Dilip Simeon's blog

Pankaj Srivastava, Associate Editor at  IBN7 , Reliance-owned Network 18’s flagship Hindi news channel, would have completed seven years with the organisation this March. However, according to Srivastava, a text message that he sent to his Deputy Managing Editor, Sumit Awasthi, on January 21 cost him dearly. In less than three hours of him sending the text message, he was summoned to the office of the organisation’s Human Resources head, where Awasthi too was present, and handed a dismissal letter. So what was the content of the text message that incensed the management of  IBN7  so much that an employee, who had been with the organisation for so long, was fired immediately? Newslaundry  has examined the message (originally in Hindi) and this is what it roughly translates to: It seems that we have joined the campaign to defeat Aam Aadmi Party. This is unfair. Many people believe that this is happening because of Umesh Upadhyay (who is the brother of the Bharti...

The objections raised by the legal fraternity over Kiran Bedi being named as BJP’s Delhi CM candidate apparently belong to a bygone era, when she was in the thick of her chequered police career. But the gravity of the findings given against her 25 years ago by the Justice D P Wadhwa Committee still provides much cause for concern. The inquiry conducted by Justice Wadhwa, who was then a judge of the Delhi high court before his elevation to the Supreme Court, was into three incidents in which Bedi, as deputy commissioner of police in charge of north Delhi district, had clashed with lawyers in early 1988. The report submitted in February 1990 faulted both sides, in varying degrees and for different reasons. Wadhwa pulled up lawyers for going on strike after one of them, Rajesh Agnihotri, had been apprehended on January 15, 1988 allegedly in the act of stealing inside the ladies common room of St Stephen’s College. The provocation for the strike was that Agnihotri had been taken to th...

January, 27, 1945, was the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the survivors of the Nazi concentration camp at  Auschwitz. We should never forget the crime of genocide committed by the Hitler regime, the essence of state terrorism.  We should also remember the Romany, who too were sought to be annihilated by the Nazis. Hitler's annihilation of the Romanis (the Gypsies of Europe) "We are Europe's misery" - plight of the Romany people in France They had come back, some three hundred of them, but this was not the Planet Auschwitz they remembered. The Auschwitz of their memories was a place where the rules of normal life were upended, where the moral laws of gravity were reversed, where good was deemed evil and evil deemed good – a place scholars came to speak of as an alien planet. One even writes of “the Auschwitz universe”. That place was cold and desolate, the very sound of the word – Auschwitz – seeming to contain a bitter frost. It was terminal...

Amidst the feel-good roadshow of Barrack Obama and  Narendra Modi  and the promise of $ 4 billion American investment, something critical to the survival of India and the rest of the developing world went under the radar - continuing pressure by America to dilute India’s intellectual property regime that saves the lives of millions of people in India and elsewhere. In the name of doing more business in India,  Obama raised it , yet again, at the CEO’s meet on Monday. In response, Modi said that  India was willing to accept the suggestions   of a joint Indo-US working group on intellectual property rights. Its biggest impact will be on India’s health sector. Modi’s promise is the beginning of a dangerous acquiescence to the dictates of America, which wants India to play by its intellectual property rules, whereas what India does is absolutely within its rights under the WTO (World Trade Organisation) framework. America wants to circumvent India’s WTO protect...

The Delhi High Court on Wednesday sought response of the Centre on the plea of Greenpeace activist Priya Pillai against her “offloading” from a flight to London at the Delhi airport. Justice Rajiv Shakdher also issued notice to IB and Immigration Department seeking their responses on Pillai’s plea terming the “offloading” act as illegal and a violation of her basic rights to personal liberty and freedom of speech. Greenpeace activist Priya Pillai plea challenges her offloading from flight The court notices were issued on the activist’s plea seeking direction to the concerned authorities to expunge the endorsements made while offloading her from the flight by immigration officials on January 11, while she was on the way to London to make a presentation before British MPs, regarding alleged human rights violation at Mahan in Madhya Pradesh. The court, meanwhile, has also directed the counsel appearing for the respondents to take instructions on Pillai’s interim application s...

On behalf of  IndiaResists.com , we thank citizens for supporting our petition against the government's mischievous advertisement this 26th January, which omitted 'secular' and 'socialist' from the Preamble of the Indian Constitution. We are dismayed by the Information & Broadcasting Ministry's "explanation", published in today's newspapers.  It defies credulity to contend that the  Preamble amended in 1976 was "not available", and the original, outdated one was used in tribute to the Constitution's framers. The advertisement didn't have a "retro" theme, but had a contemporary photograph of five women and three men in the foreground, beneath Narendra Modi's prominently displayed quote about the government of India having "only one holy book" and "that is the Constitution". But the Constitution is emphatically not a "holy book"; it's a secular document. Besides, six of the eight ...

In another glaring example of how the police in India continues to treat rape victims with insensitivity and brutal force, a  viral video shows how the Rajasthan  police dragged a rape victim from a protest site. We have shared a YouTube link of the video above. According to a report in  Hindustan Times , the victim filed a rape case against one Vasudev Sain in December last year, but no action was taken, her counsel Sadanand Bishnoi told the paper.  The woman had then launched a sit-in protest outside the office of the sub-divisional officer in Jalore, some 390km away from Jaipur, says the report. Eight days ago, she went on an indefinite fast, according to the report, and that's why the police decided to drag her away to the hospital. According to the report, "deputy superintendent of police Sunil Panwar and some policemen went to the spot and dragged the woman and her mother for a few metres," before they were put in a police vehicle.  When asked by the ...