Dilip Simeon's blog

Last month a shocking story gained little traction in the mainstream press, despite its horrific implications and brutal reality. A report from Iran emerged which  detailed how every male  from a village in the province of Sistan Balochistan had been executed. The Baloch, an ethnic minority in both Pakistan and Iran, continue to face systematic repression in both of these countries, yet remain largely ignored in both the East and the West. Simply having their voices heard remains a major struggle for this stateless population faced with poverty, violence and discrimination. The Baloch are a distinct ethnic group who reside in the lands between southwestern Pakistan, southeastern Iran and a very small section of southwestern Afghanistan. Yet many fear that they have become invisible in their plight. Their struggle is reduced to a footnote in a region locked in turmoil. Their stories are overshadowed by the refugee crisis, bloody civil wars, and an attempt to silence them i...

"Pakistan's tolerance for religious extremists is not just destroying lives and alienating entire communities, it is destroying Pakistani society across the board." BBC-  Pakistan blasts: Shia refuse to bury Quetta bomb dead Reuters-  Shi'ite leader challenges Pakistan army chief over attacks Quetta:  A series of bombings killed 115 people across Pakistan on Thursday, including 81 who died in twin blasts on a bustling billiards hall in a Shiite area of the southwestern city of Quetta.  Pakistan's minority Shiite Muslims have increasingly been targeted by radical Sunnis who consider them heretics, and a militant Sunni group claimed responsibility for Thursday's deadliest attack - sending a suicide bomber into the packed pool hall and then detonating a car bomb five minutes later.  It was one of the deadliest days in recent years for a country that is no stranger to violence from radical Islamists, militant separatists and criminal gangs. Violence has be...

NB: This is a dangerous move by the Trinamool government. If the Kolkata Police forced the cancellation on apprehension of communal disturbance, it must be on  the assumption that 'Muslim sentiment' is invariably conservative, and pro-Pakistani. This is a false and mischievous assumption, and it is precisely the kind of stereotype that feeds Hindutva anti-Muslim propaganda. The atrocities committed by the Pakistan army in 1971 are well-documented, yet there are Islamists in Kolkata who protested the decisions of the Bangladesh war-crimes tribunal in 2013. A pro-Shahbagh rally at the Bangladesh High Commission by secular democrats was called off under police pressure.  A similar episode occurred in Chennai in 2013 when a talk by the American Islamic scholar Ms Amina Wadud was cancelled under police pressure due to threats of 'hurt sentiment' delivered by a little-known outfit called Indiya Towheed Jamaad in 2013. This kind of political interference in democratic deb...

Peshawar:  A pair of suicide bombers detonated their explosives outside a historic church in northwestern Pakistan on Sunday, killing 75 people in the deadliest-ever attack on the country's Christian minority, officials said. See also :   Herald Exclusive: State of fear (a documentary on the lives of non-Muslims in Pakistan) A wing of the Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility for the bombing in the city of Peshawar, saying it would continue to target non-Muslims until the United States stopped drone attacks in the country's remote tribal region.  The latest drone strike came on Sunday, when missiles hit a pair of compounds in the North Waziristan tribal area, killing six suspected militants, Pakistani intelligence officials said. The attack on the All Saints Church, which also wounded 110 people, underlines the threat posed by the Pakistani Taliban at a time when the government is seeking a peace deal with the militants. It will likely intensify criticism from th...

Balochistan, Pakistan’s largest and mineral rich province has been burning since 1947, at times piece by piece, at times wholesale. Problems facing Balochistan have never been addressed by any government to date. Now, when Baluchistan has its first middle-class Chief Minister, Dr. Malik Baloch, dumped bodies of “missing persons”, Hazaras’ genocide, and the exodus of Hindus and Christians goes on unabated. When a new government was formed last summer, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif had an opportunity to bring the dissident Baloch to the negotiating table. However, instead of visiting Balochistan, Mr. Sharif, accompanied by the Chief Minister of Balochistan visited China with the aim of handing over Gwadar-Port and the Reko Diq project to the Chinese authorities. As a result the Baloch people lost hope that the new government would remedy their problems. Regarding their current visit to China, Baloch believe the purpose is to exploit their resources with the collaboration of China....

Parrikar has violated the two oaths he takes on being sworn in as a minister. The wording is that he will act 'in accordance with the Constitution and the law,' which his 'using terrorists' statements are in violation of. The other oath is that of secrecy.   Defence ministers should carry a big stick, but speak softly. In Manohar Parrikar, an intellectual who studied at the elite IIT, India has got the opposite: Someone with a small stick and a very big mouth. I n May 21, he spoke of using terrorists as State policy. His words as quoted were: 'There are certain things that I obviously cannot discuss here.'  However, he then went on to discuss them, saying: 'If there is any country -why only Pakistan -- planning something against my country, we will definitely take some pro-active steps.' Using a Hindi phrase he said, ' kante se kanta nikalna . We have to neutralise terrorists through terrorists only. Why can't we do it? We should do it. Why do...

SOMETIME around the first week of December, the residents of Gwadar woke up to find work taking place to build a large metal fence that would stretch from just north of the old airport and extend westward along a road known as the Balochistan Broadway Avenue. The total length of the fence would be 24 kilometres, and according to what the locals were able to gather, it is planned to extend in a straight line along the central divider of Broadway Avenue and then cut straight south to the sea. Along the way, it will cut two habitations of 30 to 40 houses into two parts, one part inside the fence and one outside. The master plan for Gwadar includes three special zones, known as the Gwadar Port Free Zone (2,280 acres), GIEDA Industrial Zone (3,000 acres) and EPZA export processing zone (1,000 acres). As part of the infrastructure development programme for these three zones, a series of projects are envisioned, including construction of roads, utilities, warehouses and security. In the pro...

Bodies are piling up in Pakistan's largest city as it suffers one of its most violent years in history, and concern is growing that the chaos is giving greater cover for the Taliban to operate and undermining the country's economic epicenter.  Karachi, a sprawling port city on the Arabian Sea, has long been beset by religious, sectarian and ethnic strife. Here armed wings of political parties battle for control of the city, Sunnis and Shiites die in tit-for-tat sectarian killings, and Taliban gunmen attack banks and kill police officers. With an election due next year, the violence could easily worsen. According to the Citizens' Police Liaison Committee, a civic organization that works with police to fight crime, the violence has claimed 1,938 lives as of late November, the deadliest year since 1994, when the CPLC began collecting figures. Police tallies put the dead at 1,897 through mid-October.  The Taliban seem to be taking advantage of the chaos to expand their prese...

We have such misplaced priorities that sometimes I feel whether the entire nation has gone bonkers. We get agitated over drone attack which are supposed to kill the militants and yet silent when Hazara Shias are murdered by militants. As a nation, we do not have the basic morality to stand up for minorities. In fact we are not able to condemn monsters like Taliban even when they target the urban areas of Pakistan.  by Raza Habib Raja NB - Thank you Raza, for your fair-mindedness.  On this side of the border too, we are flirting with insanity - DS Some say that it was never the founder’s intention and consequently the entity when it materialized had no solid footings to begin. The political entity, which came into being on the fateful day of 1947 was born out of chaos, confusion and bloodshed. All of these constituted the birth environment of the country and resulted in a deep paranoia which has prevailed to this date. This environment was dominated by fear of a brea...

Hailing from the restive province of Balochistan and being a vocal critic of the Pakistani State on the issue of forced disappearances, Karima Mehrab had for long received threats and intimidation in Pakistan. She was forced to leave Pakistan but continued to receive threats on her life in Canada. Her uncle was  killed , her home was raided more than twice, and her family in Pakistan was repeatedly threatened to persuade her to give up activism...   Karima Mehrab Baloch was a known crusader of justice, relentless in her demand for equality for persecuted residents of Balochistan in Western Pakistan. Her  death  in Canada this week caused an uproar, even as the Toronto police said the incident appeared to be a “non-criminal” matter without any foul play. For Karima’s supporters in Balochistan and elsewhere, though, that is hardly reassuring. Karima Mehrab, who had been living in exile in Canada, is not the first Pakistani human rights activist who faced death t...

Pakistan’s death-wish hatred is the Ahmadi community. Nations trapped in the cycle of fate can’t resist a recurrent deathwish even when they know it is a death wish. Turks can’t live down their primal hatred of Armenians, and become Turks only when they collectively hate them. Iranians have the same kind of emotion about the Bahai. Once Germans hated Jews and killed a lot of them to post their “greatness” to the world. Pakistan’s deathwish hatred is against the Ahmadi community. It lives as a nation only if it kills Ahmadis and ceases to be a nation if it stops killing them...    In the fascist lexicon, a nation cannot become great unless it smears its face with blood On May 27, this appeared on the front page of the Pakistani daily, Dawn: “Gunmen shot dead a doctor from the minority Ahmadi community in Chenab Nagar town in Punjab. Mehdi Ali, a 50-year-old heart surgeon from the United States, was attacked as he visited a cemetery in the town of Chenab Nagar.” The name of ...

' The largest obstacles to remote military operations relate to transportation and logistics.'  Pakistan has said NATO's supply convoys can cross the Afghan border so long as America's drones do not. Though the expanded use of cyberwarfare, covert special forces and drones is designed to overcome the frictional problems of waging war from a distance, logistics still matter. The world is not flat - even for the US military.    Over the last decade a new political economy of war has come into view.  We have become aware of late modern war’s proximity to  neoliberalism through privatisation and outsourcing (‘just-in-time war’) and its part in the contemporary violence of accumulation by dispossession.  The rapacious beneficiaries of the business of war have been swollen by the transformation of the military-industrial complex into what James der Derian calls the military-industrial-media- entertainment network (MIME-NET).     And the very logic of g...

NB - Venkat Dhulipala's new book;  Creating A New Medina: State Power, Islam, and the Quest for Pakistan in Late Colonial North India ;  ( Cambridge University Press), is shortly to appear in print. A history of ideas, this work questions the assumptions that lie behind much of  the historiography of Pakistan. In part this is due to the authors departure from the high politics of partition & his meticulous use of hitherto under-used sources - DS Here is an extract that appeared in The Hindu: In his forthcoming book on the idea of Pakistan, the historian Venkat Dhulipala argues that Pakistan was not simply a vague idea that serendipitously emerged as a nation-state, but was popularly imagined as a sovereign Islamic state, a new Medina, as some called it. In this regard, it was envisaged as the harbinger of Islam’s revival and rise in the twentieth century, the new leader and protector of the global community of Muslims, and a worthy successor to the defunct Turkish...