Dilip Simeon's blog

My beloved friend Ajay Singh's book will be released today, April 20, 2022; at 6.30 pm at the Indian International Centre. Hon'ble Kunwar Natwar Singh will launch the book. T hree other speakers will be Mr. K C Tyagi, Mr. Bhai Chand Patel and me. All are cordially invited. Ajay Singh (1950-2020). RIP Beloved comrade and lifelong friend 'Anticipation of Love' and other poems by Jorge Luis Borges Salaam Comrade In Naxalbari, forty-eight years later Dilip Simeon: Closing the Circle: On Revolution (Frontier, 2012) Remembering Rabindra

NB : India's rulers have invented several bits of political abuse over the years, including tukde-tukde gang , and urban Naxals . Some years ago  during the wave of violent 'actions' undertaken by the CPI (Maoist)  I was often asked to join TV programs debating the issue. I was invited because  having been a Naxalite cadre myself in the first phase of the movement  during 1969-1972;  I had sharply criticised Maoist violence. I am still of the view that Maoists should give up violence .  I wrote the following piece for  The Hindustan Times ) in 2009. I found it necessary to point out that there was much in common between Naxalism (the name for Indian Maoism) and the extremist doctrines of the Sangh Parivar.  I re-post that article here, as our Prime Minister has chosen to use the phrase 'Urban Naxal' to attack the Congress Party. The Congress ruled West Bengal during the first years of the Naxalite movement and the Chief Minister-ship of S.S. Ray ...

The most-quoted statement about the Naxal insurgency to demand an ‘all-out assault’ on the rebels, a statement that is again in currency following the  recent Naxal attack  in Chhattisgarh, has come from a prime minister not really known for his assertiveness. But what complicates the irony are the events before Manmohan Singh  termed  Naxals the “single biggest internal security challenge” in April 2006.  Exactly a year before his statement, the Tatas  signed  a much publicised MoU on 4 June 2005 with the Chhattisgarh government for a mega steel plant in Bastar. A day later, Salwa Judum was formally launched to terminate the insurgents from Bastar, and began the most bloodied decade of the State-Naxal battle. The Tatas had to eventually shelve the project a decade later, but a large number of adivasis who joined the Naxal ranks following the protests against the project continue to carry a rifle to date. Bastar was relatively quiet before Salwa Judu...

NB : It is the height of barbarism and cruelty to murder someone in custody. Over more than a half a century of political activity the Naxalite movement has failed to protect the Indian people from communal violence and the danger of growing fascism. The only result of violence is more violence. The only long-term historical beneficiary of Indian Maoism has been the BJP/RSS. What India needs is not a violent campaign to overthrow the Indian Constitution but a non-violent mass movement to defend it. If there are any thoughtful comrades left in the movement they should lay down their arms and challenge the ruling class to uphold what is left of Indian democracy. I have said this repeatedly over the decades and I repeat it now. DS Naxals have killed a police sub-inspector they abducted in Bijapur district three days ago, an official said on Saturday. Murli Tati had come to his home at Palnar when he was abducted by Naxals on April 21, Bijapur Superintendent of Police Kamlochan Kashyap sa...

Born on September 9, 1950 at village Talwandi Salem in Jalandhar, Avtar Singh Sandhu wrote under the pen name of Pash. Inspired by the Naxalite movement, he was known for his poetry of resistance. The four volumes of his poetry - ‘Loh Katha’, ‘Udadiyan Bazan Magar’, ‘Saddey Sameyaan Vich’ and ‘Khilre Hoye Warke’ - have been translated into several languages. He was gunned down by militants on March 23, 1988. He was 38. Our journey together was horrifically and abruptly cut short. On Wednesday, March 23, 1988, a group of Khalistanis assassinated my father. But, they were never able to touch the most crucial parts of Pash’s being: his beliefs, ideology and spirit. Thirty-two years hence, my father lives on and inspires people’s hearts, ignites discussions, makes it to university syllabuses and is often the theme of research scholars’ PhDs. Even today, his poetry changes lives of the youth and inspires young men and women to follow in his footsteps. It goes without saying, I am proud to b...

NB : Premen Addy passed away on January 15, 2020, coincidentally exactly a year after the death of my old friend and comrade Rabindra Ray . He was my kaka - my late father E.J. Simeon 's maternal cousin. His father, Kiron Chandra Addy, was my granduncle, whom my father had nicknamed 'Mejo'. He was Principal of St Pauls College Calcutta. His mother Shanti Addy (nee Sinha) was educated in  Rangoon (her birthplace) and Calcutta, where she graduated from  Victoria Institution.  She too, was in the teaching profession for over 30 years.   This is a fine obituary by one of his old friends, and I have little to add to it but personal memories. Between 1970 and 1972 I was in the Naxalite movement, out of touch with my family and a source of grave anxiety to my parents. At the time my father was Principal of La Martineire Boys' School in Calcutta. In December 1971, Premen happened to visit Calcutta to research an essay he was writing - to be published later as 'Polit...

NB : The elephant in the room: its the establishment and the ruling class that engages in violence via lynching, communal murder and 'encounter' killing. Those who celebrate Gandhi's assassination need not complain about Maoist violence. DS Over the last decade or so, Kerala has seen overt and covert Maoist activities in the northern districts of Kannur, Kozhikode, Wayanad, Palakkad, and Malappuram. In 2018, Wayanad, Malappuram, and Palakkad joined the Centre’s list of 90 leftwing extremism (LWE) affected districts across the country. The ripples of the Naxalbari uprising in North Bengal in the late 1960s reached Kerala as well. North Kerala, including Wayanad, was a hotbed of the ultra-Left movement, and A Varghese, a CPM leader who turned to Naxalism, and K Ajitha, who is now a prominent feminist activist, inspired a series of revolts against landlords. The so-called ‘Spring Thunder’, however, suffered a blow when Varghese, who had won the hearts of tribals, was...

Soon after Rama enters the aranya, Sita delivers a lecture on Kshatriya dharma. A rare instance.. when Sita advises her husband to be cautious... Sita warns that his use of force may damage the forest and his own reputation. Of three grave evils, she notes, two - the “habit of telling specious words” and “vile desire for other’s women” - are absent in him. However, he should be particularly careful about the third, “cruelness without enmity.. That third tendency to torture others’ lives without enmity, that which will usually be effectuated unwarily, has now suddenly chanced before you," Sita says - a clear warning against collateral damage. She fears that in his fight against the demons, Rama may inflict injury on innocent humans and non-humans living in the forest... Even if he ignored Sita’s advice, Rama, nevertheless, lived by ethics and righteousness. For the contemporary market and the state, the forest is a space to be brought under domination. The collateral damage ...

As three of the five activists – Vernon Gonsalves and Arun Ferreira in Mumbai and Varavara Rao in Hyderabad – arrested across the country on August 28 were produced in a  Pune court  on August 29, public prosecutor Ujjwala Pawar claimed that they were members of the outlawed Communist Party of India (Maoist) and constituted an “anti-fascist” front that aims to overthrow the government. Two activists detained on August 28 – Sudha Bharadwaj in Haryana and Gautam Navlakha in Delhi – had petitioned the High Courts and had been placed under house arrest.  Scroll.in  posed some questions to Ajai Sahni, executive director of Institute for Conflict Management, about the case.  Excerpts: What do you make of the prosecution’s arguments against the activists arrested on August 28? If I had read these  excerpts  without knowing the context, I would have thought them the work of a satirist or comedian. Obviously, not a single charge will actually stick, ...

We are witnessing the creation of a new public enemy - the ‘Urban Naxalite’. The term describes not only over-ground Maoist sympathisers, of which there are bound to be some, but  also encompasses a larger amorphous population of those who sympathise with the condition of India’s most marginalised – Dalits and Adivasis. Arun Jaitley, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s wordsmith, has ingeniously designated them ‘Half Maoists’  a la  Chetan Bhagat. The etymology of the term can be traced to Prime Minister Narendra Modi who had described Aam Adami Party chief Arvind Kejriwal as an anarchist who may as well join the Naxalites, while campaigning for the Delhi assembly elections in 2015. By July 2016, Manoj Tiwari, elevated to party chief in the national capital, had begun calling Arvind Kejriwal an ‘Urban Naxalite’. With the recent indictment of Dalit activists and lawyers by the Pune police, the term has moved beyond the BJP’s political lexicon. It has been appropriated b...

Gadchiroli (Maharashtra): Over 76 trucks and heavy moving vehicles from the Surjagad mining site or Thakurdev, the holy mountain for the Madia Gond adivasis, have been burnt in Gadchiroli in the past few months. Two adivasi women, who accused the special anti-Naxal force of rape, have been ‘kidnapped’, and many village elders and anti-mining activists have been arrested. In the middle of that, two anti-mining adivasi activists recently won the zilla parishad (ZP) elections. Sainu Gotta, a political leader who was previously a ZP member between 1992-1997, and Lalsu Nogoti, an Indian Law Society’s Law College (ILS) alumni lawyer and activist, won from Gattapad and Bamragad respectively. Along with them is Mahesh Raut, a Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) alumni, who has been actively working with the adivasis of Gadchiroli since 2011. “I didn’t come here to work with the people,” he said. “People were working from the beginning itself, I just joined them, learned from them and st...

NB : You may well be correct comrade Rao, but the fact is that there is a long history of Maoist violence, is there not? What is needed is a reconsideration of the entire Naxalite programme and outlook, and the disavowal of violence  - something I have argued for decades. In any case, is it not clear that it is the 'Sangh Parivar' that is campaigning to overthrow the constitution? All other extremist projects such as 'revolution' only help them in this design. They have the support of a large section of the establishment and can carry out their projects much more efficiently than the Maoists. The challenge is to protect democracy and the rule of law, which is the last defence of the oppressed. Please consider the arguments contained here . DS Revolutionary writer and Maoist ideologue P Vara Vara Rao on Friday rubbished the Pune police’s claims that they have seized an incriminating letter that quotes him as being part of a  plot to assassinate Prime Minister  Narendr...

Salaam, comrade. RIP Ramchandra Singh of Bangaramau village, Unnao district, Uttar Pradesh, silently passed away at 2 am on 2 March. It was a brain haemorrhage that took him. Anonymous that he was, there was no hue and cry about his passing. No social media obituaries celebrating his life. His is not a name you will find on Google. Needless to say, there weren’t any notices of his death in the corporate-controlled media, nor was there so much as a mention of his name in the alternative media — which too comes to us via the seemingly guileless charms of protean capital that peddles the belief that social media is the last hope for democracy and dissent. One wonders, if a death goes unnoticed, was the life which preceded it worth the effort? Do the anonymous travails of entire lives spent dedicated to egalitarian values amount to anything at all? And yet, Ramchandra Singh lived a full life, a revolutionary life no less, with complete fidelity to his ideals, struggling and suffer...

NB : This is the third piece I have written concerning the 50th anniversary of Naxalbari. It appeared today (June 5,2017) in the Indian Express website. The first appeared in CatchNews and was entitled  Annihilation . The second, entitled  Yesterday once more - 50 years after Naxalbari , was published in Outlook . Here is a   post about a trip to Naxalbari in 2015 that I made in the company of my old and dear comrades. Also relevant is t he text of an open letter  which I wrote in December 1971, protesting against the stand taken by China and the CPI (ML)  on the Bangladesh crisis -  DS The inheritors of Naxalism should challenge the ruling class to abide by the Constitution   We are not what we know but what we are willing to learn - Mary Catherine Bateson Age catches up with everyone, and it’s been no different for ageing hippies and the Beatles generation. For some of us however, the half-century since Naxalbari has been the marker of ...