Dilip Simeon's blog

Against The Dying of The Light : Bharat Ratna Frontier Gandhi, Badshah Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan (1890-1988)   This note is being circulated for the attention of the Presidential candidates in the forthcoming elections for the offices of President and Vice President of India and the electoral college in this election. Recently, taking advantage of Covid lockdowns, the Haryana Government renamed Badshah Khan Hospital in Haryana after Atal Behari Vajpayee. This was done although the Frontier Gandhi, Badshah Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan (1890-1988), was, apart from other things, a recipient of the Bharat Ratna. He was the only non-citizen apart from Nelson Mandela, to receive the Bharat Ratna. Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan went to prison in 1919 in the agitation against the Rowlatt Act in 1919 as did his 90-year old father Behram Khan in the same agitation. This was at a time when Atal Behari Vajpayee had not even been born. Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan was not merely an NWFP figure; he was, ...

Today, 1 July,  is the centenary of the police firing in Dharwar during the movement for Non-violent Non-co-operation with the Colonial Government in India 100 years ago.  The firing started around 8.20 at night when non-co-operators were picketing market toddy and liquor shops. At least 42 bullets were fired, killing 3 and injuring around 39 persons. The All India Congress Committee appointed an Inquiry Committee to inquire into the incident and fix responsibility for the casualties, including deaths and injuries.  The Inquiry Committee was chaired by Abbas Tyabji, retired Chief Justice, Baroda, and included SS Setlur, former Judge of the Mysore High Court and M. Bhawani Shankar Niyogi, Advocate, Nagpur as members. Shri N.H. Dambal, Secretary Karnataka Provincial Congress Committee,   acted as the Secretary to the Committee.  The Inquiry Committee  treated the Inquiry as "a judicial contest between the Public of Dharwar and the Police of Dharwar."  Th...

Allah Baksh versus Savarkar      Soon after the assassination of the legendary Allah Baksh on May 14, 1943, a young Sikh in Lahore wrote an elementary biography of the murdered leader. The first part of the title of the book by Jagat Singh Bright was "India's Nationalist No 1". Today, 60 years after the killing, India barely remembers Allah Baksh and his resounding challenge to Muslim separatism through the Independent (or Azad) Muslims Conference that this Sind Premier organized in Delhi in April 1940, a month after the Muslim League passed its Partition resolution at Lahore. The Conference, presided over by Allah Baksh, shook up the British establishment. Azad wrote: "The session was so impressive that even the British and the Anglo-Indian press, which normally tried to belittle the importance of nationalist Muslims, could not ignore it. They were compelled to acknowledge that this Conference proved that nationalist Muslims were not a negligible factor". This ...

I would like to highlight a few considerations from a political and Constitutional angle. Perhaps these would strike a chord also with Democratic Socialists of various persuasions. 1.  There needs to be  until the current public health  crisis lasts. This would emphasise in a formal way to all in the Indian state and outside it the gravity of the crisis before the country. At the moment various sections of the state go into denial at the earliest opportunity or excuse. 2.  The President of India and BJP Parliamentarians in particular need to understand that the incumbent PM, incumbent Home, Foreign and Health Ministers, incumbent Chief Ministers of UP and Uttarakhand and the Election Commissioners, to go no further, have lost domestic and international credibility and must quit. 3.  The President of India needs urgently  to start talks to constitute a National Government so as to resuscitate Governance.  The focus must be on  prote...

"In fact, whatever the wisdom of the statement, pampering and pauperization in India in the last few decades have little to do with “secularist liberals” or with any specific religion. There are classes that are pampered. " ... The Temple Construction at Ayodhya at the spot where the Babri Masjid stood is a product of a pseudo-religious movement which one of its early proponents, who later served as Deputy Prime Minister, had once admitted was essentially political in character.  The baggage of RSS-Advani ideas is being thrust on the people with the help of an Enabling Judiciary. The fifth of August that ruling circles seek to mark, to recall the steps taken with regard to Jammu and Kashmir on that day in 2019 and the event in Ayodhya in 2020 has an underlying focus on Hindutva, a doctrine embodying a view of state and nation that runs counter to the Basic Structure of the Constitution of India and the principles of the Republic.  Jawaharlal Nehru’s corresponden...

As the Black Lives Matter protests have spread, statues of prominent figures have been defaced or brought down for their racist pasts. It is unfortunate that amidst this, some have also pointed fingers at M K Gandhi.   Anil Nauriya charts the evolution of Gandhi’s attitude on the race question as well as his views on the African struggle for rights during the latter's stay in South Africa that spanned 21 years. It was in 1893 that M K Gandhi (1869-1948) went from India to Natal in South Africa as a young lawyer, not even 24 years of age. He was not yet 45 when he left in July 1914. Except for a few interludes, mainly in India and England, Gandhi's  stay in South Africa spanned 21 years. The widening of Gandhi’s outlook on racial matters goes back to his South Africa years and was not merely a later occurrence as is sometimes erroneously assumed.  The purpose of the struggle against racism is to get people to shed any ethnic or related prejudices they migh...

Our history is a battleground. What we remember and what we forget  is essential to the control of the national narrative Nearly a month after Gandhi’s assassination, Sardar Patel, the then home minister, wrote, on February 27, 1948, to prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru and placed the blame squarely on “a fanatical wing of the Hindu Mahasabha directly under [Vinayak Damodar] Savarkar that [hatched] the conspiracy and saw it through”. At the time, Patel still made a distinction between the fanatics led by Savarkar and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, which he suggested was “not involved”. The Supreme Court, Gandhi and the RSS However, a few months later, on July 18, 1948, Patel wrote somewhat differently to his cabinet colleague, Syama Prasad Mookerjee, a past president of the Hindu Mahasabha: “As regards the RSS and the Hindu Mahasabha… as a result of the activities of these two bodies, particularly the former, an atmosphere was created in the country in w...

Note dated 30 March 2019 : by Anil Nauriya March 30, 2019 marked the hundredth anniversary of the historic protest in Delhi against the Rowlatt legislation in response to Gandhi's call. Elsewhere in India the protest was observed on 6 April 1919.  The March 30 / April 6  protest was the first all-India hartal and protest on a democratic rights issue In Delhi the Colonial Government resorted to firing and other steps and several people were killed. Here is the beginning of a sample list I'm drawing up: Abdul Ghani , b. 1894. Took part in public demonstration against the Rowlatt Act on 30 March 1919. Killed in bayonet charge by a British Army unit near the Town Hall, Delhi. Died same day. Atam Prakash : Took part in public demonstration in Delhi against the Rowlatt Act on 30 March 1919. Received bullet wound in firing by the police and died the same day. Chandra Bhan, b. 1889 : Took part in public demonstration in Delhi against the Rowlatt Act on 30 Mar...

Seldom in history do things happen suddenly; they are often years in the making. It is known that during his South Africa years  Mahatma Gandhi  had corresponded with Leo Tolstoy, described by Lenin in 1908 as the mirror of the Russian Revolution. This correspondence was three or four years prior to Gandhi’s last major agitation in South Africa, in which tens of thousands of Indian mine workers and plantation workers and other indentured workers struck work. By the time the Russian Revolution took place in 1917, Gandhi had already been back in India for two years, barely a month before the death of one of two leading statesmen who had guided Gandhi’s politics in his South African life, Gopal Krishna Gokhale. The other, Dadabhai Naoroji, the Grand Old Man of India, would pass away shortly in the midst of the coming struggle in Champaran, Bihar. The Marxist Socialist Narendra Deva, a keen student of Lenin’s life and writings, would observe that the Bolshevik Revolution ...

From:  Minority Identities and the Nation-State by D.L.Sheth and Gurpreet Mahajan (eds) Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 1999. Pages 73-112 The rise of Hindutva, particularly since the eighties, is paralleled by strenuous contemporaneous attempts by writers like Ayesha Jalal and H.M. Seervai to present a sanitized version of the politics of M.A. Jinnah. Such accounts have had an appreciable circulation. Some of the conceptual questions arising on the above basis and having implications for the notion of ‘minority’ and ‘minority politics’ are dealt with in this paper. Part I of the essay sets out the idea of community-for-itself, a conception which lies at the core of the later politics of both Savarkar and Jinnah. Part II examines the extent to which such politics may be seen as nationalist politics; while Part III discusses the parity theory—that is, the notion that Jinnah wanted parity rather than partition. Part IV examines the cl...