“How is civil society useful in deepening the roots of democracy?” (2023)
Deepening democracy means extending it beyond periodic elections in three directions. It reaches downwards to marginal groups and localities, inwards into accountability in everyday governance, and outwards into public deliberation. Civil society, the organised space between family, market and state, contributes in four ways.
1. Accountability between elections
- Social audits: the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS) was founded in Rajasthan in 1990 by Aruna Roy, Nikhil Dey and Shankar Singh. At village public hearings (jan sunwais), it read official records of wage payments aloud. The campaign that grew from these hearings led to the Right to Information Act, 2005. Social audits are now mandatory under Section 17 of the Mahatma Gandhi NREGA, 2005.
- Electoral transparency: petitions by the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) produced Union of India v. ADR (2002), which requires candidates to disclose their criminal records and assets. ADR was also a lead petitioner in the case where the Supreme Court struck down electoral bonds in February 2024.
2. Inclusion of the excluded
- Robert D. Putnam (Making Democracy Work, 1993) found that Italian regions with dense civic networks had better-performing democratic institutions.
- In India, women’s collectives and Dalit and adivasi organisations bring first-generation participants into gram sabhas and panchayats. This extends democracy’s social base beyond the elite.
3. Deliberation and the public sphere
- Jürgen Habermas held that democratic legitimacy depends on a public sphere in which citizens reason together. Campaigns, public hearings and people’s tribunals widen that sphere and bring local knowledge into policy debate.
4. Democratic habits
- Associations teach negotiation, tolerance and leadership. Alexis de Tocqueville called them the “schools” of democracy. Many panchayat leaders first learn to lead in cooperatives and self-help groups.
Limits
- Partha Chatterjee (The Politics of the Governed, 2004) notes that formal civil society is mostly urban and middle-class. The poor deepen democracy mainly through political society: negotiation, mobilisation and moral claims on the state.
- Associations can also deepen exclusion, as caste panchayats and communal organisations show. Dependence on donors or the state can blunt their critical edge.
Conclusion
Civil society deepens democracy when it makes power answerable, inclusive and open to debate between elections. The path from MKSS’s public hearings to the RTI Act is the best case: local protest became a national right. How far democracy’s roots go depends on civil society staying independent and reaching beyond the middle class.