Civil society has been emerging as the quintessential actor in the process as well as the discourse of development in India. The neoliberal paradigm influencing the realms of governance and related factors such as higher degree of participatory civic culture has unravelled a never before emphasis on Civil Society. The civil society is now in the process of being reinvented so as to envisage itself as the contentious space for the expression of voice of the unmediated and the excluded.such as the women, dalits and low castes, peasants, farmers, forest dwellers, and tribals. This emergence inevitably also posits a challenge to the hitherto existing patriarchal thereby avoiding to become the preserve of only white, upper caste male, and property-owning elites as it was earlier. With this as a setting, the paper posits to explain the crisis that that has been raised over the identity of the civil society at both intellectual and political level since its inception in India.
Development, Neoliberal paradigm, Governance, Participatory civic culture, Identity
