Dilip Simeon's blog

Politics sits on people’s minds as lightly as a jasmine flower. Things couldn’t be otherwise: trustworthy and sensitive individuals are in charge of the state; they run the government in ways that don’t disturb the lives of the people. Since only the most virtuous are in political life, every political party is filled with good people who have a great love for the country and a deep understanding of its realities. It is therefore tough to tell one party from the other. Indeed, opposition parties exist since the people wish to ensure that the ruling party gets a break after having selflessly attended to the work of government for a full term. And, for its part, a ruling party looks forward to sharing the opportunity to serve the people with another party. Although parties take turns at running the government, they work together at all times. All cards are on the table and the government doesn’t take a step without the legislators from all parties walking along with them. As a happy con...

An “in conversation” event with Nandini Sundar, Professor of sociology at the Delhi School of Economics. Topics covered will include recent protest movements, arrests of academics, journalists and activists, and the future of dissent in India. Introduction: Dr Gerald Roche, Senior Research Fellow, La Trobe Asia Speakers: Professor Nandini Sundar, Sociology, Delhi School of Economics Dr Ian Woolford, Hindi Studies, La Trobe University Protest, Dissent, and the Struggle for Justice in India | La Trobe Asia

NB: The game is quite easy to understand, really. The Sangh Parivar and its allies wish to set themselves up as sole representative of Hindu 'sentiment'; and the sole interpreter of what Hinduism is. They dream of becoming the Head Quarters of Religious Truth for the Indian people. It is a replica of the harassment of Turkish author and Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk by the Erdogan government. And it is similar to the punishment of Boris Pasternak  by the Soviet government for writing Dr Zhivago . This is why they make threats when something outside their ideology (and beyond their comprehension appears); and this is why they use the police and state power to crush the freedom of the mind. This is why they campaigned against A.K. Ramanujan's The Three hundred Ramayanas, and this is why they will not rest until all thought in India has been subjugated by their ideology. They will not succeed. My warmest congratulations to Geetanjali Shree.   DS Several noted Hindi litterat...

NB: To this excellent commentary on justice I will add a few lines from J.P. Stern's book, Hitler: The Fuhrer and the People (1992). They are taken from pages 113-114; a chapter called The Spirit of National Socialist Law: "National Socialist law is not, as in Dickens, 'an ass': that is, extravagant, purblind, and pompously remote from the true interests of the litigants and the community at large. It is the exercise of objective-seeming power in support of purely arbitrary and subjective decisions, its true character on no way hidden but emphasized by the mock-formality of its wordings. It is the law as it informs Franz Kafka's unfinished novel, The Trial (1914-15). 'Someone must have falsely denounced Josef K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one morning', runs its famous first sentence; and from this opening to Josef K.'s execution at the end, neither he nor anyone else in the novel ever asks the obvious question as to what ...

NB: These remarks in the SC order are gratifying, and show that some of our judges are diligent in their duties as defenders of citizen's freedoms against the misuse of state power. I hope judges and magistrates in lesser courts take a lesson from this judgement and refrain from succumbing to the authoritarian impulses of the regime now in power. DS New Delhi: Fact-checker Mohammed Zubair, who got bail last week, was "trapped in a vicious cycle of criminal process where the process itself has become the punishment," the Supreme Court has said, warning that arrest "cannot be used as a punitive tool". The detailed judgment in the case that was released today contained a series of extremely strong remarks. Muhammed Zubair had walked free last week, after more than a month in jail, days after Chief Justice NV Ramana flagged the matter of "hasty and indiscriminate arrests, difficulty in obtaining bail, and prolonged incarceration of undertrials". "Ar...

Millions of internal migrants were sent back to their homes across India since the first coronavirus lockdowns. By the time restrictions lifted, many women had already lost work, and faced compounding layers of inequality.  Sunita Devi’s life is a study in contrasts. On a cold February morning, the 35-year-old daily wage worker turned the wheels of a chaff cutter in her village in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state. If ‘things had not changed’, Devi would have been 400 kilometers away quarrying stones instead in the neighbouring state of Rajasthan. For more than 15 years now, Devi and her family have been inter-stiate migrants who travel to more than half a dozen cities from Mandi Mirza Khan village in search of work. Her migration, like most of India’s informal workforce, is seasonal and often   circular  (to earn and remit money back), lasting anywhere between six to ten months in a year. She has led a hardscrabble life of manual labour to earn just 9,000 rupees...

Yogendra Yadav: Devanoora Mahadeva fills the silence An iconic Kannada literary figure, a towering public intellectual and a revered political activist in Karnataka. Shy and self-effacing to a point that you begin to wonder why he is in public life. He has a knack of disappearing from any public attention. As you suddenly notice his absence from the dais, someone helpfully explains: he may have stepped out for a smoke. Invariably and annoyingly late, even by my standards, Mahadeva is always a little out of sorts, a bit disheveled. His is not a carefully designed carelessness of a bohemian poet. It is just that his life has a different rhythm and radically different set of priorities than you would imagine a famous man to have. Oh, I forgot to say, he is Dalit. But now don’t rush to call him a Dalit writer or a Dalit activist. That would be a serious misrecognition, a category mistake. We don’t describe Shekhar Gupta as a bania intellectual, notwithstanding his touching, unadulterated f...

New Delhi: Bewajaah koi bhi sadak par ikattha bilkul na ho jisse poori millat ko nuksaan uthaana pade, jumma padhein aur apne ghar jaakar dua kariye aman aur shanti mohobbat kaayam rahe . Do not gather on the road together without reason, the entire community will have to bear the brunt. Read your Friday prayers, go home and pray that harmony, peace and love will prevail. This was what Javed Mohammed, 54, wrote on Facebook on 11:12 am on 10 June 2022, among other appeals he made for peace on Facebook and Whatsapp ( here , here and here ) to address resentment felt by Muslims, 14 days after a spokesperson of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) made abusive comments about the Prophet Mohammed. It was on 26 May 2022 that Nupur Sharma, later removed as BJP spokesperson, made those remarks during prime-time national television debates on News24, Republic TV and Times Now, sparking outrage, both nationally and globally , and spurring protests across the country. The Facebook timeli...

The Samyukt Kisan Morcha, an umbrella body of farmer unions, on Tuesday rejected the Union government’s committee on Minimum Support Price, or MSP, reported PTI. The body, which spearheaded the protest against the now-repealed farm laws, said that the “so-called farmer leaders” who supported the legislations are members of the panel. Farmer leader Abhimanyu Kohar told PTI that the government has included leaders who did not have anything to do with the farm law protests. The Minimum Support Price is the rate at which the government buys farm produce and is based on a calculation of at least one-and-a-half times the cost of production incurred by farmers. Market rates for many crops are usually well below the Minimum Support Price.Farmer leaders have been demanding that the minimum support price guarantee be extended to all produce, not just rice and wheat. The committee on Minimum Support Price was formed on Monday, eight months after the Centre promised to set up such a panel as i...

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...