Participatory Citizenship

This volume argues that the conventional undestanding of citizenship is inadequate to capture the complex challenges a large majority of India's marginalised people face in actualising their rights and making their voices heard. It offers instead an extended connotation of citizenship and participation from the perspective of those bearing excluded identities--namely, the low caste, the poor, women and tribals. Based on the experiences of these groups in their everyday relationships with the state and with society at large, the contributors to this volume detail and explore the possibilities and the problematics of their inclusion in attempting a change in existing relations. Among the issues discussed are 'participatory citizenship' as a way of altering the existing relationship between the state and its vulnerable citizenry, and rescuing citizenship from its universal legal status to include the differential positioning of subjugated groups. The contributors conceptualise participation not merely as a voting/electoral mechanism but as one where all citizens have a legitimate and equitable stake in the processes of development and governance.