This week’s NL Hafta features an in-house panel with Anand Vardhan, Abhinandan Sekhri, Madhu Trehan, and Manisha Pande. We discuss the No Confidence Motion, the Alwar lynching, the Maratha reservation protests, and the recently concluded Pakistan elections.The panel opens with a discussion on the Pakistan elections. Anand offers his views, “What would also be a bit difficult for him, is that he is not controlling Punjab... I think Imran is a creature of ambition, he will not go away without taking his trophy. He took it at the cost of being controlled by the Army.”Madhu adds, “The saddest part about Pakistan is that nobody has been able to dislodge the army, whether it’s a dictator or behind-the-scenes.”Anand then speaks on how cow protection became a political process. "I think it is the result of a very fragile social contract between a community which considers cow as a food and a community which considers it as a bovine resource and a religious deity also. “I think lynching is mainstream, and it has nothing to do with the numbers. It has to do with its approval on primetime by party spokespersons”, comments Abhinandan.“There’s only a specific kind of crime that gets state sanction that has people like Yogi Adityanath say that cows are important, but humans are also important. N number of statements have come out saying that this will keep happening until you don’t protect cows,” says Manisha.The panel then discusses the motivations behind the No Confidence Motion that was raised in Parliament last week. “It’s such an obviously defeatable motion, that one has to think of conspiracies…did the BJP tell them to do it to reinforce their hold over Parliament and the country?” wonders Madhu. On why the motion was admitted, Anand remarks, “The ruling dispensation wanted the motion to be defeated, and the general perception is that it provided a kind of political messaging platform in the penultimate year of the general elections, from which the BJP could orchestrate or generalize the oratory skills of the PM."The panel then discusses the rift between the Shiv Sena and the BJP, Karan Thapar, Rahul Gandhi’s Q/A session with 100 women journalists, and the Maratha reservation protests.For more, listen in!

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