Welfare Civil Society and Democratic Governance in Rajasthan (India).

This paper deals with the conceptual, political and organizational tensions between the service-delivery organizations and the movement organizations in civil society and their implications towards democratic political change. It argues creating social capital and trust do not help advancing democracy. The civil in civil society needs to get politicized. The service delivery organizations have created a culture of dependency among the masses. On the contrary, by using the language of rights, the movement groups have turned the ‘civil public’ into, what Habermas has called, the ‘political public’ and helped decentering domination, assert selfhood and chart out democratic discourses affecting the politics of everyday social life. The paper concludes that civil society would contribute actively towards democratization when it makes a transition from ‘capacity building’ to ‘capacity mobilization’; emphasizes on the ‘politics of accountability’; and start building a ‘counter-hegemonic’ force at the grassroots. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]