People and public sphere in India

Abstract

The public sphere as conceptualised by Habermas is a bourgeois institution that had emerged in European countries as a “discursive platform ” to engage in critical discussion and deliberations with the idea of delivering “common good”. The institution has been replicated in many countries including India. But the institution as a whole has inherent assumptions that of the social structures of a bourgeois society. The platform that is supposed to generate “common good” is transforming into the one which almost bringing together socially unequal cultures, whereby the language of the dominant overrules the subordinate. There is no socio-political safeguard to the pluralism of the masses and hence the “common good” is decided by the motivations of private interest in place of public interest. Therefore it becomes crucially important to take a re-look at the present structure of “public sphere” in the Indian context as to how far the institution itself is democratic to deliver “common good” to the society.