Articles by Peter Ronald deSouza

Sasheej Hegde is grateful to the authors Gopal Guru and Sundar Sarukkai for their lively participation in a symposium on the book organised by the Department of Sociology, University of Hyderabad on 3 March 2020, which also oversaw a critical input from Aseem Prakash of Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Hyderabad and Parthasarathi Muthukaruppan of English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad. The event was, fortunately, just before the COVID-19 disruption, although the latter explains largely the delay in our rendition. This paper also celebrates the over three decades of friendship between its two authors—and, even as it bears the brunt of a writing style intrinsic to one of them, the foray marks their shared interests and concerns, at once analytical, ethical and political (of the order of “maitri” as encapsulated in Experience, Caste, and the Everyday Social).
 

Dhirubhai Sheth’s intellectual quest was to reinvent social and political theory based on innovations coming from India. The test for a theory of Indian politics was a sustained dialogue between academics and activists—evidenced in his co-founding of Lokayan and Lokniti. Democracy was at the centre of all he thought and wrote about. All pretenders to it were his enemies.

The most troublesome of questions, the relationship between intellectuals, truth and truthfulness is discussed. The site for the investigation is Harvard University, whose motto is Veritas (truth), and the case discussed is Harvard’s long association with the disgraced billionaire Jeffrey Epstein, convicted for paedophilia but whose relationship with Harvard continued long after the conviction. Using the details described in the report of the internal committee, it is argued that a huge gulf exists between the intellectual’s ideal of “speaking truth to power,” the illusion, and the practice of complicity, falsehood and co-option by power, the reality. The analytical method advocated is the “trolley problem,” which is used to highlight the difficulty of moral choices.

The debate on the Uniform Civil Code in India has passed through three phases which have been grounded in different normative concerns, that is, national consolidation, equality of laws, and now gender justice. Since the normative goals of a polity and political contingency are in a perpetual struggle in India, the time is appropriate for us to visit the UCC debate with a view to strengthening our constitutional democracy. This article after presenting an overview of the debate suggests that there are mainly two paths to follow to meet this aspiration: (i) changing the ecology of laws relating to women, and (ii) adopting the common civil code that is prevalent in Goa.

Examining the micro politics of a single constituency, this study tries to explore the relationship between the empirical and the theoretical in a working democracy. By detailing the dynamics of electoral and party politics in the context of a constituency which suffers from a "development deficit", the study examines the place of political leaders, party strategy, political ideology, political rhetoric, youth participation, voter loyalty, identity mobilisation, etc, in the democratic process. To engage with these issues of democracy-in-practice the study has chosen to look in detail at the case of political nomadism (defections) in the constituency and to see how both, the political institutions set up to regulate it and the political calculus of parties, have responded to such behaviour. By using an ethnographic approach and an attitudinal survey, the study raises questions related to representation, institutional regulation, and the tension between act and rule utilitarianism in a working democracy for the public discourse in India.