ABSTRACT: Taking into account the growing social mobilizations and large-scale transformations in the society and polity in last few decades, the paper looks into the issues of how the ‘civil public’ gets transformed into, what Habermas calls, the ‘political public’? How do the marginalized and subaltern groups in civil society use the language of rights to decenter domination, assert selfhood and chart out democratic discourses affecting the politics of everyday social life? And, how the morphology of the public sphere, which was restricted among the elites as an agency of upholding capitalist state hegemony (Gramsci) instead of mediating between civil society and the state (Habermas), has gone through a metamorphosis over time? Addressing these questions, the paper argues that the post-colonial welfare state in India which assumed the role of provider of social services created a mass of depoliticized citizenry incapable of their own social reproduction. The rolling back of the welfare state from the socio-economic sphere and the penetration of market mechanisms carried serious implications for the public and political life of the nation. This led to the assertion of right based mobilizations at the grassroots level (democratization) which had significant effects on liberal democracy and local governance in India. India during the same period also witnessed the upsurge of communal and sectarian movements or what Radhika Desai (2004) calls systematic ‘saffronization’ of state and civil society. Despite of the existence of such uncivil social elements within the civil society, the ‘subaltern counterpublics’ have been successful in carving out a space for themselves and widening the scope of democratic participation. The potential of the subaltern classes and their ideologies of discontent and resistance in reshaping the state have prevented the bourgeois in instituting its hegemony over civil society. The legitimacy of democracy no longer depends on the hegemony of the elites but on ‘the politics of the governed’.

civil-society-and-subaltern-counterpublics-in-india.pdf