Claim OwnershipThe Interview With Karan Thapar
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From incisive questions to insightful responses, the most definitive interviews that you need to watch out for.
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With the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) picking up immigrants especially brown looking people, and even deporting them, a climate of fear has built up among the Indian community, says Sravya Tadepalli.
“Indians are the third most undocumented community in America,” says Tadepalli, deputy executive director of Hindus for Human Rights (HfHR). “Among Indians there is a perception that we are all here legally, as tech workers, doctors, but many Indians are not in a position of privilege,” she says in a podcast conversation with Sidharth Bhatia.
Many organisations are working on educating Indians of their rights vis a vis ICE, she says. HfHR runs a Know Your Rights programme. “We’ve operated at Hindu mandir’s in New York City, coordinating with 10 of them and distributed Know Your Rights cards, conducted training.”
HforHR claims it is the ‘only Hindu organisation working to protect our community from the viciousness of ICE violence.’ Pointing out that organisations like Hindu Swayamsewak Sangh, which is linked to the RSS, “cares more about hating on Muslims rather than supporting Hindus. I’ve never seen a statement from the HSS about ICE. I've never seen any actions from the HSS about ICE. So that should tell us something.”
She emphasises that HfHR spreads “progressive Hindu ideas. We have monthly discussions, called Baithaks for Liberation, where people talk about Hindu liberal ideas, which promote inclusivity, equality, diversity.” This emphasis on the “social justice principles of Hinduism can weaken the stronghold that Hindu nationalists have.”
We present two separate interviews, packaged as one, with Ashok Gulati, Distinguished Professor at ICRIER, and Avik Saha, National President of the Jai Kisan Andolan, on the question has India been successful in ensuring that genetically modified produce or its derivatives are not given access to the Indian market? The government insists that is the case but could there be room for doubt? We explore the extent to which there is credible room for doubt. Both guests believe that traces of GM material will enter India. Mr. Gulati believes this will almost certainly be the case when we import Dried Distillers Grains from America and could be the case (we are not sure) when soya oil is imported from America. Mr. Saha is fairly sure that it will be the case both when DDGs and soya oil are imported. This means that when the Commerce and Industry Minister, Piyush Goyal, told a press conference on Saturday that “no genetically modified items will enter India” he was not correct. Mr. Saha inclines towards the belief that Mr. Goyal lied or was misled. Mr. Gulati believes that Piyush Goyal probably didn’t know that DDGs contain traces of GM and was perhaps only talking about the direct import of American soya and corn rather than their derivatives.
Historian, author and political commentator Ramachandra Guha, believes that India is becoming a Hindu Pakistan and that the treatment of Muslims is a form of “medieval barbarism”. He says: “India in 2026 is as close to being a Hindu Pakistan as it has ever been … in politics and in the law, in symbol and in substance, in word and in deed, India is … becoming ever more like Pakistan, except that here it is Hindus, and not Muslims, who rule over fellow citizens who are of other faiths.”
In exactly a week, on the 12th of February, Bangladesh will hold what The Economist calls its first proper elections since 2008. Foreign policy expert Shafqat Munir, a Senior Fellow at the Bangladesh Institute of Peace and Security Studies, says that if the Bangladesh Nationalist Party wins, as is widely expected, it’s 60-year old leader, Tarique Rahman, will seek to reset and improve the relations with India.
In an interview to discuss and analyse Sunday’s budget, economist, former Chief Statistician and former Country Head of the International Growth Centre Pronab Sen says the prime minister’s description of the budget as historic is not correct.
Instead, Sen described this as “a business-as-usual” budget which he called “unremarkable”. Asked how well the budget has tackled the problems the economy faces, Sen made clear that it has not done so effectively. He said he couldn’t see “the bada boost” to job creation, which the prime minister identified in his post-budget statement. And Sen thought it was “irresponsible” for the finance minister to have almost forgotten about agriculture in her budget.
In an interview to discuss the politics, personality and legacy of the former Deputy Chief Minister of Maharashtra, Ajit Pawar, who died yesterday in an air crash, political analyst Suhas Palshikar says he was secular and did not indulge in the Hindu-Muslim “bashing” associated with the Pawar’s ally the BJP. However, Prof. Palshikar says that Pawar’s style of politics was akin to “running with the hare and hunting with the hounds”.
Palshikar says that history will remember Ajit Pawar for the work he did for the development of Maharashtra. In time the scams that were associated with his name or the alliance with the BJP will be forgotten or diminish in importance and what will be remembered is Pawar’s commitment to development.
Sharda Ugra, who is widely considered India’s foremost sports journalist, says the Board of Control for Cricket in India’s ego is responsible for the potential crisis facing the T20 World Cup due to start on the 7th of February. As she put it: “The ICC is basically just the Dubai office of the BCCI”.
The crisis facing the T20 World Cup emerges out of Pakistan’s threat to boycott this event. Mohsin Naqvi, the head of the Pakistan Cricket Board and the country’s interior minister, has indicated that Pakistan will decide about its participation on Friday or, even, as late as Monday. Ugra says the ICC has mishandled the present crisis, which began with Bangladesh’s demand that its matches be held in Colombo rather than Kolkata and Mumbai but, actually, goes all the way back to BCCI’s instructions to Kolkata Knight Riders to drop Mustafizur Rahman from their team. She says without Pakistani participation (if that happens) the T20 World Cup would be damaged and its credibility is “out of the window”.
Former judge of the Delhi high court Justice Rekha Sharma has said that the police treatment of journalists in the Kashmir Valley is “a direct attack on our freedom, an attack on our personal liberty … and an attack on democracy itself.” She says its “extremely extremely distressing”, adding “it’s totally without jurisdiction” and is in “disregard of the law”.
Justice Sharma was referring to the treatment of the Assistant Editor of the Express who is also the paper’s correspondent in Kashmir, Bashaarat Masood, who was summoned for four days between January 15 and 19 by the cyber police station in Srinagar and asked to sign a bond that he would not do anything to disturb the peace. He was also not the only journalist to be summoned in this manner.
The Science Editor of The Hindu says that Monday’s failure of ISRO’s PSLV rocket is a major setback and a very big blow to the organization. He agrees that it raises worrying questions about the reliability of the PSLV rocket which is ISRO’s workhorse. In an interview to Karan Thapar for The Wire, Vasudevan Mukunth raised questions about the functioning of ISRO Chairman V. Narayanan and ISRO’s lack of transparency during his tenure. He made this point in connection with the fact that this is the second successive back-to-back PSLV rocket failure. The earlier one was in May 2025. On both occasions the problem occurred during the third stage of the flight when the rocket was attempting to get into orbit around the earth. However, the Failure Analysis Committee investigation report into the May 2025 failure has not been made public. It was submitted to the Prime Minister’s Office but has not been released from there. This means that independent experts have not been able to review and analyse the findings. In turn, that has led to questions being asked whether there is something in the failure analysis report that is being hidden from the Indian public.
In an interview where he seeks to explain the many reasons why Bangladeshis have reservations about India as well as the historical character of Hindu-Muslim relations within Bangladesh, the former CEO of Prasar Bharati and former Trinamool Congress Rajya Sabha MP, Jawhar Sircar, has called for India to moderate the anti-Bangladeshi fury sweeping through the country and to “refrain from reacting to every provocation” from Bangladesh.
Sircar argues that the anti-Bangladeshi fury in India is playing into the hands of extremists and fundamentalists in Bangladesh. In this context, he points out that the decision to force Kolkata Knight Riders to drop Mustafizur Rahman was completely mistaken and wrong. It overlooked the fact that Rahman is an icon and hero for Bangladeshis and in no way responsible for the mistreatment of Hindus in that country. Now, he says, this will encourage ordinary Bangladeshis to turn against India.
India’s former Ambassador to Venezuela, who has also served as High Commissioner to Sri Lanka and the United Kingdom and, subsequently, as Chief Information Commissioner, says that Trump’s action in Venezuela to kidnap and spirit away the country’s President and his wife was “a brilliantly executed military operation”. Yashvardhan Sinha adds that “the Venezuelan military was caught flat-footed”. However, Sinha declined to say that the US has become a rogue superpower under Trump, even though in recent weeks it has carried out air strikes over Iran, Syria and Nigeria, repeatedly threatened to takeover Greenland, cast covetous eyes on Panama and is now threatening Colombia, Cuba and Mexico.
In sharp criticism of the Supreme Court’s decision to deny bail to Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam, lawyer and former President of the Supreme Court Bar Association Dushyant Dave has called the decision “completely wrong”.
Dave says its “really flawed both in facts and law”. He says the two judges have done a disservice to themselves as well as to the Supreme Court. He says increasingly in India, judges are afraid to give bail.
In sharp and focused criticism of the government’s new rural employment scheme, which he says is mistaken and misleadingly called a guarantee, Nikhil Dey, a founder member of the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan, says it has “completely demolished the idea of a rural employment guarantee scheme”.
It's time for our end-of-year tradition, an interview where Karan Thapar is the interviewee and is toughly or teasingly questioned by an interviewer we have invited on the show. On this occasion the guest interviewer is the highly popular YouTuber, journalist, radio jockey and political satirist Akash Banerjee, in the avatar of Bhakt Banerjee.
Chairman of Cerg Advisory and economist Omkar Goswami has said that IndiGo, which controls nearly 66% of domestic air travel and on many routes is the only airline flying, has become too big to regulate. As Goswami put it: “When one player accounts for almost two-thirds of the passenger market and when it’s often the only carrier to many airports, the shoe is firmly on IndiGo’s foot. Not the governments, irrespective of what the DGCA may claim …IndiGo has become too big to regulate. It effectively calls the shots.”
Professor of history Mridula Mukherjee, who taught at Jawaharlal Nehru University and is a former director of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, says Prime Minister Modi was “economical with the truth” in his Vande Mataram speech in the Lok Sabha on Monday when he accused Jawaharlal Nehru of removing stanzas from Vande Mataram under pressure to appease Jinnah and thus put the country on what the PM called the path of “appeasement politics” that ultimately led to partition. Mukherjee says he is guilty of “not placing facts on the table as they should be”.
Author and columnist Tavleen Singh has said that Russia’s President Vladimir Putin is “a tyrant, a dictator, a despot and a monster”. She called his invasion of Ukraine “evil”. She says Prime Minister Modi has damaged his image with the gushing and effusive welcome he accorded President Putin last week. She also said that by welcoming Putin as a hero, India has let itself down and undermined what it stands for.
Former ambassador to the United States of America, who also served in Washington during the first Trump presidency, says that President Trump has “broken” India’s trust in America and skepticism is back. Navtej Sarna says the optimism that used to prevail in the relationship, what he calls “the positive unquestionable narrative”, is no longer true and no longer holds.
Both Justice Madan Lokur, a former judge of the Supreme Court, and Dushyant Dave, a well-known lawyer and a former President of the Supreme Court Bar Association, have strongly criticised the Supreme Court’s advisory opinion given in response to the presidential reference on how Governors and the President should handle legislation. Both believe that the advisory opinion is not well-thought through and will add to the confusion. Both gentlemen also believe that if Governors start taking interminable time to pass legislation, it will place India’s federalism in danger. Both men also believe that the Supreme Court should not have entertained the presidential reference seeking an advisory opinion.
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