There would be, perhaps, very little disagreement if one were to argue that over the last decade or so, civil society has emerged as a ‘hold-all’ concept that has been both an explanatory category as to how some societies are managing their democratic processes as well as a normative category that sets goals in terms of what societies should aspire to be in future in order to claim to be potentially or essentially democratic. However, there would be very substantive disagreement over how civil society as a conceptual tool has fared in terms of explaining ‘realconcrete’ political processes across societies, beginning from the continental to the Oriental parts of the world. Regardless of whether or not civil society had taken shape in Europe and was then ‘exported’ to other parts of the world, in the process, it signifies both the ‘imperialism of categories’ and also thereby seriously mars its potential in explaining the ‘specificities’ of the societies that are non-European. If civil society has shaped, and in turn taken shape through, the institutional and political processes integral to the way democracy works in a country like India, how should one approach this concept?