Participatory Citizenship: Identity, Exclusion, Inclusion Book

According to this volume, the conventional understanding of citizenship is inadequate to capture the complex challenges a large majority of India?s marginalized people face in actualizing 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. They discuss ?participatory citizenship? as a way of altering the existing relationship between the state and its vulnerable citizenry; rescuing citizenship from its universal legal status to include the differential positioning of subjugated groups; and conceptualize 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. Combining theoretical discussions with empirical case studies, this volume delineates the possibilities and potentials of excluded people seeking inclusion, as well as the complexities and contradictions inherent in the processRead More