ABSTRACT
The idea of ‘civil society’ as emerged for understanding the domain outside the state in the western countries has travelled a long distance across diverse societies throughout a couple of centuries only to produce contested meanings. Despite it being a contested idea, I have no hesitation to use the term ‘civil society’ to categorize the bhadralok elites, since the latter has already been called a ‘civil society’ not only in media space but also widely in academic discourse. These bhadralok elites would dominate both the public institutions i.e. the bureaucracy and the political institutions in West Bengal, and therefore being the constitutive part of state and its institutions. Being a part and parcel of the state, while are hardly able to constitute (Chandhoke 2001, 19) ‘a sphere that is oppositional to the state’, these bhadralok elites would play roles in shaping the policies meant for the interest of broad masses, here the rural people. In place of the dichotomy between civil society and ‘political society’, as coined by Chatterjee (2004), if we put here another dichotomy, i.e. the elite and subaltern, and try to analyse the context, we might find a similar rendering to that of the so-called civil society and political society. This book has already explained the dynamic ways in which the upper castes as part of the political parties have been playing their roles in shaping the issues of unemployment in rural areas. Now, it is civil society’s turn on behalf of which the same upper castes are performing in the domain of rural unemployment, thereby reconstructing the same through various ‘civil’ voluntary interventions.
