Dilip Simeon's blog

धर्मनिरपेक्ष दक्षिणपंथ – एक कल्पना का सच: सुशील चन्द्र पिछले जयपुर साहित्योत्सव (हालांकि मैं उसे ‌‌‌तमाशा-ए-अदब कहना अधिक पसंद करूंगा) के दौरान अमर्त्य सेन ने अपनी सात अभिलाषाएं व्यक्त कीं। दिलचस्प यह है कि उनमें से एक अभिलाषा उलटबांसी अधिक नजर आती है – कि वह देश में एक धर्मनिरपेक्ष दक्षिणपंथ चाहते हैं । यह मासूम सी सदिच्छा न सिर्फ कई प्रश्न उठाती है बल्कि एक साथ कई सारी विवेचनाओं की मांग भी करती है। सच तो यह है कि यह कामना कोई नई बात नही है और पश्चिम की अधिकांश दक्षिणपंथी पार्टियां जैसे रिपब्लिकन पार्टी़, कंजरवेटिव पार्टी़, क्रिश्चियन डेमोक्रेटिक पार्टी इत्यादि इसी संकल्पना की उपज हैं। वस्तुत: यह संकल्पना इस अवधारणा से निकली है कि दक्षिणपंथ के धार्मिक-सामाजिक पक्ष (जिसकी परिणति कठमुल्लावादी रूढि़वाद में होती है) और आर्थिक पक्ष (जो अंतत: नव रूढि़वाद में प्रतिफलित होता है) बिल्कुल अलग अलग हैं और उनके बीच कोई पारस्परिक निर्भरता नहीं है। पहली नजर में यह सही भी लगता है जहां फ्रांस में लंबे समय तक दक्षिणपंथी शासन के बावजूद प्रशासन राज्य और धर्म के बीच संपूर्ण अलगाव के प्रति समर्पित नजर...

Glance at any "top five" policy list in India's business media and you're likely to find "faster environmental clearances and land acquisition" - or some variation on that theme - in the list. For instance, Fitch Ratings  claims  "tough environmental clearances and regulatory approvals" are "key challenges" before the country.  Such logic certainly looks attractive. In a country with crippling shortages of basic infrastructure, and with a severe crisis of underemployment, don't we need quick access to natural resources for "development"?   Therefore, shouldn't the government institute an "easy", "single window" approvals process - coupled with "generous" compensation to "farmers" to address any opposition? In this briefing, we examine these issues more closely. What we find is precisely the opposite of what is usually claimed: in reality, land is underpriced and acquisition is ...

Since the nineties, feminists in many parts of the world have  warned of the growing strength of fundamentalist movements  - Protestant, Catholic, Hindu, Jewish, Orthodox and Buddhist as well as Muslim. We have warned that these movements were a threat to human rights and world peace comparable to that of fascism in the thirties. In Weimar Germany, the left was too sectarian to unite against the Nazis until it was too late. Today as then, an energetic defense of individual human rights - that cornerstone of liberalism - is essential to any workable leftwing strategy. That means we must fight both empire and fundamentalism.. A leftwing analysis that blames the suffering of women in Muslim-majority countries on the feminist movement - variously identified as "white feminists", "liberal feminists", or "colonial feminists" and their "native informants" or "comprador intellectuals in the South" - has become influential in US academic femi...

Lab tests have suggested that a papyrus scrap mentioning Jesus's wife is authentic. Why do most scholars believe it's fake? J esus’s bachelorhood  is almost taken for granted today. In the Catholic tradition, his single status forms the basis for the theological argument that priests cannot marry. Those making this argument point to a simple, undeniable fact: the New Testament contains no mention at all of Jesus’s having been married...  That’s true as far as it goes. But as the Gospels present it, the biography of Jesus contains a gaping hole. None of the stories produced about him in the first century   A . D .—stories with at least some potential to be accurate—tells us anything at all about his adolescence or 20s. For six days  in September 2012,  some 300 participants came together at Sapienza University, in Rome, for the 10th International Congress of Coptic Studies. Among those presenting was Karen L. King. The author of five books, King is a highl...

What put off his fired-up-by-communal-riots contemporaries in the newly created Pakistan was his frequent reference to Hindu mythology and fables extracted from such ancient classics as the Panchatantra. Pakistani novelist Intizar Husain was awarded the French honour, Officier de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters), this year by Ambassador Philippe Thiébaud at a hotel in Lahore . After Manto, he is the best-known Pakistani writer in the world.  What kind of fiction does he write? In his own critique of literature in Dawn earlier this year, he wrote: “One big difficulty with our modern fiction is that it has developed a love for an intellectualised mode of expression. Perhaps it started with the emergence of the trends of symbolism and abstraction in our short story. Firstly, these trends had an intellectual attitude inherent in them. In addition, those were the years when Sartre was very much in vogue in our literary and intellectual circle...

No one knows more about Karachi than this extraordinary Frenchman named Laurent Gayer, with his undying French sensibility producing gems like “normalisation of the unofficial” to describe the death of a metropolis in his book Karachi: Ordered Disorder and the Struggle for the City (OUP 2014). He consoles us by saying Karachi is not as knocked-up as Caracas and Guatemala City in other parts of the world, where the state is in the same process of recession — silently predicting we may have to survive yet higher levels of violence in Karachi to match the thresholds achieved by them. Karachi was a halcyon city under the British Raj and under Pakistan, in the afterglow until the 1980s, when the country faced the Soviet invasion next door in Afghanistan, which stuffed the city with more alien populations than it could take without going bust. Gayer says Karachi was founded by Hindu “baniya” traders of upper Sindh, later supplemented by similarly occupied Hindus and Muslims from Gujar...

No one personified the international scale of the New Left better than Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the unofficial leader of the French revolt of 1968. In the spring of 2008, he visited the Brandeis campus to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the near disintegration of the Fifth Republic , where he summarized the failures as well as successes of the 1960s by mentioning Martin Heidegger’s two most famous students in the Weimar Republic . “We read too much Marcuse,” Cohn-Bendit told me, “when instead we should have been reading Arendt. ” A failure to foresee Thermidor may have stemmed merely from the habit—common to our species—of being surprised by the future. But a limitation of Marcuse’s own sensibility can be held accountable as well. To put it simply, he was not good at appreciating the force of political orientations other than his own. Nor did he manage to exhibit empathy for other philosophical perspectives.  Marcuse imagined how Freud’s critique of the consequenc...