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On Civil Society:
Issues and Perspectives
The book is seventh and final in the series ‘Themes in Indian Sociology’. With a judicious selection of 13 papers, it covers various dimensions of civil society. The selections are from the Sociological Bulletin, which were published over a decade ago. D. N. Dhanagare points towards the decline in civil society in India while contextualising a discourse on ‘Civil Society, State and Democracy’. Reflecting on "digital democracy and e-governance", he calls for a debate on the role of universities as a forum of civil society, independent of state intervention. J. P. S. Uberoi explains the history of civil society in the modern period and examines the reformed traditions of pluralism and vernacular democracy in India while delineating the opposing approaches of culture and power. The reader is offered a "culturist critique" of the modern Indian state as Vikash N. Pandey traces the link between state and civil society. He asks one to step beyond the boundaries of dualism of state and society. Analysing the national movement, the Constitution, Gandhi’s legacy and segmentation of Indian society, Satish Saberwal argues that Indian democracy has worked due to an accident of mutually unrelated circumstances. P. K. B. Nayar assigns the Civil Society Organisations (CSO’s) an "intermediate space" describing them as a post-Independence phenomenon. He lauds the contributions made by the CSO’s as well as identifying many of their banes. B. S. Baviskar paper on NGOs is enlightening. He describes them as diverse and heterogeneous, outlining their success and failures. Donald W. Attwood makes an analysis of co-operatives in rural India. He distinguishes between Type A (Agonistic) and Type B (Blue print) models and recounts the success story of Maharashtra’s Type A sugar cooperatives. Dipankar Gupta puts forward "irreducible ethos" and "capitalist engine" as views regarding the nation state. He distinguishes between closed and open stratification while highlighting the concept of citizenship being "critical for nation states to survive". Religion, caste and language are T. K. Oommen’s bases to view civil society. He studies religious protests, reform movements, caste associations and linguistic reorganisation of states. In the age of electronic media and globalisation, Rowena Robinson analyses ‘Internet Hinduism’ and points out that "religion, rather than caste or language alone is the main marker of South Asian (and in particular, Indian) identities on a global scale." While studying identity politics, Ananta Kumar Giri adds a "spiritual supplement" to the study of civil society. Staffan Lindberg analyses the new peasant movements and sees them in an Indian economy "in which labour intensive agriculture and small-scale industry are presented as an alternative to large-scale capitalist industrialisation and urbanisation". In the concluding chapter, Andre Bettiele analyses concepts of state, citizenship and mediating institutions as backbones of civil society. He calls for the "separation of secular institutions from kinship and religion". With a useful bibliography, this book can be of great help to those interested in social sciences and students of sociology. |
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