This week on NL Hafta, Abhinandan Sekhri, Manisha Pande, Anand Vardhan and Raman Kirpal discuss India’s latest poverty estimates and the US midterm elections.

They are joined by Nitin Bharti, assistant professor at the University of Western Australia and South and Southeast Asia coordinator at the World Inequality Lab, and Joyojeet Pal, professor at the University of Michigan’s School of Information, whose research focuses on technology, democracy and politics.

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 They want the armed deployment withdrawn, jailed activists freed and the hydropower project stopped altogether.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

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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.

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Produced by Amit Pandey with production assistance from Anshu Anand & Sound by Anil Kumar.

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This week on NL Hafta, Abhinandan Sekhri and Rinchen Norbu are joined by Newslaundry reporters Samarth Grover, Astha Savyasachi and Khushi Mehrotra to discuss the police crackdown on protests against CEC Gyanesh Kumar over alleged irregularities in electoral roll revisions.

Drawing on their experiences reporting from the ground, the panel examines the detention and alleged manhandling of journalists, restrictions on public protests, and the legal battle over the right to dissent.

Produced by Amit Pandey with production assistance from Anshu Anand & Sound by Anil Kumar.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

Timecodes

00:00:00 – Introduction

00:07:03 – Headlines

00:12:01 – MDR on UPI

00:44:03 – Anupam’s Recommendations

00:48:32 – Manisha on Brazil politics

00:55:32 – UCC

01:25:52 – Mihira’s Recommendations

01:28:32 – Letters

01:46:08 – 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.

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