When Ally Activism Becomes ‘Concerned Citizenship’ 

This is an excerpt from Chapter 5 of Ankita Pandey's Becoming Allies: Civil Liberties Activism in India. Reproduced with permission from Cambridge University Press.

On November 1 [1984], when we toured the Lajpat Nagar area we found the police conspicuous by their absence while Sikh shops were being set on fire and looted…. The only sign of police presence was a police jeep, which obstructed a peace procession brought out by a few concerned citizens. 

—Excerpt from the report Who Are the Guilty? published jointly by the PUDR and the PUCL (PUDR and PUCL 1984, emphasis mine)

In early 1997, a group of 15 citizens in Andhra Pradesh came together to form the Committee of Concerned Citizens in order to attempt to reflect the voice of a large democratic section of society that had been denied any role in the ongoing conflict between the state and the ‘Revolutionary’ parties.

—Excerpt from the booklet Know PUCL (PUCL 1988, emphasis mine) 

The two excerpts cited above are just two examples among many instances where civil liberties activists have identified and positioned themselves as concerned citizens. For more than four decades, a segment of middle class activists in India has adopted this self-identification, which is an important aspect of the ongoing normative contestation surrounding the notion of good citizenship. Despite its significance, the history, specificity  and practice of this self-identification remain underexplored. This chapter examines concerned citizenship as an urban, middle-class, civil-society based form of allyship, which has facilitated a distinct mode of collective action within the Indian socio-political landscape. 

Here are a few more examples of the contexts in which the term ‘concerned citizenship’ would appear. In 1981, the PUCL observed 1st–15th September as ‘Independence of the Judiciary Fortnight’ with ‘concerned citizens’ to ‘assess the threats to the independence of the judiciary’ (PUCL  1981c, 3). In 1997, a Committee of Concerned Citizens mediated the  dialogue between the Government of India and the People’s War Group (Maringanti 2010). In 2008, the PUCL, Gujarat, formed a ‘committee of  concerned citizens’ to enquire into an incident of police firing against the tribal people in the state’s Sabarkantha district (PUCL, Gujarat 2008, 1). In 2011, the PUCL called ‘all concerned citizens’ to ‘initiate various public protest actions from May 22 to August 18’ to demand the release of Irom Sharmila, the iconic opponent of extraordinary laws (PUCL 2011). These examples illustrate the mobilisation of concerned citizenship as a civic practice. 

'Becoming Allies: Civil Liberties Activism in India' by Ankita Pandey. (Cambridge University Press, March 2026)

Today, the initiatives that self-identify as concerned citizens have expanded beyond civil liberties activism (Mudgal 2016). Groups of  concerned citizens have initiated signature campaigns, written open letters and released statements on issues of public interest. A three-volume Concerned Citizens’ Tribunal report, Crimes against Humanity: An Inquiry  into the Carnage in Gujarat, was published soon after the infamous Gujarat riots of 2002.1 In 2005, in the light of several reports from Chhattisgarh of a ‘spontaneous’ people’s uprising against Maoists that was supposedly led  by a group called Salwa Judum, several ‘concerned’ groups visited the area  to understand the goings-on first-hand. The term is routinely found in petitions, letters and statements concerning public affairs in contemporary India. 

I argue that the self-identification as a concerned citizen reflects an ongoing contestation between the state and civil society over the normative dimensions of citizenship in India. This struggle centres on defining the values, behaviours and ideals deemed appropriate for a citizen. Through this self-identification, a segment of the salaried, professional middle class found a  means to engage with movement politics. The broad, national mobilisation of  concerned citizens in the 1970s and 1980s was particularly distinct, emerging  alongside the rise of various identity-based movements (such as those led  by women, Dalits, farmers and tribal communities). In postcolonial India,  the state has sought to define and promote ideal citizen conduct through  legislative measures, civics curricula, official communications and public advertisements. In contrast, civil liberties activists have initiated actions  grounded in what they perceive as a heightened sense of civic responsibility, positioning themselves as a relevant actor in the ongoing dialogue about the  ideal of citizenship in India’s democratic life. 

Several scholars have written about the strategies through which  state actors imagine and produce a good citizen (Pykett, Saward and  Schaefer 2010). These accounts often invoke Michael Foucault’s notion  of governmentality to explore officially produced, normative frames of  an ideal citizen (Verdery 1998; Mamdani 2001; A. Roy 2008; Subrata Mitra 2010). Studies on Indian politics have uncovered the official vision  of citizenship through exploring it as a legal status, the debates in the  Constituent Assembly of India, the definition in the Constitution of India  and allied Acts, immigration policies and court judgments (Bhargava  and Reifeld 2005; Bhargava 2008; Mahajan 1998; A. Roy 2010; Rodrigues  2008). In contrast, civil-society-based activists have articulated a vision of  the good citizen that stands in stark opposition to the official conception.

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