Ethnicity and Development – A Civil Society Perspective from North-East India
Journal Title: Journal of Social and Political Sciences - Year 2018, Vol 1, Issue 2
Abstract
Civil society in northeast India has emerged gradually over the last few decades. It is observed that civil society organizations especially student and youth groups have thrived on the margins of the Indian political system, in the buffer space between political parties and insurgent groups. It is significant to note that most of these organizations in the northeast are based on ethnic affiliations, and hence ethnicity creeps into all civic spheres into which these organizations intervene, prompting some scholars to describe these organizations as “civic representatives” of ethnic groups and communities. In the context of the above, the proposed research paper seeks to examine the role of some major student and youth organizations of Meghalaya, a state of northeast India, as champions of the interests of the respective ethnic communities they claim to represent. The paper also proposes to focus on the developmental agenda of the Indian State and to enquire into the contradictions and dilemmas that have arisen as a result of the vigorous pursuit of ethnic agenda by these civil society organizations. The paper is structured into the following sections. The first section conceptualizes student and youth organizations as important components of the civil society in northeast India. In the second section, development constraints in northeast India have been discussed. The next section highlights the role of some of the student and youth organizations of Meghalaya as champions of ethnic interests. The fourth section identifies a few contemporary issues are dominating the developmental agenda in Meghalaya and focuses on the views of these organizations on the same. The final section examines the contradictions between ethnic sensitivities and the developmental agenda in Meghalaya and summarizes the main observations of the paper.
Authors and Affiliations
Susmita Sen Gupta
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP339379
- DOI 10.31014/aior.1991.01.02.20
- Views 43
- Downloads 0
Ethnic Tourism in Northern Thailand: The Paradox of Authentic Tourism Experience
Ethnicity and the exotic are the two concepts Thailand has exploited in intimate details to create the cultural tourism experience. The Cultural tourists’ is in search of the authentic intact native. The uniqueness of th...
Lifestyle of Generations in the Sub-urban Case study: Major Cities in Northeastern Thailand
This research aims to study the lifestyle of generations in the suburban area of the Northeast, Thailand. The qualitative methodology was employed, and the units of analysis were individual and community level. Key infor...
Citizen Participation in Local Democracy Online: A Snapshot of Trends and Challenges in Adoption of Crowdsourcing Methods in Tanzania
Although numerous studies concerning local democracy have been carried out in Tanzania, most of them have fallen short of analysing crowdsourcing citizen participation in local democracy online. Local democracy aims esse...
Is Photographic Image Represented the Reality?
The development of technology represents the circulations and progresses of culture and society, from ‘death of painting’ (after the invention of photography) to ‘death of photography’ (after the invention of digital ima...
Defining Poverty: A Summary of Competing Models
How we talk about poverty and low income is complicated by the competing methods for defining and measuring the phenomenon. In this article, I present a brief summary of the dominant methods currently in use by the gover...