NL Hafta

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 They want the armed deployment withdrawn, jailed activists freed and the hydropower project stopped altogether.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.

This week on Hafta, Abhinandan Sekhri, Manisha Pande and Anand Vardhan are joined by political cartoonist Manjul, Rachita Taneja of Sanitary Panels fame, and comedian Sanjay Rajoura to ask whether Indian politics has lost its sense of humour. The discussion begins with a takedown of political cartoons on the Modi government’s direction. Abhinandan argues that satire has always mattered in democracies because it can say what serious commentary cannot. “Every autocrat, every dictator fears being mocked more than anything else,” he says.Manjul recalls that early in his career, even the PMO asked for his cartoons. It was only after 2016-17, he says, that trolls supporting the ruling party, and then the government, came after him. Now, it does so through IT rules that push platforms to remove posts within hours.Rachita calls automated takedowns a dangerous precedent. Satire, she argues, punctures the aura of godlike leadership since laughing at them “brings them down to earth with the rest of us mortals.” She also points to the recent Cockroach Janta Party protest in Bengaluru against CEC Gyanesh Kumar, where shared laughter built community.Sanjay argues that difficult times sharpen the craft. “Good satire makes me angry, actually,” he says.Subscribe to watch the full conversation. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Chief Justice of India’s remark that the polls in question were “only by-elections” in West Bengal is where this Hafta discussion begins. Abhinandan Sekhri calls it “a bit alarming”, and says similar casual comments have come up in earlier hearings.Neha Rathi, a Supreme Court lawyer and a petitioner in the SIR cases, says the Supreme Court was the right forum, but argues that the reason behind voter deletions in Bengal remains opaque. Of the “logical discrepancy” ground, she says, “there is no notification about that, it’s still a mystery.”Shahrukh Alam, a senior Supreme Court lawyer, calls the SIR a “gambit” and says the Election Commission has “got away with” its “big little power plays”. She says she and others are pushing back on the state’s legal responsibility, but asks, “What about its moral responsibility?”Rinchen Norbu cites data showing that the share of people who trust the Election Commission “a lot” fell from 50.8 percent in 2019 to 43 percent in 2024, according to a recent CSDS-Lokniti survey that appeared in the Hindustan Times. TNM executive editor Sudipto Mondal widens the lens to the judiciary itself. “The judiciary is the greatest threat to Indian democracy. Not from today, from its inception,” he says. He says a brave judge is needed, but “in the long term one hero is not going to save us.”Subscribe to watch the full discussion. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Former Election Commissioner Ashok Lavasa challenges the framing of the Election Commission’s internal rift. Asked by Abhinandan Sekhri whether the “dissenting notes” amount to genuine dissent, Lavasa flips the premise, arguing that if two Election Commissioners share one view and a third disagrees, it is the third (the Chief Election Commissioner in this case) who is dissenting, not the two being labelled as such.The conversation then turns to the changes made to Form 6 during the Special Intensive Revision (SIR). Lavasa argues that the Commission overstepped its authority regardless of whether all three commissioners were in agreement. As he says, “The Election Commission of India is not competent to make these changes, because they fall under the principle of subordinate legislation, which ought to be approved by the competent authority — in this case, the government.”Manisha Pande brings up the case of Goa, where election officers who had verified wrongly-deleted voters were reportedly unable to restore them to the rolls due to what the Commission described as a “software” limitation. Lavasa is unconvinced that this explanation absolves the Commission of responsibility, offering the segment’s standout line: “Whenever you use technology, it is used to support the law. It cannot impede the enforcement of law or the taking of action in accordance with the law.”Produced by Amit Pandey with production assistance from Hassan Bilal & Sound by Anil Kumar. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week on Hafta, Abhinandan Sekhri, Manisha Pande and Rinchen Norbu are joined by Anupam Manur, Professor of Economics at the Takshashila Institution, and Mihira Sood, Supreme Court lawyer specialising in women’s rights.The panel opens the discussion by examining the government’s decision to introduce a 0.4% fee on UPI merchant transactions above Rs 2,000, asking what the move means for a payment system that has become central to everyday transactions in India.Anupam Manur acknowledges that UPI generates wider economic benefits, but argues that the current model also creates a problem: who ultimately bears the cost of running the system? He explains that the cost of operating UPI is substantial, while the government subsidises only a portion of it.Manur says, “When UPI came about, India was miles ahead of the world in some sense. It was truly revolutionary.” But he argues that the costs leave new entrants with insufficient incentive, which has affected private-sector innovation. “Private players are just not incentivized to innovate.”The discussion then moves from the economics of UPI to the politics of its messaging. Abhinandan argues that the government has often reduced complicated policy questions to easily marketable slogans: “I think the problem is, like many things that Mr. Modi does ever since he’s come, let’s count his slogans. He’s a fantastic ad man.”The panel then turns to the BJP’s push for a Uniform Civil Code (UCC).Mihira offers a qualified position. She makes clear that she supports the idea of a UCC in principle, particularly as a route towards greater equality.But she distinguishes that principle from the particular version being discussed. She says, “What I have a problem with is this particular type of Uniform Civil Code because it is not based in secularism and it is not based in feminism.”Rinchen questions whether we should even call this a ‘uniform civil code’, given the carve-outs that exist for Scheduled Tribes in states like Uttarakhand, where the BJP has implemented its version of it.He also argues that the focus on polygamy in the UCC debate distracts from the larger issue of inheritance rights for women. “This whole bigamy, this whole polygamy thing is a red herring, it’s overstated,” he adds, while Mihira breaks down the real legal questions surrounding inheritance if the BJP actually cared about women’s rights.Timecodes00:00:00 – Introduction00:07:03 – Headlines00:12:01 – MDR on UPI 00:44:03 – Anupam’s Recommendations00:48:32 – Manisha on Brazil politics 00:55:32 – UCC 01:25:52 – Mihira’s Recommendations01:28:32 – Letters01:46:08 – Recommendations Check out previous Hafta recommendations, references, songs and letters.Produced by Amit Pandey with production assistance from Saurav Kr. Ranjan & Sound by Anil Kumar. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week on Hafta, Abhinandan Sekhri, Raman Kirpal and Anand Vardhan are joined by urban geographer and researcher Rashee Mehra to discuss Delhi's continuing housing crisis.Rashee traces the problem to a structural failure in planning. Using the example of Satya Niketan, a “regularised JJ colony”, she explains how a neighbourhood can be made legal while the construction within it remains unauthorised. “It is actually a very confusing governance structure that we have created in the city,” she says, pointing to the overlapping jurisdictions of the central government, state government and municipal bodies. “That leads to questions of whose responsibility it is.”She argues that Delhi’s housing problem cannot be reduced to a question of illegal construction alone. “Housing has to be adequate, affordable, viable, sustainable. Where housing is affordable, it’s not adequate, and where housing is adequate, it’s not affordable. And that’s your catch-22 kind of situation.”Anand adds that the crisis extends well beyond university students. He notes that landlords in the city fall into two categories: “One who has made investments in these houses, and one who is living on the rent only... they have less incentive to invest because all the rent that they get, they spend somewhere.”Subscribe to watch the full discussion. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The discussion opens with Abhinandan Sekhri talking about the flood of commentary around India's quarterly GDP figures over the past two days. Much of it, he says, is “just completely wrong” – although still a healthier public debate than recent controversies over food or language politics. He calls it a small win for Indian media, even if the conversation isn’t always well-informed.Vivek Kaul addresses ex-finance secretary Subhash Chandra Garg's viral ‘2.5% quarterly GDP growth rate' claim, saying Garg “did what the BJP has been doing to us all these years.” “He made a quick point, he made a simplistic point, which was wrong,” Vivek says, adding that by the time fact-checkers responded, the claim had already spread widely. He then turns to the GDP methodology shift from a 2011–12 base year to 2022–23, a recalibration meant to reflect changes in the economy's structure. He notes that private consumption, recalculated under the new method, has been revised downward by close to $1 trillion over four years – a correction he says went largely unreported by business media.Puja Mehra builds on this, explaining that GDP estimates depend heavily on the data sources and proxies used, particularly for India’s large informal economy, which lacks reliable direct data. “GDP, you get to define what GDP is and then measure it in the way you have defined it,” she says, pushing back on the common misconception that GDP should behave like a fixed, universal measurement, “unlike weighing one kilogram of fruit”.Subscribe to watch the full conversation.Check out previous Hafta recommendations, references, songs and letters.Produced by Amit Pandey with production assistance from Hassan. Sound by Anil Kumar. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.