The Role of Civil Society In India — The virtue of vigilance

By Siddarth Pai

Published in

Global Shapers Bangalore

3 min readJun 17, 2018

There isn’t a facet of life into which civil society has not permeated in one way or another. There are movements against the construction of dams, movements against the construction of nuclear plants and movements against forced rehabilitation. We have risen against a broken down judicial system, against unfair practices and against violations of our rights. Civil society has evolved into a counter system to our government, offering health and education services that the government has promised but failed to deliver. ‘Teach for India’, ‘Make a difference’, ‘Akshaya Patra’, all these programs are by ordinary people making an extraordinary difference in the lives of our countrymen.

My civics teacher in school told us about how the people in her locality, prior to an election, collect information about all the candidates — their qualifications, political history, achievements etc. and distribute it to all their neighbors free of charge. They would also host forums wherein the candidates would have to debate with each other and thus help the people vote based on the person, not the political party.

NGOs and other such institutions are hallmarks of a functioning and healthy democracy. These institutions are driven mainly by the youth who are yearning to make a difference. Our social obligations should be treated as our moral duty, to be informed and to act, to remedy, to redress, to reproach. After all, civil society is not a group of activists in Gandhian caps crying themselves hoarse-

Civil society is us.

We alone elected the people who now plunder us, and we alone can remove them from power. We have long forgotten the power we possess- one voice, one vote. There was the genuine fear of actual reform when civil society raised its head earlier this year in the eyes of the entrenched political classes. They realized that civil society if not a force to be trifled with any longer. Sweet words and empty deeds would no longer placate the masses, who are saturated with the depredated conditions they live under.

Civil society forms a duality with the political class in a true system of democracy. It forms the checks and balances upon the government. The government’s duty is to work for the people and it is up to us to ensure that they do. Socrates espoused a system of ‘dialectic’ to engage the rulings classes and thereby resolve any problems. Constitutional economics, a realm of economics investigating the link civilians and their constitution with the economy of a country should be further probed.

As Lincoln said, ‘The price of liberty is eternal vigilance’.

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The Role of Civil Society In India — The virtue of vigilance

By Siddarth Pai

Written by Nithya J Rao