The Promise of Citizenship

From ‘People’ to ‘Citizen’: Democracy’s Must Take Road, an anthology of 10 meticulously crafted and persuasively argued chapters, by Dipankar Gupta, makes him an exponent of a road less travelled. The courageous call to take a road to democracy through citizenship makes this book important for all social scientists trying to make sense of the dilemmas and challenges thrown up by political and social contestations in contemporary democracies. Kymlicka and Norman (1994) had announced the “return of the citizen” in their article in the journal Ethics. They suggested that unlike the earlier periods of heightened consciousness about citizenship, the

revival of interest in citizenship in the 1990s was accompanied and made necessary by the need to democratise it by accommodating multicultural and group-differentiated rights.