NL Hafta

This week on Hafta, Abhinandan Sekhri, Manisha Pande, Anand Vardhan and The Hindu’s Sobhana K Nair discuss a book that has dominated the news cycle—Sonia Gandhi’s memoir ‘Belonging: A Journey of Love’. Sobhana calls the book “very well written,” with “sparkling prose.” The first 200 pages, she says, have little politics and read more like a portrait of Indira Gandhi than Sonia. Abhinandan points to factual errors, including the founding year of the RSS and the year Ahmed Patel died, and asks how they got past the editors at HarperCollins India. He also remarks that political memoirs are rarely honest while their authors are still in politics.Manisha says Sonia Gandhi has given so few interviews that the book promises a life worth knowing—one that was once celebrated before the vicious attacks that began around 2013. Anand says he is “quite sure” Sonia Gandhi did not write the book herself and questions whether it can be called an autobiography at all.Subscribe to watch the full conversation. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Democrats won big in the US midterm elections, and some are already calling it the end of MAGA. Joyojeet Pal, a professor at the University of Michigan’s School of Information, agrees with this claim, but adds that it is not the end of the conservative or far-right movement. He says the doubling of petrol prices and inflation hurt Trump with his own base, and that this was a vote against Trump rather than for the Democrats. Joyojeet also explains why the polls missed the scale of the win, what the US Congress can and cannot stop Trump from doing, and how voters expressed their anger at Big Tech by voting against data centres. Subscribe to watch the full conversation. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The discussion turns to Arunachal Pradesh, where Tongam Rina, a senior editor at the Arunachal Times, describes the recent armed deployment against Siang dam protesters. “Why do you arm and come against people who are saying, ‘We don’t want hydropower’?” she asks. She says a women-led protest in Pasighat was met with a road blockade and tear gas by the central armed police force. Despite this, she says, the protesters’ position has not changed. They want the armed deployment withdrawn, jailed activists freed and the hydropower project stopped altogether. She also points to Facebook pages of media houses and young protest leaders being shut down by the government.Mustafa Haji, legal advisor to the Leh Apex Body, then explains where Ladakh’s talks with the Home Ministry stand. After a consensus was reached on May 22 for a legislature for Ladakh alongside Article 371-type protections, he says the Centre has backtracked and now envisages only a territorial council-type body, which Ladakh has rejected. The panel also notes the same police chief has overseen the response in both regions, and asks why border communities are met with force rather than dialogue.Subscribe to watch the full conversation. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Manisha Pande asks Rohan Venkat, non-resident managing editor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for the Advanced Study of India, about the far left’s role in the recent violence in France. She also asks him to give Indian audiences some cultural context on the country’s tradition of radical protest.Rohan notes that coverage in the US, as in India, has leaned on blaming immigrants and religious and ethnic minorities. He stresses that mass protest in France is hardly new, from the student-led upheaval of 1968 to the Yellow Vest movement in 2018.“You’ve had the right-wingers in other parts of the world point to these things as if it’s a new thing that you’d see large-scale protests in France. And this is, of course, the country of the French Revolution,” says Rohan. Manisha is quick to remind our audience that the French unrest began with students complaining about poor school infrastructure, a shortage of teachers and an uncertain future.Rinchen Norbu, meanwhile, dismisses the conspiracy theories, spread by right-wing handles on social media, that the protests in India are being engineered by arms of the US establishment to topple the Modi government. The theory makes little sense, he says, given that it is bending over backwards for the Trump administration.Manisha also rejects the comparison with the CJP protests in Delhi. For nearly 30 days, she says, there was no arson or looting, barring two police vans, and the defining image was of abandoned shoes and chappals. The comparison, she argues, makes no sense.Subscribe to watch the full conversation. Produced by Amit Pandey with production assistance from Anshu Anand & Sound by Anil Kumar. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Newslaundry reporters Khushi Mehrotra, Samarth Grover and Astha Savyasachi recount what it was like to report from the ground during the October 10 protests in Delhi.Abhinandan Sekhri begins by asking how live reporting differs from the investigations Newslaundry usually does, where the pressure is to stay accurate and avoid reacting in ways that could later be called unjournalistic. Khushi, who was a print reporter during the first CJP protest, says on-camera reporting brings a fear of becoming the story.Reaching the protest site took her and Samarth about two hours, with police turning them back from lane after lane. She says it wasn’t random who got through: PTI and ANI reporters were let in, and an NDTV car went ahead of them. Samarth says that unlike reporting on the violence of July 20, this time it was “an exercise in exhaustion”, with journalists questioned repeatedly, their credibility challenged, and told to stay on the footpath, away from the detentions. He adds that he sees the police’s conduct as “a system” rather than a matter of good cops and bad cops.Astha, meanwhile, says it is dangerous for journalism that a policeman was deciding who counted as a journalist. She also explains why she didn’t escalate an incident that happened to her on October 10 when she was detained because she didn’t want to become the story.Subscribe to watch the full conversation. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.