Dilip Simeon's blog

Two Serious Injured, One Admitted in ICU No FIR Registered, No Action to Arrest the Culprits New Delhi, February 27, 2013 Ten North East students attacked at Delhi, two seriously injured, and one admitted in ICU. Delhi Police delayed in registering FIR and no action taken to apprehend the culprits. The racial attack on North East India continues in the national capital. In active of Delhi police is the matter of concern. According to the source reaching to the North East Helpline, ten North East boys from Manipur were attacked by a group of unknown people on 24 February night in Delhi University campus. While they were returning after dropping one of their friends in DU hostel, a group numbering 8 to 9 people came from behind attacked on them with sticks. When they raised their voice and tried to defend themselves, the culprits fled from the spot. Two of them suffer seriously and one still in Intensive Care Unit, while others suffered. They received first AID from DU ...

Ironically, the embrace by some leftists of Islamic fundamentalism mirrors distortions about Islam put about by anti-immigrant conservatives. The far Right talks as if all Muslims were potential terrorists, while the far Left talks as if Salafi-Jihadis represented all Muslims. Both ignore the fact that the vast majority of Muslims are like everybody else: they just want to survive and live their lives in peace. I was recently in London to launch my book  Double Bind: the Muslim Right, the Anglo-American Left, and Universal Human Rights , published by a new transnational think tank, the  Centre for Secular Space . (The  New York City launch  is Friday, March 1.) The event took place in Tower Hamlets, once a center of Jewish immigration, now largely Muslim and a site of intense struggle between South Asian secularists and fundamentalists. According to Ansar Ahmedullah, a community organizer who spoke at the launch, his group had planned a demonstration in a park ne...

Source:  The Atlantic Abdul Amir (as we’ll call him), a chemistry teacher in Quetta, Pakistan, was taking an afternoon nap on Feb. 16 when his house began to shake and the earth let out an almighty roar. His mother and sisters started screaming and ran out of the house, but by the time they gathered in the street, the noise had already stopped. He climbed to the roof to get a better view of what happened and saw a thick cloud of bright white smoke, a mile south, suspended above the market place where his students would be buying snacks after their weekend English classes. He rushed back down to the ground, started his motorcycle and took off toward ground zero, knowing all the while that this was foolish – during a bombing five weeks before, the people who came to help were killed by a second explosion. Still he raced through the streets, swerving around people running away from the bomb, finally arriving at a scene even worse even than he’d feared. The blast had been so powerfu...

More and more, we are becoming reliant on unconventional forms of energy. Shale gas is one such form, and not only because of the unusual processes required to access it, but also because of the costs involved – costs above and beyond the mere dollar figures of setting up and manning a drill site. Fracking requires enormous amounts of  water   - between 5 and 11 million litres for each well drilled. . There is a reason why oil gets the lion’s share of attention when it comes to the global game of petrocarbon extraction. Through the multiple products into which oil is refined, most important of which are gasoline and diesel, oil is the blood that animates the body of capitalism. It is a substance necessary for economies to keep operating and profits accruing, which is why access to it fuels so many geopolitical struggles around the globe. The atrocities committed by major oil companies almost everywhere they have set foot – of which spills such as BP’s recent debacle in the...

When the only thing a sad, lonely and oppressed young woman thinks might help her turns out to be the very same thing being taught by the world’s largest military power, something interesting is going on, something that takes us from mundane tips about how to live well to the world of national security, emergency planning and capital accumulation. ‘Resilience’ has in the last decade become one of the key political categories of our time. It falls easily from the mouths of politicians, a variety of state departments are funding research into it, urban planners are now obliged to take it into consideration, and academics are falling over themselves to conduct research on it. Stemming from the idea of a system and originating in ecological thought, the term connotes the capacity of a system to return to a previous state, to recover from a shock, or to bounce back after a crisis or trauma. Thus, for example, a 2008 OECD document on state-building, styled ‘from fragility to resilience’,...

जनसत्ता 10 फरवरी, 2013:   चुनाव और राममंदिर का चोली-दामन का साथ है। इधर चुनाव नजदीक आए और उधर संघ परिवार को राममंदिर की याद आने लगी। क्योंकि भारतीय जनता पार्टी का चुनाव से सबसे अधिक संबंध है, इसलिए उसे राममंदिर की याद भी शिद्दत से आती है। लोग भूले नहीं कि 2004 के चुनाव के समय भी इसी तरह की कवायद की गई थी। कहावत है कि काठ की हांडी एक बार चढ़ती है, बार-बार नहीं। लेकिन लगता है, इस देश की मिट्टी की सुगंध से रची-बसी होने का दावा करने वाली भारतीय जनता पार्टी को इस कहावत पर यकीन नहीं। उसे लगता है कि वह काठ की हांडी को बार-बार चूल्हे पर चढ़ा सकती है। संयोगवश दुबारा पार्टी अध्यक्ष बनने के बाद राजनाथ सिंह को इलाहाबाद के कुंभ मेले में राममंदिर निर्माण के लिए भाजपा की प्रतिबद्धता याद आ गई। आशा के अनुरूप राजग के संयोजक और जनता दल (एकी) के अध्यक्ष शरद यादव का तुरंत बयान आ गया कि राजग के एजेंडे पर मंदिर नहीं है।  लेकिन स्पष्ट है कि राजनाथ सिंह का बयान अचानक नहीं आया है। शायद संघ को लग रहा है कि नितिन गडकरी के सवाल पर संगठन के स्तर पर गच्चा खाने के बाद उसे भाजपा पर विचारधारा के स्तर पर दबा...

Maura Moynihan : This month of Losar, the Tibetan New Year, saw a tragic milestone — more than 100 people in Tibet lit their bodies aflame protesting against Chinese atrocities and shouting for the return of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Last week, a Tibetan monk who had recently escaped into Nepal, self-immolated in Kathmandu and later died in a local hospital. The searing images of the monk’s burning body exposed to the world the high cost of China’s reign of terror in Tibet, which has been well concealed for over 60 years.
 At a time when people in Tibet are burning themselves alive, when China has installed a formidable military infrastructure across the Tibetan plateau that bears down upon South and Southeast Asia, when no UN peacekeeping forces will rescue the victims of China’s police state, it is time to be realistic about how to assist the Tibetan people at this perilous hour. For as long as the Dalai Lama lives in Himachal Pradesh,Tibetans in India have a measure of prot...

Dear Mr Police Commissioner: I am told by “the Press” that Indian Mujahideen and Lashkar e Tayyaba / Toiba with several score "sleeper cells" are responsible for bomb blasts at Hyderabad recently. The same press also reports that the Commissioner of Police says it is not yet known who is responsible. The media however, quoting allegedly unidentified yet allegedly reliable police sources, seems to know a great deal more than even the police. For, scanning news reports I see that over a week, EVERY name of an alleged suspect is a Muslim name. Even names of alleged organisations allegedly linked with the blasts, are Muslim names. The implications, the undercurrent of political, administrative and executive as well as media bias is striking. Once again, the Muslims are the target. To interpret these horrifying signals, not much of a brain is needed. However, in the India of today where the language of political discourse has fallen to abysmal levels, four notable absentees ...

JERUSALEM — Clashes erupted Saturday in the West Bank where Jewish settlers shot two Palestinian demonstrators in the northern village of Kusra, an Israeli military official and Palestinian residents said. The clashes reflected mounting friction in the West Bank, where Palestinians have faced off against Israeli troops in recent weeks in a series of large demonstrations protesting Israel's control of the territory in general and in solidarity of four hunger-striking prisoners in Israeli jails. Also Saturday, a Palestinian prisoner died in an Israeli jail, an event that is likely to intensify tension in the area. In the West Bank skirmish, Helmi Abdul-Aziz, 24, was shot in the stomach by Jewish settlers, Palestinian demonstrators said. They said Jewish settlers also shot 14-year-old Mustafa Hilal in the foot.  Israeli military official confirmed that two Palestinians were shot, but said the bullets appeared to have been fired by Jewish settlers because the Israeli forces were ...

Chimen Abransky on  Kamenev's Last Essay (Courtesy Harrison Fluss) http://newleftreview.org/I/15/lev-kamenev-preface-to-machiavelli This is not the place for an examination of the purges which devastated the Soviet Union in the 1930's, and their impact on the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The aim of this introduction is very limited. It is to give a brief account of the last known public episode of Lev Kamenev, who together with Grigori Zinoviev was the principal actor in the first of the great and tragic trials of 1936–1938.  Stalin moved to destroy Zinoviev and Kamenev before settling his accounts with the other Old Bolsheviks, because these two stood closest to Lenin at many crucial periods in the history of the Bolshevik Party. One incident alone will serve to show how close Lenin felt to Kamenev. When the Kerensky Government launched its bitter attack on Lenin in July 1917, and the Central Committee of the party decided that Lenin must go into hiding, he went w...

The murder of a local journalist in Sukma is indicative of the fragility of the fine line local journalists have to work within to survive in the Red Corridor This piece appears in the Sunday Guardian on the 24th of February, 2013 There has always been a line that has just moved into a downward spiral for the safety and integrity of journalists with the brutal execution of a journalist in Sukma district of Chhattisgarh on the 13 th  of February, 2013. Nemi Chand Jain’s body was found on the road, his neck slit, with a note claiming that he was an informant. He was 45 years old and wrote for the Hindi-dailies Haribhoomi and Dainik Bhaskar and had over 20 years of experience in journalism, both as a distributor and as a journalist. An initial note the police recovered from the site claimed that the Maoists have accused him of working as an informant for the police for the past three years, yet there have been questions regarding the authenticity of the note. It was sign...

If there is terror, it has to be a Muslim. If he is a Muslim, he has to be from the IM. If it is the IM, it must have acted at the instance of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) It is less than 48 hours since the two blasts in the Dilsukhnagar area of Hyderabad on the evening of February 21, 2013, resulted in the death of 16 innocent civilians. The police and the intelligence agencies are still in the preliminary stages of the investigation. They have not yet done a reconstruction of the act of terrorism. The collection and examination of the forensic evidence have not yet been completed. No arrests and interrogation have been made yet. Instead of waiting till the investigation makes substantial progress, the police and the agencies, with the help of sensation-hungry media, have already started pointing the finger at the Muslim community, the Indian Mujahideen and Pakistan. If there is terror, it has to be a Muslim. If he is a Muslim, he has to be from the IM. If it is...

कल मैंने एक देशद्रोही सूटकेस देखा . मैं देखते ही पहचान गया कि यह देशद्रोही सूटकेस है . उसका रंग लाल था और उस पर हज यात्रा का नम्बर भी लिखा हुआ था . मैं एक ही नजर में समझ गया कि यह तो पक्का देशद्रोही सूटकेस है . लाल रंग अपने आप में में ही देशद्रोह का सबूत है . अरे अगर इस सूटकेस को भारत में रहना है तो इसे अपना रंग केसरिया करवा लेना चाहिये था . या फिर सफ़ेद करवा लेता तो हम उसे गांधीवादी मान कर सहन कर लेते . लेकिन लाल रंग वो भी इस दौर में ? जब कि हम लाल गलियारे . लाल आतंक और लाल विचारधारा के कारण रातों को जाग जाते हैं . ऐसे में इस सूटकेस का लाल होना बहुत ही खतरनाक राजनैतिक रुझान का परिचायक है . यह राजद्रोही भी हो सकता है . सम्भव है यह विधि द्वारा स्थापित राज्य के प्रति अप्रीति उत्पन्न करने की मानसिकता रखता हो . मेरा मन हुआ इसे अभी फांसी दे दी जानी चाहिये . कमबख्त लाल . अरे जब हमारे छत्तीसगढ़ का अकलमन्द गृहमंत्री लाल सलाम कहने के जुर्म में स्वामी अग्निवेश को जेल में डालने की घोषणा कर सकता है तब इस बैग का अपने लिये लाल रंग चुनना कितन ा बड़ा जुर्म है .  और लाल रंग के साथ हज यात्रा का यात...

Bernard Bailyn, the greatest historian of early America alive today. Now over 90 and ensconced at Harvard for more than six decades, Bailyn has recently published another one of his epoch-making grand narrative syntheses,  The Barbarous Years It’s all a bit of a blur, isn’t it? That little-remembered century—1600 to 1700—that began with the founding (and foundering) of the first permanent English settlement in America, the one called Jamestown, whose endemic perils portended failure for the dream of a New World. The century that saw all the disease-ridden, barely civilized successors to Jamestown slaughtering and getting slaughtered by the Original Inhabitants, hanging on by their fingernails to some fetid coastal swampland until Pocahontas saved Thanksgiving. No, that’s not right, is it? I said it was a blur. Enter Bernard Bailyn, the greatest historian of early America alive today. Now over 90 and ensconced at Harvard for more than six decades, Bailyn has recently published...