Dilip Simeon's blog

Delhi’s Police’s investigation against students and activists in connection with the Delhi riots is pushing the Indian state into a long dark night of tyranny. The riots are a serious matter. All perpetrators must be credibly identified and subject to the law. But instead, we are witnessing a project designed to crush civil society. If our freedom is to be saved, we need to understand what is at stake in what is happening in Delhi. Normally, in a society constituted by the rule of law, we should let the investigation run its course before pronouncing judgment.  But we are living in a world where the state, in partnership with the media, does not subscribe to this restraint. In case after case, it runs nightly media trials, destroying people’s lives and reputations. The state uses investigations, leaked evidence, chargesheets as pretexts for establishing narrative dominance and to intimidate. It is not interested in guilt or innocence. It is interested in demonstrating that it can d...

What will the US’s increasingly progressive majority do if Republican state officials reinstall Trump in the White House, in defiance of the voters? What will they do if that 6-3 court overturns Roe v Wade and bans abortion across the entire country? Think how that latter situation will have arisen: it is because the Senate picks the judges, and the Senate enshrines minority rule. With two senators per state, Wyoming (pop: 600,000) has the same representation as California (40 million). On  current trends , 70% of Americans will soon have just 30 senators representing them, while the 30% minority will have 70.  When it comes to their right to medical treatment or to rid their streets of military-grade assault weapons, the urban, diverse majority are subject to the veto of the rural, white, conservative minority. How long is that sustainable?  Donald Trump's plot against democracy could break America apart We know that US democracy is on  the line this November , bu...

The high-profile Char Dham road project in Uttarakhand was proposed by the prime minister in 2019 and has been fast-tracked for completion by 2021. Mallika Bhanot  writes  that the accelerated execution of the project has broken laws, caused ecological damage, and raises the prospect of permanent damage to the ecologically-fragile region... India's ambitious solar energy targets are supposed to show its commitment to renewable energy.  But, as Tejal Kanitkar argues, the aggressive pursuit of solar is not based on a larger vision for the energy sector, the targets have been arbitrarily drawn up, and there has been no concern for developing domestic manufacturing capacity in solar, together actually  threatening India's energy security .  What is a 'social' stock exchange? Varsha Aithala  explains  how this proposal, which has been mooted for India, will work as a source of finance for both not-for-profits and for-profit enterprises w...

Acknowledging the past is an ongoing necessity to know who we are, says Arnon Grunberg, whose Dutch WWII Remembrance Day lecture pointedly commemorates those who lost their lives shouting ‘No!’ and refusing to conform. ..Saying that one knows the past well enough by now usually amounts to a refusal to get to know that past. And those who do not know the past are not so much doomed to repeat it as doomed not to know who they are. Nothing makes people long for a cut-and-dried identity more than the gnawing suspicion that they have no idea who they are. And it is often the cut-and-dried identity, the refusal to deal playfully with that identity, that results in the Other being seen as a complete stranger and absolute nemesis... https://www.eurozine.com/nee-nee/ Ordinary people. The courage to say NO Remember this lady Book review: The Lovers Who Led Germany’s Resistance Against the Nazis Noor Inayat Khan (1914-1944). Shrabani Basu on the spy who saved Europe Noor Inayat Khan: Statue of ...

What can the history of the soil tell us about modernity and its ills? An experiment in urban gardening sets Kate Brown thinking about the consequences of the western world’s perennial misuse of the land – and how to return life to today’s extinct terrains.... My shovel hit the earth with a ka-chunk. My friend and I were digging trenches to lay down a line of asparagus. We didn’t get far. The ground on a stretch of urban territory in Washington DC consisted of a thin layer of grass covering gravel mixed with burnt-orange clay. Clay is the iconic soil of the American South.  In Margaret Mitchell’s novel  Gone with the Wind , Scarlett O’Hara, the man-hungry party-girl, stands in the smoking ruins of the Civil War and longs for the ‘red earth of Tara’. In the novel’s conclusion, Scarlett realizes that, more than any man, her native soil ‘was her strength’... https://www.eurozine.com/resurrecting-the-soil/

The way that Trump plays with uncertainty, tests out what is thinkable and conceivable, seems to be precisely what makes him so fascinating. Like with a car accident, one cannot look away. His game is ‘to keep the country in suspense’, as he put it before the 2016 elections, when asked whether he would accept the results. By forcing us to continually speculate about whether he will break the rules, he forces us to play his game. This creates suspicion. Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen, in his testimony before the House of Representatives in February 2019, expressed his fear that if Trump loses the election in 2020, ‘there will never be a peaceful transition of power’. Conspiracy theory is the logic of populism – and it is a logic that affects everyone. But perhaps we should stop looking spellbound at the coming election and its outcome? After all, the current wisdom is that democracies die not with a bang, but with a whimper. Perhaps the United States made the transition to ...

In July, shortly after Turkish society emerged from COVID lockdown, members of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) proposed withdrawing the country from the Istanbul Convention. Signed by Turkey in 2011, the Convention creates a European legal framework for preventing, prosecuting and eliminating violence against women and domestic violence.  Arguments that the convention ‘weakens the institution of the family’ and ‘encourages homosexuality’ were consistent with the culture of anti-feminism and patriarchalism long encouraged by the AKP.  However, in the context of a recent wave of femicides, the prospect of losing one of the few legal protections for vulnerable has women provoked outrage, reaching all the way into the conservative camp. What follows is the English translation of a comment published in the September issue of Turkish journal Varlık by the poet and philosopher Betül Dünder, together with an open letter signed by 155 female writers and poets, ...