Networks, Solidarities and Emerging Alternatives

How a farmers’ movement, in its declining phase and amidst agrarian distress, is building new alliances, incorporating new frameworks and attempting to create alternatives is explored. The Karnataka Rajya Raitha Sangha, one among the farmers’ movements of the 1980s, became a member of a transnational agrarian movement, La Via Campesina in 1996 to confront issues that were “global” in nature. Based on ethnography during 2011−12 and focusing on the linkages of the KRRS with LVC, the simultaneity of different processes at play within the KRRS are explored to shed light upon how shared understandings are intertwined with the perception and practice of politics, the multiple meanings attached to the terms “local” and “global,” and the discourses and practices of alternative agriculture.