This book is successful to a great extent in examining and evaluating the process of democratization and highlighting the growing demands for participations and complex power structures. With multiple editors and a host of contributors, the volume manages to assemble data and theories from a cross-section of society, including the major as well as minor players. All the four editors: Manoranjan Mohanty, Richard Baum, Rong Ma and George Mathew are esteemed luminaries in the world of academia.

The process of democratization is characterized by many similar elements in both India and China. Expanding growth and complex power structures dominate the economy as also the society. This book takes up issues of institutional structure and local participation and the dynamics of local governance in the emerging socio-economic environment, including the issues of gender ethnicity and religion in the local political processes. Comparative perspectives and case studies focus on the major changes in the institutional structure of both India and China in recent years. In the case of India, the Seventy-third Amendment of the Indian Constitution in 1993 introduced Panchayati Raj in rural India. In China, the Organic Law of 1998 provided for competitive elections in the village level. Both these steps have initiated new political processes at the local level. A few case studies from minority regions add important cultural and ethnic dimensions to institutional dynamics.

The context of economic reforms in both the countries has generated new challenges for local institutions, both in terms of integrating the local market with the global economy a well as affecting the choices of the local populace, including the local producers. In this book, the comparative essays on microfinance and the political economy of the rural areas present deep and penetrating insights on this issue.

Aspirations for grassroots democracy have acquired universal recognition during the past quarter century. In recent years, however, local self-governance has emerged as the new mantra of the forces of globalization and liberalization. There exist two divergent perspectives on local governance: one sees it as an arena for transforming an unequal local society into a democratic community; while the other treats it as an agency or a channel to implement centrally formulated policies and programmes. The former evokes the ideas of Gandhi, trying to reinvent the vision of gram Swaraj or village-level self-rule or villagers’ self-determination in the course of the people’s struggle for freedom. Mao Zedong’s notion of the rural people’s commune involved a comparable notion of self-reliant villages engaged in a process of ‘liberalization’ or human transformation, both personal and social. Their perspectives differed, however, over such things as the role of individual autonomy in the process of liberation and the principal socio-political obstacles to liberation at the local, national and global levels. The Maoist approach focuses on mechanisms of governance and stresses implementation of policies involving local institutions, local groups, and local people in general. While Mao Zedong’s approach is to tie the politics of transformation, the Gandhian approach is embedded in a framework of self-management.

In the emerging context of expanding democratic consciousness in the face of globalization and inequality, the concept of local democracy needs to be understood afresh. First, the new political economy perspective moves the focus of discourse beyond local governance to local democracy by treating local institutions not just as agencies for implementation of central policy, but as arenas for the exercise of autonomy and self-determination of local areas and local groups. Second, local institutions that have generally served as institutions of domination by the local elite must be evaluated from the perspective of their contribution or obstacle to overcoming social as well as political inequality, that is, in terms of their facilitating or impeding the transfer of resources, both material and cultural, to the poor and the disadvantaged, including women, minorities and, in the Indian case, lower castes.