Dilip Simeon's blog

NB: The Sangh Parivar is obsessed with the goal of rectifying history. They are still fighting with the Mughals; still dreaming of military glory while the world burns. At some point people will understand that Akhand Bharat and Hindu Rashtra are mutually incompatible ideals, but in the meantime millions will suffer the cruelties and injustice of communal hatred and violence. Communal politics and each and every variety is disguised atheism, it only wears the mask of religion. But some lessons come very late.  DS Javed Anand: The vishwaguru fantasy So which is the real Mohan Bhagwat? The one who, while addressing swayamsevaks at the RSS headquarters in Nagpur on June 2, advised Hindus not to go looking for a ‘Shivling’ in every mosque? Or the one who in the course of the same speech squarely blamed Indian Muslims for repeatedly testing the patience of Hindus with their provocative words and deeds? Hindu society does not accept any form of extremism, he asserted, while claiming tha...

The arrest of human rights activist Teesta Setalvad and R.B. Sreekumar, the former additional director general police, by the Gujarat Anti-Terrorism Squad on the basis of a first information report (FIR) that copiously draws on the Supreme Court judgment in the Zakia Ehsan Jafri case is patently malafide. The arrest came close on the heels of the Supreme Court judgment dismissing the challenge by the widow of late Congress leader Ehsan Jafri, to the closure report filed by the special investigation team (SIT), thereby discarding the allegations of a larger conspiracy by high state functionaries, in the Gujarat riots of 2002. The arrest was preceded by home minister Amit Shah’s coming down heavily on Setalvad, accusing her of giving baseless and false information about the Gujarat riots, soon after the Supreme Court’s clean chit to Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The Supreme Court judgment gratuitously slams not only Zakia Jafri but also Setalvad and others by its totally unwarranted and...

Riyaz Attari, the man who filmed himself brutally murdering a tailor in Udaipur named Kanhaiyal this week to avenge an alleged insult to the Prophet, was described by a local Bharatiya Janata Party and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh leader as a “dedicated worker of the BJP” in a Facebook post less than two years ago. Irshad Chainwala and Mohammad Tahir are influential members of the Rajasthan State BJP Minority Morcha and the RSS-promoted Muslim Rashtriya Manch and their Facebook timelines have photographs of  Attari posing next to the BJP’s leader in the Rajasthan assembly Gulab Chand Kataria  and senior Udaipur BJP leader Ravindra Shrimali ( see below ). Other posts show Attari attending BJP events wearing a party scarf and being garlanded by Chainwala and Tahir... https://thewire.in/security/as-photos-emerge-of-udaipur-killers-links-to-bjp-leaders-party-moves-to-damage-control-mode Bharat Bhu shan: New Bharatiya Janata Party's troubled road ahead / Sickular Libtard: Nupurgate ...

NB : To this timely statement I will add just one observation directed at all those groups and individuals who seem to derive their meaning of life via abuse, hatred, machismo and what in north India we call rangdaari . I have commented on this useless controversy here  - read it if you can still engage in rational conversation. Can all spokespersons of the ruling party and its allies - not to mention other devotees of the Almighty - please try and get pleasure out of the small things in life? Eat some mangoes, or ice cream. Enjoy the company of friends and loved ones, unless they too have gone over the cliff-edge of communal lunacy.  Ladies and gentlemen, you are a pathetic disgrace. If this is your religion, your patriotism, your nationalism, all I can say is God help us. Put a lid on it. DS IMSD support free speech; condemn hate speech, death threats Indian Muslims for Secular Democracy (IMSD) deplores the divisive and hate-driven politics behind the statements made by the ...

NB : Our honourable senior judges may kindly let us know if they have totally abandoned their constitutional duty to exercise oversight on the actions of the executive. In face of their silence, may we assume that this kind of hooliganism by the Yogi government will be allowed to continue with impunity? Should we also assume that they do not consider the illegal destruction of citizens homes to be a serious matter worthy of judicial cognisance? Are we to assume that the Indian Constitution has been suspended for the duration of this RSS/BJP  government? What should we do? Pray? DS The bulldozer brought in by the Uttar Pradesh government in Prayagraj on Sunday to raze the house of Mohammad Javed is part of a familiar playbook: the issue is under substantive challenge in three courts, the Supreme Court, Allahabad High Court and the Madhya Pradesh High Court. And in all three, the cases are in a limbo. The bulldozing of houses, under the pretext of alleged violations of the state...

Imagine an America in the not-so-distant future. A right-wing populist politician has just been reelected president of the United States, stirring a wave of ethnonationalism not seen since the Trump presidency. Amid the country’s nativist turn, a cult of personality forms around John Wilkes Booth, the actor who fatally shot President Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre just days after the end of the Civil War. Members of the president’s party hail Booth as a champion of the Confederate cause. Statues and memorials are erected in his honor. Although the president still pays lip service to Lincoln and his legacy, he is politically aligned much more closely with Booth. In the United States, this is a futurological fantasy, but in India a similar scenario is a reality: The man who assassinated Mahatma Gandhi, the father of India’s independence movement and the country’s most revered figure, is celebrated today—by some, at least—as a national hero. Nathuram Godse, who shot Gandhi to death on ...

The killing of yet another Kashmiri Pandit in Budgam district of Kashmir Valley is a disturbing development, and further evidence that the J&K administration has been unable to prevent such targeted killings. Last month, a Kashmiri Pandit was injured when militants shot at him in Kulgam. Before that, another killing shook a small Rajput community that has been living in south Kashmir for years. On Thursday, the person targeted was Rahul Bhat, a young revenue department official, who had moved to the Valley under a two-decade old Central employment scheme for Kashmiri Pandits whose families had left during the 1990 exodus. Shockingly, he was shot by his two assailants in the government office where he worked. Last October, after a spate of attacks on Kashmiri Pandits and migrant workers, the J&K police had claimed to have killed the “masterminds” behind the attacks. However, it has been clear for several years that a policy that focuses on “elimination” of militants alone is not...

With the rapid radicalisation of sections of Hindu society, the  Hindutva  project has become dangerously autonomous. It is no longer possible to see it only as an electoral strategy of the  Bharatiya Janata Party  (BJP). Today one does not need to even presume the direct hand of the BJP or the  Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh  behind Hindutva’s every move. Its exponential social growth may have placed it beyond their control. In a formally secular India, religion indeed seems to have become the opium of the people. When Marx described religion as “the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people,” he spoke of it as a panacea that people invented to provide personal solace to deal with the unpleasantness of social life. Indians seem to be drugging themselves with religion when they should be fighting to overcome the conditions of their miserable existence. Modernising societ...