echoing Gandhi’s belief that “small is beautiful.” The veteran Gandhian Baba Amte joined the struggle, even leaving his life’s work at Anandwan to live along the Narmada.

The tactics were unmistakably Gandhian. The NBA used peaceful marches, hunger fasts, and tax refusal, and during one major march, participants voluntarily tied their hands together to demonstrate their commitment to non-violence even when they were beaten and arrested. Patkar herself undertook repeated satyagrahas and long fasts, including a 21-day fast in 1991 that brought her close to death. The campaign also achieved a concrete result: sustained pressure helped force the World Bank to withdraw funding from the dam, shifting attention toward alternatives designed to benefit the poor and the environment.

Gandhian tactics in a globalised age

What ties these movements together is a shared toolkit drawn from the freedom struggle and adapted to new opponents. Where Gandhi’s generation faced colonial rule, these activists faced multinational corporations, international financial institutions, and trade agreements negotiated far from the villages they affected.

Satyagraha and civil disobedience remained central. The seed satyagraha and the Narmada fasts both followed the logic of moral confrontation: accepting suffering rather than inflicting it, in order to expose the injustice of a policy. Non-violence was not just a moral preference but a strategic one, allowing small communities to claim the moral high ground against far more powerful adversaries. Decentralisation and self-reliance provided the positive vision – decentralised water harvesting in the Narmada valley, and zero-budget natural farming promoted by KRRS, which relies on local resources rather than expensive corporate inputs.

Sustainable development, culture, and justice

These movements pursued goals that map closely onto Gandhi’s priorities. The first was sustainable development: both KRRS and the NBA argued that a model built on large dams, chemical-intensive farming, and corporate seeds was ecologically destructive and ultimately self-defeating. Gandhi is often described as a precursor of the modern green movement, and earlier struggles like the Chipko movement against commercial deforestation already pointed in this direction.

The second goal was cultural preservation. Resistance to globalisation in uniformity was, at heart, a defence of local crops, knowledge systems, and ways of life against a homogenising market. The third was social justice: the displaced Adivasis of the Narmada valley and the indebted small farmers of Karnataka were precisely the groups Gandhi placed at the centre of his vision of swaraj.

A debate worth noting

It would be too simple to cast Gandhi as a straightforward opponent of globalisation, and some scholars caution against it. Critics from his own time, including B.R. Ambedkar and Rabindranath Tagore, challenged his anti-modern and anti-Western views, and a closer look at his life shows that he was himself part of a rapidly modernising India rather than a pure traditionalist. Others argue that Gandhi did not perceive cultural exchange as a threat at all, objecting only to consumerism and environmental harm. This complexity is part of why his ideas remain so useful: anti-globalisation movements can draw on his critique of unchecked capitalism while still embracing selective engagement with the wider world, much as Nanjundaswamy distinguished diversity from uniformity.

The lasting significance of these movements lies in how they translated a philosophy rooted in the anti-colonial struggle into a response to twenty-first-century economic forces. They demonstrated that Gandhian methods could be turned against new forms of concentrated power, and that the questions Gandhi raised about the purpose of development have not lost their relevance.

What do you think? Can Gandhian methods of non-violent resistance remain effective against corporate and global economic power, or do they need to evolve for a digital and interconnected age? And is it possible to embrace the benefits of globalisation while still protecting the rural communities and ecosystems that movements like the NBA and KRRS fought to defend?

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Table of Contents

Globalisation arrives in the 1990s 🔗

Why Gandhi spoke to the anti-globalisation moment 🔗

The critique of Western modernity 🔗

Swadeshi, decentralisation, and self-reliance 🔗

Karnataka Rajya Raitha Sangha and the fight over seeds 🔗

The seed satyagraha and the attack on Cargill 🔗

The Narmada Bachao Andolan and the cost of development 🔗

A long Gandhian struggle 🔗

Gandhian tactics in a globalised age 🔗

Sustainable development, culture, and justice 🔗

A debate worth noting 🔗