In this week’s Hafta, Rituparna Chatterjee, Consulting Editor, Reader’s Digest and India Today magazine, joins Abhinandan Sekhri who was missing from last week’s podcast. Manisha Pande, Raman Kirpal and Anand Vardhan are also on the panel.
The fallout between the Bharatiya Janata Party and the People’s Democratic Party, in addition to Arvind Kejriwal’s nine-day-long protest, is discussed in depth by the panel. The Airtel controversy over a customer refusing services from a Muslim customer care executive is also debated upon. The killing of Rising Kashmir editor-in-chief Shujaat Bukhari has left our panel in complete dismay. The suicide of Rohit Vemula is revisited as well.
Abhinandan begins the discussion with the murder of Shujaat Bukhari and asks, “Why is this getting so much traction and not other murders?” Raman talks about the incident taking place in a conflicted area like Kashmir. He says, “He is confounded about “what really triggered his killing?”
Rituparna quotes Shujaat from his interview in 2006, “You don’t know anymore who your enemies are” and talks about the reality of this statement in today’s times. Manisha talks about the tendency of being “labelled as an India sympathiser” if one is a moderate or reports against the militants in Jammu and Kashmir.
Rituparna moves on to discuss the BJP pulling out of an “unlikely alliance” with People’s Democratic Party. Anand refers to this move as a “standard tool for coming out of any confusion when you are in a coalition”. Abhinandan questions the timing of this decision. Raman states, “Almost the entire youth of Kashmir have been radicalised,” adding, “withdrawing from the PDP has more to do with politics.”
The “tussle” between the Delhi state government and the Lieutenant Governor of Delhi has received varied responses from the panel. Abhinandan asks, “What do you make of what happened and where we are?”
Anand observes, “I think the AAP was in it for retrieving political capital of a contrarian party…the moral capital which had suffered substantial erosion with its apologies, with giving tickets to people who in public perception were not deserving of Rajya Sabha seats…” He adds, “The AAP also went on an obfuscation because the blocking of ministerial work is an afterthought. It still didn’t address the original allegation of (alleged) violence against the topmost bureaucrat of Delhi.”
Rituparna says that the Congress has yet again ‘missed the bus’. She points out that the coalition drive of the Congress cannot work in Delhi with the AAP because it’s a ‘natural rival’.
Raman says, “I found IAS officers — former and the serving — all of them were trying to explain that we’re not on a strike.”
Abhinandan comments, “AAP’s whole template is to make an event a talking point and then that goes viral…” He adds, “They (AAP) have been unable to create[turn] any event [into a talking point] since they’ve formed the government.”
The panel discusses a recent Twitter row that involved Airtel and a customer. The customer denied the services of a particular customer support executive since the Airtel personnel interacting with her was a Muslim. Rituparna says, “Brands need to immediately hire people to handle a crisis of this sort…because the crisis of this sort is only going to increase.”
The panel also discusses Rohit Vemula’s mother’s case who was allegedly offered money to speak against Prime Minister Narendra Modi and more.
Recommendation:
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Shujaat Bukhari: A profile in courage
Seymour M Hersh — the Journalist as Lone Wolf
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Abhinandan
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