Sahoo Sarbeswar - Civil Society and Citizenship in India and Bangladesh

Praises for Civil Society and Citizenship in India and Bangladesh

This is a fine and thought-provoking collection of articles about civil society in India and Bangladeshtwo countries where issues of civil society and those of class, gender, religion and ethnicity (as well as caste) have been historically so intertwined. The articles provide detailed analysis of their case studies, the results of which are useful for comparative analysis and incursions into theoretical debates. Sometimes, work on civil society can appear to be stale, because the concept can mean different things to different people, but in ways often left unacknowledged. The sort of critical awareness necessary to actually enrich discussions of civil society, rather than contribute to its elusiveness, pervades through the book.

Professor Vedi R. Hadiz

Asia Institute, University of Melbourne, Australia

With civil society criticality under mounting pressure around the world, this excellent and carefully curated collection of essays focusing on gender issues and the status of religious minorities introduces readers to the dynamics shaping the complex relationship between CSOs and the state in todays India and Bangladesh.

Professor Sarah Ansari

Royal Holloway, University of London

This volume prioritises Tocquevillian associational forms in various actors engagements in the civil society space. Issues of gender rights, minority rights and statecivil society relations are examined on the basis of painstaking fieldwork in a comparative framework between India and Bangladesh. This volume should be a compulsory read for everyone who is interested in contemporary contests in the civil society space in South Asia, wherein new associational forms are emerging, leading to construction of new parameters of engaged citizenship.

Professor Amit Prakash
Centre for the Study of Law and Governance,
Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi

This edited anthology is a timely and an important contribution to the scholarship on civil society and citizenship, particularly in South Asia. Both empirically and theoretically, this volume meticulously presents the tension and trajectories of relationship between state, civil society and citizenship through exploring women organisations, religion, gender, minority and refugee issues in India and Bangladesh.

Associate Professor Mohammad Salehin

Centre for Peace Studies,
The Arctic University of Norway, Norway

Civil Society and Citizenship in India and Bangladesh

Civil Society and Citizenship in India and Bangladesh

Edited by

Sarbeswar Sahoo and Paul Chaney

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First published in India 2021

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Contents

A historian of ideas will testify that concepts that, otherwise, share common vocabularies develop in different ways in discrete historical contexts. Take the concept of civil society. Emerging as a dominant concept in the 1980s in the erstwhile socialist world of Eastern Europe, civil society signified a space where social movements and associations could make demands upon the state, monitor and hold a democratic state accountable, and protest against policies, programmes and laws that were manifestly unjust. Civil society fulfilled a basic proposition of democracy. Ordinary citizens possess the political competence to critique government policies, protest against the oppression of vulnerable groups and propose alternative policies to neutralise injustice. That is why civil society is best thought of as a project of many projects. Some projects affirm each other, some oppose others, some take on the state and others support the state as the condensate of power. There is no one essence to civil society; it is the theatre of democracy.

In the world of the colonised, civil society was not born out of the same historical experience as Europe: an autonomous market, alienation, a juridical order, the individual as the bearer of legal rights and property relations. Civil society organisations in undivided India were related to the freedom struggle and its agenda of social reform, nationalism, uplift of weaker sections, education, charity and welfarism. Nationalism gave rise to the idea that we have obligations to our fellow beings.

This sentiment was subverted by the partition of India in August 1947. The Partition bore dreadful consequences in the shape of involuntary mass migrations, ethnic cleansing, gang rapes and sordid mutilationsall of which have left vivid scars upon the memories of populations on both sides of the border. In 1971, when East Pakistan declared itself independent of Pakistan, an estimated 3 million people died in the war between the new state of Bangladesh and the parent country. About 8 to 10 million were rendered homeless. In another historical context, A.E. Housman had written: They say my verse is sad: no wonder, Its narrow measure spans, Tears of eternity and sorrow, Not mine, but mans. These lines may well provide the epigraph of partitions.

The birth of first two, and three nations was embedded in massive violence. This is the first factor that adversely impacted the body politic in India and Bangladesh. The second factor was the logical consequence of partitionsthe minority issue. The third troublesome factor was the emergence of identity politics as a dominant feature of the political scene. And the fourth factor was state-sponsored construction of the nation.

The historian, Hans Kohn, writing in the aftermath of the Second World War had pointed out that territorially based civic nationalism is qualitatively distinct from cultural or ethnic nationalism. The former, which developed in England, the United States and France, represented predominantly a political movement to limit governmental power, and to secure civic rights. The temporal and the spatial contexts for ethnic nationalism, which arose later in Central and Eastern Europe and in Asia, were different. Consolidated amidst social and economic underdevelopment, and emerging in direct opposition to state power, ethnic nationalism was first articulated in the aesthetic and cultural field. Kohns distinction between civic and ethnic nationalism set the stage for much of the subsequent discussion on the subject.