Dilip Simeon's blog

A court in Andhra Pradesh on Tuesday issued an arrest warrant against Indian cricket team captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni for allegedly hurting the religious sentiments of Hindus. The court in Anantapur issued the arrest warrant as Dhoni did not appear in the court despite three summons served in the past. It directed the police to present Dhoni in the court July 16. The case relates to a picture on the cover of Business Today in its April 2013 edition. Dhoni was portrayed as Hindu god Vishnu with a sub title “God of Big Deals” and holding products of several companies including a shoe in his hand. Y. Shyam Sunder, a local leader of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), had filed a petition in the court in February this year alleging that the cricketer hurt the sentiments of Hindus by denigrating a Hindu god.  The summons issued by the court to Dhoni on three occasions were returned. The court, which took up the hearing Tuesday, issued the arrest warrant. Similar petitions against D...

NB: In the absence of any assurance that files of historical value will be preserved or even vetted before being destroyed, ( "a sked if these files of historic value were saved or junked, an official expressed ignorance" ),  all those who respect knowledge and historical research have cause to be gravely alarmed at this news. This is particularly so in light of the attempt of the previous NDA government, under AB Vajpayee, to tamper with Mahatma Gandhi's Collected Works (see more on this below). As also the Gujarat governments actions with regard to riot-related intelligence records . The files destined for the shredders may be of the highest historical value and it is unacceptable that the Prime Minister and Home Minister should destroy them without a transparent vetting process by respected scholars. India's historical archive is not the private property of the RSS and Mr Modi. Scholars and intellectuals regardless of ideological persuasion need to protest aga...

Religion doesn't have the intellectual resources to deal with religiously inspired violence. To address religious violence, one must embrace secularism. One needs to think outside The Book. In Iraq, we are witnessing yet again the tremendous harm caused by religious fanaticism. One interesting aspect of the present conflict is that it largely pits Muslim against Muslim, with some fanatics in the Sunni tradition battling devoted adherents of the Shia tradition. Both traditions, of course, rely on the Quran as the ultimate authoritative text. So why the conflict? Well, why not? History has witnessed many conflicts between religious groups who purport to rely on the same authoritative text. For the most part, different sects of Christians no longer kill each other, but the bloodshed between Protestants and Catholics only dribbled to a halt in the early nineteenth century -- that is, apart from Northern Ireland. And this phenomenon should not be surprising. In fact, the phenomen...

KHARTOUM, Sudan (AP) — A Sudanese woman sentenced to death for apostasy was freed Monday by a Khartoum court, and has rejoined her Christian husband with their two young children, her lawyer and state media said. State news agency SUNA said the Court of Cassation threw out the death sentence against 27-year-old Meriam Ibrahim after defense lawyers presented their case. Her lawyer, Eman Abdul-Rahim, told The Associated Press that Ibrahim left prison and was with her husband. Her 18-month-old son, Martin, had been with her in jail, where she gave birth last month to a second child. Ibrahim, whose father was Muslim but who was raised by her Christian mother, was convicted of apostasy for marrying a Christian. Sudan's penal code forbids Muslims from converting to other religions, a crime punishable by death. Ibrahim married a Christian man from southern Sudan in a church ceremony in 2011. As in many Muslim nations, Muslim women in Sudan are prohibited from marrying non-Muslims, ...

Subaltern Studies  by Dilip Simeon NB: This was written for the International Encyclopaedia of the Social and Behavioural Sciences, 2001 edition. I had erroneously dated it in 2002). The review may also be read online here .  An Indian school of historiography whose inspiration lay in the Maoist movement of the 1970’s, and whose  raison d’etre  has been the critique of the perceived elitist bias of Indian nationalist discourse in history writing. Since 1983, when the first volume appeared, Subaltern Studies have produced ten volumes of collected research articles, which comprise the main corpus. After the appearance of SS 6, a collective has managed editorial work. Individual members of the collective have also written texts which exemplify the “subaltern” viewpoint. The school was founded by Ranajit Guha, a Marxist intellectual from  Bengal . Once a member of the Communist Party of India, Guha was influenced by the radicalism of the Chinese Cultural ...

Mao Zedong encouraged critics of his government—and then betrayed them just when their advice might have prevented a calamity. In February 1957, Chairman Mao Zedong rose to speak to a packed session of China’s Supreme State Conference in Beijing.  The architect and founding father of the People’s Republic of China was about to deliver what one scholar described as “the most important speech on politics that he or anyone else had made since the creation of the communist regime” eight years before.  Mao’s speech, titled, “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People,” began with a broad explanation of socialism and the relationship between China’s bourgeoisie and working class. Joseph Stalin, he said, had “made a mess of” unifying the classes in the Soviet Union. In a section of his speech that the Communist Party would delete before publishing the text in the   Peoples Daily , he claimed that China had learned “from the mistakes” of the Soviets, who had kil...

The  14 th  Convocation of the Karnataka State Open University, Mysore 10 May 2014 His Excellency the Governor of Karnataka and the Chancellor of the Karnataka State Open University Dr Hansraj Bharadwaj, the members of the Board of Management and Academic Council; Prof M G Krishnan, the honourable Vice Chancellor of the University, the distinguished academics, social dignitaries, faculty and dear graduating students -  It is a great honour that has accidently befallen me to deliver this convocation address at the 14 th  Convocation of the Karnataka state Open University. It might be the unique occasion in the history where a recipient of a degree also makes a convocation speech.  Friends, my latest tag as the professor of IIT is incidental as I have passed most of my time in the corporate world which is the main consumer of the university output. And we are living in what is called neoliberal era, which is just a euphemism for the corporate-centric ...