Dilip Simeon's blog

Military voices now challenge the established narrative of the Bangladesh war. Every year, December 16 is observed in Pakistan as a moment of morose stocktaking, in which India is held responsible for the break-up of Pakistan in 1971. However, over the years, the Pakistani media has taken to mixing the message. It now balances the short-term culpability of India with the long-term culpability of Pakistan.  This year, the familiar pattern was disturbed by the hanging of a Jamaat-e-Islami (Bangladesh) leader, Abdul Quader Mollah, for "war crimes" including the rape and slaughter of women, while he opposed the "war of liberation" for the new state of Bangladesh. As the NGOs protest at the way Mollah was punished, the world has accepted the hanging. The Islamabad foreign office pointed to the violation of human rights in the "war crimes" tribunal, but called it an internal matter for Bangladesh. The Pakistani parliament, though, decided to condemn the han...

Away from their forested home in Dantewada, two alleged Maoists are living in exile in a crowded lane in Delhi. Barred from entering their "motherland" Chhattisgarh, tribal teacher Soni Sori and her nephew Lingaram Kodapi, both accused in the Essar-Maoists payoffs case, spend their days meeting activists, students and reading Marx among other things.  "If you say Lal Salaam or use the word Marx in Chhattisgarh, you will be termed a Naxal and arrested immediately. In Delhi many people say Lal Salaam," says Sori, 37.  "I am surprised that Marx is taught in colleges here. Arrest all these students," adds Kodapi, 25. In Chhattisgarh, Marx is considered to constitute Maoist literature — sufficient evidence for arrest under the stringent Chhattisgarh Special Public Security Act.  After spending over two years in jail, the duo were released after being granted interim bail by the Supreme Court last month. But they were prohibited from entering Chhattisgarh. ...

News portal Gulail.com on Tuesday released a set of 39 new tapes purportedly containing tapped conversations which it said established that the alleged illegal surveillance mounted on a young woman by the Gujarat Police went "beyond the boundaries of the state".  The surveillance was carried out because, the web portal said in a report headlined 'Snoopgate: New tapes nail BJP lies', "a Saheb in Gujarat was interested in knowing the details of her (the woman's) love life." The tapes contain purported conversations between Gujarat police officers G L Singhal and A K Sharma, who are discussing the refusal of the Karnataka government to allow them to tap the phone of the woman, whom Gulail calls "Madhuri". This allegedly happened in 2009, when B S Yeddyurappa was chief minister of the state.  According to Gulail, the new tapes reveal that officials of private mobile service companies facilitated interception of the woman's phones and illegal...

From time to time in the history of every nation there emerges a maverick force that collapses the existing system by taking its logic to the extremes.  Arvind Kejriwal and his Aam Aadmi Party are precisely that, a ‘wild card’ in Indian politics, threatening to turn it upside down in ways no one could have imagined before. Ever since they were born out of the throes of Anna Hazare’s anti-corruption movement, a couple of years ago, everyone has tried to slot the AAP in the regular political categories of right, left and center. Some have dubbed the Aam Aadmi Party as the ‘new Congress’ and others as the ‘B Team’ of the BJP. Supporters of the party have hailed its leader Arvind Kejriwal as a ‘modern day Gandhi’ while one opponent has intriguingly called his party ‘right wing Maoists’! In my opinion though, if there is any one term that can be used to describe Arvind Kejriwal and his Aam Aadmi Party it is simply ‘innocently subversive’.  I have no doubt at all now that they ...

Religious bigots unite to perpetuate shameful ignorance & moral tyranny New Delhi, 19 Dec 2013 : The decision of the Supreme Court on Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code is not only in line with the eastern traditions of this country, moral values and religious teachings but it also removes apprehensions about invasion of western culture and disintegration of family system and fabric of social life – the inevitable fallouts of the Delhi High Court order of 2009 wherein it decriminalized homosexuality. Our India is a religious country whose overwhelming majority believes in religion and upholds traditions of the east. All religions emphasize on construction of a family through marital relation between men and women, on which depend not only the existence of human race and lasting peace and tranquillity in the society but it also establishes the respected and central position of woman in the society. The Constitution of the country has rightly described homosexuality as...

Charlie Chaplin: “Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long shot.” "Gentlemen, Chicolini here may talk like an idiot and look like an idiot, but don’t let that fool you. He really is an idiot” -  Groucho Marx “My way of joking is to tell the truth. It’s the funniest joke in the world.”  George Bernard Shaw “There are,” said Twain, “certain sweet-smelling, sugarcoated lies current in the world which all politic men have apparently tacitly conspired together to support and perpetuate… We are discreet sheep; we wait to see how the drove is going and then go with the drove. We have two opinions: one private, which we are afraid to express, and another one -- the one we use -- which we force ourselves to wear to please Mrs. Grundy.”. It is the Mrs. Grundy of the opinion polls from whom President Barack Obama begs the favor of a sunny smile, to whom the poets who write the nation’s advertising copy sing their songs of love, for whom the Aspen Institute spo...

A survey done earlier this year shows that public facilities in the poorest regions of India have steadily expanded, improving the lives of people there, writes development economist Jean Dreze. Once upon a time, not so long ago, public facilities in the poorest districts of India were few and far between.  Most people were left to their own devices and they lived in the shadow of hunger, insecurity and exploitation, with no public support in their hour of need.  Many villages had no school, no health centre, no ration shop, no approach road, no post office, no telephone, no electricity, and perhaps even no convenient source of drinking water. Where an anganwadi (government sponsored mother and child-care centre) existed at all, it was often closed. There were no public works around, and no pensions for widows or the elderly. It takes a pause to realise that all this really applied "not so long ago" - as recently, say, as the mid-1990s, when living conditions in the coun...