INTRODUCTION 5 Social capital, the recent buzzword popularised by international agencies, refers variously to either certain "features of social organisation" or to the outcomes of having different social relationships and associations, in terms of information, insurance and trust. Harriss argues that the social capital is too general and homogenising a term to be of any meaningful use. He raises several issues that are left unanswered by the proponents of the theory of social capital. Are all social relationships based on norms of reciprocity and trust? Does even an existence of strong interpersonal relationships in individual associations necessarily mean non-existence of social antagonisms? These questions are obviously fundamental to identify whatever social capital might mean in a society. What better example of the fallacy of the idea than the organisationally strong communal organisations in India that operate to divide the society. Do they constitute a social capital for the country? Social capital has been commonly used to refer exclusively to the existence of (and participation in) the apolitical "civic organisations". Notably, this excludes political parties, trade unions and peasant unions from a list of institutions of developmental importance. Such a list, on the other hand, will include religious groups, entertainment groups and football clubs. The term is also often used to refer to only "organisations" excluding from its purview the institutions that do not exist as an organised body. This, to us, seems to be a reformulation of the much debated issue of formal and informal organisations operating in the society. This would, for example, remove the whole complex of class and caste relationships from the institutional map of an Indian village. The exclusion of such relationships not only limits the institutional landscape but also contributes to a certain homogenising of the social capital for different individuals in a society. The social capital one derives from participating in a "civic organisation" is same for all individuals and has nothing to do with the unequal power that some individuals might enjoy owing to their class-caste position. The available evidence reviewed by both John Harriss as well as Stokke and Mohan shows that an active state and political organisation are crucial to the functioning of the so-called civil society and building up of the so-called social capital. There is substantial evidence that contradicts the historiography of studies that have attempted to argue that the social capital arising from these apolitical organisations was a fundamental cause of more development in certain parts of the world than in others.