Dilip Simeon's blog

NB - This report appeared in Mail Today. It includes 2 sub-headings, 'Hypocrisy' and 'A Little too late'.  I attach beneath it a letter to the Editor which is self-explanatory - Dilip They knew . In October 2012, the  Uttarakhand government  received a 48-page report called 'Investigations in the Asi Ganga valley on the aftermath of flash  flood/landslide  incidences in August, 2012.' A team of experts had examined the Uttarkashi disaster where a combination of heavy rainfall and flash floods had swept away vehicular and pedestrian bridges, cutting the Gangotri valley off from the outside world and killing 29 people. As many as 85 villages were damaged and over 500 people were stranded on the Rishikesh-Gangotri National Highway. The report, complete with pictures of IAF Mi-17s evacuating stranded villagers and details of measures to avoid such calamities, said a disaster of such a magnitude was waiting to happen. And it did, within a year. The rep...

RISHIKESH: In the midst of a sea of survivors at the Rishikesh bus terminal, a nine-year-old rushed about with a carton in one hand swiftly picking empty cans, bottles and paper bags. His mother followed him. She too went about quietly collecting the waste lying around. Contributing to the relief exercise the mother and son from Germany are in no rush to catch the first flight to the comfort of their home and have instead stationed themselves here doing whatever is required. But their concern for the environment at the camp strewn with plastic bottles, paper plates, empty cartons brings to the fore the reality that the nation, despite the disaster in the hill state, is yet to learn to respect nature. So far 35,000 survivors have registered with the administration, SDM Riskhikesh Ramji Saran Sharma told TOI on Wednesday. Rishikesh is the main transit point that evacuees have been brought to the last three days to catch buses, trains and flights from Dehradun. A sense of charity per...

The Nobel Peace Prize For Espionage On February 28, 1933, the Reichstag Fire Decree gave Adolf Hitler the emergency powers he needed to suspend civil liberties, and the Nazi party wasted no time targeting political opponents. 1  Carl von Ossietzky was arrested by the special police that very morning. It was not the first time the editor-in-chief of   Die Weltbühne  (The World Stage), the voice of leftist intellectuals, had been in a German prison. After Ossietzky ran an article exposing Germany’s secret rearmament, a clear violation of Treaty of Versailles, he was convicted of “treason and espionage.” He was sentenced to 18 months in Spandau Prison, but was released after seven months for the Christmas amnesty. 2 The first time Ossietzky entered a Berlin prison, he was led by a procession of prominent German intellectuals, but many of those dissidents fled when Hitler was appointed chancellor in January of 1933. Philosopher Walter Benjamin lit out for Paris, and scie...

The News (Pakistan), June 26, 2013 Z A Bhutto wrote in If I am Assassinated – a book he penned while in prison – that perhaps the real mistake he committed in his politics was to try to harmonise the interests of the upper classes with those of the downtrodden. This would never happen. Unfortunately, it seems that Bhutto was the second last mainstream popular Pakistani politician (Benazir being the last), who at least thought about the social, political and economic interests of the struggling classes. The issue has been placed on the back burner now and there is no real distinction between the economic policies propagated or pursued by the major political parties. The discourse is all about who is more ‘efficient’ and less corrupt in implementing the same pro-rich economic paradigm that is supposed to serve the poor through a small trickle-down of surplus wealth by creating safety nets. The discordant interests of the rich and the poor, the haves and the have-nots, the elites and th...

Dhaka Tribune, June 27, 2013 A new phenomenon where men kidnap 10-16-year-old girls from minority communities and force them to sign declarations that they are adults and wish to change their religion to Islam to get married.  Human rights groups and NGOs are calling for more action to be taken to prevent a spate of abductions and rapes of women, who have reportedly also then been forced to convert to Islam as part of a “carefully-planned” strategy to reduce support for victims from their communities after the crime is perpetrated. Prima (not her real name), a sixth grader from Gazipur’s Tongi area, was abducted on her way back from school on April 6 this year.  Law enforcers found her 55 days later at a hotel in Cox’s Bazaar. She had been raped repeatedly by some boys from her locality during the period and was forced to convert her religion from Hinduism to Islam and marry one of the perpetrators, Rabiul Hossein Manik. Experts say Prima’s traumatic experience was not an isol...

The CBI, which is investigating the killing of a man called Sadiq Jamal in Ahmedabad in January 2003, alleges that not only was he shot dead by the police in a fake encounter, but also that the Intelligence Bureau or IB played a role in it.  Like they did in the Ishrat Jahan case of a year later, the Gujarat Police have claimed they had intelligence that Sadiq was a terrorist who planned to attack Narendra Modi and other top BJP leaders.  But the CBI, which has questioned an unprecedented six IB officials in the case, alleges that its investigations have patched together a vastly different story. The CBI probe has found that the intelligence that the Gujarat Police got on Sadiq was from three reports generated by the IB - one by a member of IB's Mumbai station Gururaj Savadatti in end October 2002, another by the IB headquarters on November 24 the same year and a third five days later by then Ahmedabad station head Rajinder Kumar, who is also being investigated in the Ishrat...

Sometimes it is better to write about history that is long gone and archived for easy or privileged access.  But with his latest essay on Afghanistan, William Dalrymple has crossed into the wilds of contemporary geo-politics and proved the axiom that history can also be someone’s pet interpretation. Or more dangerously, a convenient narrative set to convenience some. Dalrymple’s  A Deadly Triangle: Afghanistan, Pakistan, & India  is being promoted among the powerful in Washington almost as THE version of what happened over the past three decades in Afghanistan. He wrote the essay for The Brookings Institute, a major DC think tank, and with it his entry into the American wonk club is assured.  The story is told in Dalrymple’s typically engaging style with enough “live feeds” to keep up reader interest. But his thesis is deeply problematic and ultimately wrong. To sum it up in his words: “The hostility between India and Pakistan lies at the heart of the current ...