Dilip Simeon's blog

Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammed Shtayyeh announced after a cabinet meeting  that his government will move to implement the end of Palestinian cooperation with Israel and the United States and its withdrawal from all agreements it had signed with them. The steps were announced Tuesday by President  Mahmoud Abbas . Abbas had said, “The Palestine Liberation Organization and the State of Palestine are no longer committed to all signed agreements and understandings with the Israeli government and the American government, including the security commitments.” He added that Israel will now have to “uphold responsibilities before the international community as the occupying power.”  US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo professed not to understand what in the world Abbas was talking about.  So Mr. Secretary, since you don’t know much about the Middle East and what you think you know is wrong, let me explain it to you.  No one ever thought the Israelis had a...

The  strongest cyclone in recorded history  flattened the Bay of Bengal this week, coming after both Indian West Bengal and the country of Bangladesh. Massive and successful early warning systems and the movement of 2.4 million people into shelters kept India’s and Bangladesh’s loss of life to 80 dead. That compares to half a million dead in a cyclone in 1970, and 3500 dead in 2007. The 100-mile an hour winds on landfall nevertheless destroyed thousands of homes, leaving people without shelter. On May 18 when tropical cyclone Amphan was still out in the Bay of Bengal and before landfall, it was clocked as the most powerful tropical superstorm in recorded history. In the areas worst hit,  Alex Ward at Vox reports,  90% of clinics, community centers and businesses were destroyed. He notes that hundreds of Bangladeshi villages are underwater and a million have been left without electricity. Ward says that victims of the cyclone are refusing to go to shelters where ...

China’s proposal for  imposing new national security laws  on Hong Kong would bar subversion, separatism or acts of foreign interference against the central government and would allow the central government to set up “security organs” in the territory, it has emerged.  The Communist party’s efforts to impose a national security law have been widely interpreted as a move to fully take control over the territory, wracked by pro-democracy protests for the last year. Critics say it will effectively erase the “one country, two systems” framework that is meant to grant  Hong Kong  a high degree of autonomy. According to a  draft of the legislation , China’s parliament has set up a legal framework “prevent, stop and punish any act to split the country, subvert state power, organise and carry out terrorist activities and other behaviours that seriously endanger national security.” The bill bars any “activities of foreign and external forces to interfere” in Ho...

Mr Patel has destroyed  the city of Ahmedabad  by cementing over the banks of the Sabarmati river that runs through it, he is in the process of ruining Varanasi by building roads through it and covering it in concrete with no regard to it’s people or it’s history. All this of course under Modi’s BJP government’s direction “Never let a good crisis go to waste,” Winston Churchill once declared … Crisis offers, of course, an opportunity for draconian governments to hide their deeper purpose.  Just such deeper purpose is hidden in India’s fascist government’s decision to push forward now in the midst of the Covid-19 crisis with the redevelopment of the so-called central vista in Delhi. The high court of  India  has been coerced into giving the go ahead to this hair-brained scheme in the last few weeks without consultation or due process. The central vista is Edwin Lutyens’ design for the parliament buildings and the grand avenue of Janpath (People’s Road) w...

Rohit De - A People's Constitution: The Everyday Life of Law in the Indian Republic  Reviewed  by Sunita  Kale Rohit De’s  A People’s Constitution: The Everyday Life of Law in the Indian Republic  offers a creative examination of the first two decades in the life of India’s constitutional order. A corrective to the argument that this order exists at two removes from the lives of ordinary Indians, De instead shows that although the document was drafted and ratified by a thin layer of political elites, it was through the engagement and interaction of ordinary Indians with the Constitution that its purpose and power was made manifest.  The introductory chapter lays out the stakes of De’s project. De suggests that over time, by invoking the Constitution, “citizen action drove politics into the courts” (p. 4). This tendency toward judicialization of conflict was already present in the colonial period but De suggests it became even more pronounced after ...

The Modi government is using incomplete national-level data to justify arbitrary policy decisions, defend its record, and underplay the extent of the COVID-19 crisis. On May 17, the day the Union government significantly relaxed  India’ s punitive national lockdown, the country recorded the largest single day spike in fresh cases of and fatalities due to the novel  coronavirus . The same day, Union Health Minister Harsh Vardhan  said India had hit the 80,000 cases mark in 106 days  after recording its first infection while many developed nations took just 44-66 days to reach that mark. The health ministry said the number of COVID-19 cases in the country were now doubling every 13.6 days, an improvement over the past fortnight, when cases were doubling every 11.5 days. These cautiously upbeat statements and the easing of  lockdown  restrictions juxtaposed against the grim news of steadily spiking infections and fatalities reveal a worrying pattern: ...

NB : Hari Vasudevan passed away on May 10, 2020, aged 68. A great scholar and wonderful man, he was widely respected and loved. He will be mourned and missed by friends and students. RIP, Hari Hari Vasudevan and the Soviet Archives : A Personal Remembrance It was May, 1995, exactly 25 years ago. Hari Vasudevan (Calcutta University), Purabi Roy (Jadavpur University) and I myself (Calcutta University) were in Moscow for two months, working as a team sent by The Asiatic Society, Calcutta in connection with a project of collection of documents from the newly opened Soviet archives on Indo-Russian Relations : 1917-1947. This project was the result of a Protocol signed between The Asiatic Society, Calcutta and Moscow’s Institute of Oriental Studies.  ... as we proceeded in our work on the publication of the texts of the documents, we began to face insurmountable resistance... from a section of the Left establishment in West Bengal. We were threatened, maligned and discouraged not...