Dilip Simeon's blog

The video shows the factory owner Jaspreet Singh and two others take turns to beat the man, laughing and hurling abuses in Punjabi. Strung up by his legs and hands from the ceiling, upside down, and brutally beaten with an iron rod, a factory worker has died in an incident in Amritsar after its video went viral on social media. The 47-minute video clip believed to be shot by one of the factory workers on a mobile phone shows the man, identified as Ram Singh, being thrashed mercilessly. Police are trying to find out who filmed it. Ram, a native of Bihar, was accused of theft by the factory owner and taken away by his henchmen on Thursday. Ram's body was found the next day with injuries all over. The video purportedly shows the factory owner Jaspreet Singh and two others take turns to beat the man, laughing and hurling abuses in Punjabi. "They came for him at around 8 in the morning and took him away in a car. He thought they had come to take him to work," Ram's w...

We, as sociologists and concerned citizens, feel extremely concerned about the lynching at Dadri, and the murders of scholars and thinkers like MM Kalburgi, Narendra Dabholkar, Govind Pansare and others, and wish to register our strong protest. We are not just shocked by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s late response, but also by the implications of the victim-blaming statement he made. To say that ‘Hindus and Muslims should not fight each other but should fight poverty instead’ puts the onus for peace and fighting poverty entirely on civil society and communities and absolves the state of any responsibility for both. As Prime Minister, he should have asserted that the state would defend the rule of law. In a country with some 4693 communities and over 415 living languages, each community is bound to have its own customs, including dietary choices. Individuals may also follow practices different from the ones followed by the majority of their community. Any attempt to impose...

It is wrong to assume that writers.. live with the constant desire for revolt against the state. Writers more than anyone else seek calm and approbation. They know that political revolutions by their very nature are short-lived, gory dramas and they instinctively flinch from confrontational situations. If they resort to an act of defiance and return a cherished reward given them by the state, it is because they see no other solution in sight. For them, all other attempts, all other means to draw the state’s attention to the plight of the marginalised have failed. The host of major Indian writers from diverse languages breaking their silence and returning their Sahitya Akademi awards is a fascinating spectacle. The Germans have a name for what their protest represents: they call it the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the times. The writers have drawn blood. Minister for Culture Mahesh Sharma was predictably the first major name to lambast the protesters and ask them to quit writing if they ...

The Vyapam scam has once again come into the news after a retired bureaucrat, who was an observer for two recruitment tests in the scam, was found dead in Odisha. The body of retired Indian Forest Services (IFS) officer Vijay Bahadur has been found on a railway track in Jharsuguda.  The Vyapam scam is an admission and recruitment scam involving politicians, senior officials and businessmen in Madhya Pradesh.  All Vyapam scam related cases were recently handed over to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and the Supreme Court has observed that mysterious deaths related to the scandal have “suddenly stopped” after the central agency started its probe. The opposition in the state has alleged that people linked to the Vyapam scam were dying mysteriously as part of a conspiracy to silence key witnesses.  http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-news-india/vyapam-scam-mysterious-death-of-retired-ifs-officer-sparks-fresh-row/ Another Vyapam scam-related death? E...

Slamming writers who have returned their awards in the wake of the incident in Dadri where a man was lynched over beef rumours, RSS mouthpiece Panchjanya, in its latest edition, has carried a cover story saying the Vedas order the killing of “sinners” who slaughter cows. It alleges that madrasas and the Muslim leadership teach Indian Muslims to hate the country’s traditions. “Akhlaq (the Dadri victim) perhaps slaughtered a cow under the influence of such bad deeds,” it states. Questioning the silence of writers, it asks them why they have been quiet on this issue. “Veda ka adesh hai ki gau hatya karne wale pataki ke pran le lo. Hum mein se bahuton ke liye to yah jivan-maran ka prashn hai (Vedas order killing of the sinner who kills a cow. It is a matter of life and death for many of us),” states the article ‘Is Utpat ke Us paar’ (The other side of this disturbance)’ by Hindi writer Tufail Chaturvedi who edits the journal Lafz. Tufail is the name Vinay Krishna Chaturvedi uses “...

NB - The whole world should know how communal violence is now the default mode of mobilisation for certain die-hard  political  hate-mongers in India.  First the legs of a cow were thrown in a Hindu area and then a dead piglet was left inside a mosque. Despite these deliberate attempts to provoke violence, however, the efforts of concerned citizens and a dedicated police chief ensured peace prevailed. An excellent piece of journalism.  DS Bhagalpur (Bihar):  The minute you tell people in Bhagalpur that you want to do a story to counter the narrative of communalism in the mainstream news, they welcome you with open arms.  On September 26 and then again on the 30th, Bhagalpur town saw two mobs form over the deliberate placement of particular forms of meat in a town that has seen widespread communal clashes and pogroms in the past. A month-old piglet, with his hind legs tied, and its neck cut, was thrown into a mosque; three days earlier, three...

“OLIVE’S BOYS”, they were called — the army of a thousand men who, led by a demure graduate of the Guardian Angel Convent School in northern Myanmar’s Lashio town, built the Golden Triangle, the great drug empire that rose from South East Asia’s jungles. Leading the Kokang Kakweye, or Kokang People’s Defence Force, Olive Yang ruled the region from the 1950s with steel and blood — her very public bisexual affairs with Myanmar’s top singers and movie stars evidence of her status. The government of Myanmar on Thursday signed a peace deal that it hopes will get the drug emperors into the country’s political system. The agreement — signed at a function attended by India’s National Security Advisor, Ajit Doval, and other international representatives — locks seven insurgent groups into a ceasefire ahead of elections due next month. The bad news is that the biggest narco-insurgent groups — the United Wa State Army, Kachin Independence Army, and Shan State Army-North — have declined to jo...