Dilip Simeon's blog

A Bangladeshi publisher of secular books has been hacked to death in the capital Dhaka in the second attack of its kind on Saturday, police say. Faisal Arefin Dipon, 43, was killed at his office in the city centre, hours after another publisher and two secular writers were injured in an attack.  A local affiliate of al-Qaeda said it carried out the attacks.  There has been a series of attacks on secularists since  blogger Avijit Roy  was hacked to death in February.  Both publishers targeted on Saturday published Roy's work.  Mr Dipon was found dead at the Jagriti Prokashoni publishing house, in his third-floor office.  "I saw him lying upside down and in a massive pool of blood. They slaughtered his neck. He is dead," his father, the writer Abul Kashem Fazlul Haq, said, quoted by AFP. Earlier on Saturday, armed men burst into the offices of publisher Ahmedur Rashid Tutul. They stabbed Mr Tutul and two writers who were with him, locked t...

Full text of the opening remarks statement read out by Jairus Banaji in his capacity as Chair at the public lecture titled "Indian Society and the Secular" by Romila Thapar delivered on 26 October 2015 in Bombay. Romila Thapar: What Secularism is and Where It Needs to Be Headed Secularism begins with uniform civil code: Romila Thapar India Today: Reasons for Concern The BJP’s victory in the Lok Sabha elections of 2014 has ushered in an unprecedented attack on India’s democracy and injected new elements of intolerance and authoritarianism in the lives of people living in the country. Behind the mask of a developmental regime promising rapid industrial expansion and millions of jobs for the mass of unemployed youth, we’ve seen instead a hideous explosion of the cultural politics of the Extreme Right, overt acclamations of a Hindu rashtra; a wide-ranging takeover of educational and cultural institutions by the RSS; a rampant culture of violence targeting freedom of express...

मुश्ते खाक हैं मगर अांधी के साथ हैं  / बुद्दू मियां भी हजरत - ए - गांधी के साथ हैं  ! यह कलम को कमाने का वक्त है बहुत समय के बाद लेखकों ने हवा का ढंग ,  अपनी कलम का रंग अौर अपनी स्याही का तंज देखने की कोशिश की है  !  इन दोनों के बिना कोई कलमघिस्सू लेखक कैसे हो सकता है ,  यह मैं जानता - समझता नहीं हूं फिर भी मैं कलम में अास्था रखता हूं .  इसलिए रोज - रोज लेखकों द्वारा लौटाए जा रहे पुरस्कारों - सम्मानों की खबरों में मैं बड़ी संभावना देखता हूं .  यह सब मुझे वैसा ही लग रहा है जैसा तब लगता है जब बारिश की संभावना ले कर तेज हवाएं चलती हैं अौर सूखे पत्तों को हवा में उड़ाती हैं .  उसमें धूल भी उड़ती है ,  कचरा भी लेकिन न वह हवा ठहरती है अौर न बारिश की संभावनाएं धूमिल पड़ती हैं .  अकबर इलाहाबादी ने कभी ऐसा ही नजारा देखा था जब लिखा था कि मुश्ते खाक हैं मगर अांधी के साथ हैं  / बुद्दू मियां भी हजरत - ए - गांधी के साथ हैं  ! 2002  में ,  सांप्रदायिक दंगों को अपनी राजनीति का अाधार - भूत तत्व बनाने की कला जिस तरह गुज...

Pakistani judges don’t shy away from announcing personal piety in their judgments, and no one protests the injustice dished out to people who can’t be considered pious because they are non-Muslim. That’s what happens when you found a state on religion. On August 23, Dawn reported what Hindus of Karachi felt was happening to them. You have to harden your heart to read this. Those in India who feel bad about the Dadri lynching will empathise with this Karachi community. Are we separate without being different? In Karachi’s Jogi Morr in Qayyumabad there are slums where human beings live in excrement. The slum is worse than usual because the inhabitants are Hindus. It has been home to 4,000 Marwari-Gujaratis for the last 60 years. They must have moved to Karachi from the desert, their original home. Their leader, Krishan Bhandari, says the locality gets no water or electricity for days. “Our children left school because they don’t have identity cards as Hindus, and problems of liv...

STALIN’S BLOODY TERROR of the 1930s discouraged any Soviet official from putting pen to paper, let alone keeping a personal diary. The only significant exception is the fascinating, rich journal kept by Ivan Maisky, the Soviet ambassador to London between 1932 and 1943. Serendipity often lies at the heart of discovery. One can easily imagine how thrilled I was when, by sheer chance, I came across the original, uncensored diary while working in the archives of the Russian Foreign Ministry.  It was immediately obvious to me that no personal manuscript of such breadth, value, and size has ever emerged from the Russian archives. It would hardly be an exaggeration to suggest that this diary rewrites history that we thought we knew. At its most intimate, the diary contains personal reflections and impressions about people who decided the fate of nations — Winston Churchill, US Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy, Neville Chamberlain, and a host of others, including H.G. Wells and George ...

A poem is a glass, through which light is conveyed to us. “March… Someone has walked across the snow, Someone looking for he knows not what.” “Singeth spells .” The poetry of Wallace Stevens makes me happy. This is the simple truth. Pleasure springs from the sense of fluid sound patterns phonetic utterance excites in us. Beauty, harmony, and order are represented by the arrangement, and repetition, of particular words on paper. No matter how many theoretical and critical interpretations there are, in the end each new clarity of discipline and delight contains inexplicable intricacies of form and measure.  The last poems Wallace Stevens gathered together under the general title  The Rock  are moving, lyric meditations on the civil and particular. As if from some unfathomable source, knowledge derived from sense perception fails, and the unreality of what seems most real floods over us. As a North American poet writing in the early twenty-first century, I owe h...

NEW DELHI: A UP court has slapped sedition charges on finance minister Arun Jaitley for criticizing the Supreme Court's recent decision striking down the National Judicial Appointments Commission (NJAC) for selection of judges to the higher judiciary.  Taking suo motu cognizance of Jaitley's criticism of the verdict, civil judge of Mahoba in Jhansi district Ankit Goel summoned him to be present before him on November 19. Goel had earlier issued summons against SP chief Mulayam Singh Yadav for his purported comment that allegations of gang rape could often be fabricated. The judge in his order said the finance minister's blog 'Indian democracy cannot be a tyranny of the unelected' prima facie amounted to sedition under Section 124A as well as causing public mischief under Section 505 of Indian Penal Code. The court said under Section 190 of Criminal Procedure Code, it was entitled to take cognizance of the statements which were published in various newspapers.  ...

NB: The RSS-led government's attitude towards oppressed castes is clear enough from an incident in April 2015. RSS swayamsevaks ruthlessly beat up Dalit villagers over a small episode involving children in Sonepat (Haryana) and the police refused to register a complaint. Let no one be fooled by all talk of CBI inquiries. Money will flow, power will talk and justice sabotaged. The kind of persons now holding political power in the Centre and many states is evident from the report on the Dadri lynching of the National Commission on Minorities. By publishing an article justifying the work of lynch mobs in its propaganda journal Panchjanya , the Sangh Parivar (which ought better to be named Sangh Lafang) has openly avowed the practice of mob violence. That persons with such noxious ideas now hold constitutional authority is a mark of mortal danger to institutions of Indian democracy. DS Tears give way to rage in Sunpedh village, CBI to investigate Dalit killing Sunpedh villa...