Newslaundry Interviews

Roop Rekha Verma is former acting vice chancellor of Lucknow University, a professor of philosophy and a social activist. She made news earlier this week when she agreed to stand as surety for Siddique Kappan as a condition of his bail.

Kappan, a journalist from Kerala, was arrested by the Uttar Pradesh police while he was on his way to report on the brutal gangrape of a teenage Dalit girl by four upper caste men in Hathras nearly two years ago. Kappan was slapped with charges under the sedition law and the anti-terror law UAPA. The journalist was granted bail by the Supreme Court on September 9, but his lawyers couldn’t find residents of Uttar Pradesh who could stand as his surety, as required by the conditions of his bail. Until, that is, Verma came forward. 

She speaks with Tanishka Sodhi about her decision to help Kappan, the consequences for dissent in this country, and her life’s journey. “In today's dark times, this much help is what every citizen has a claim of. I wouldn't have been able to face myself if I didn’t extend this small help," she says.

There’s an climate of fear in the country right now, she says, because of which it is difficult for people to speak up and speak out. 

Verma, 79, has spent a lifetime fighting caste, gender and religious hatred, and she talks about what keeps her going.

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Barkha Dutt has had a long journey in journalism. She describes covering the Kargil war in 1999 and the Covid pandemic in 2020-21 as the bookends of her career.

A veteran TV journalist, Barkha quit NDTV in 2017 and launched her own independent media organisation, Mojo Story. 

Her new book, To Hell and Back: Humans of Covid, recounts countless stories of grief, grimness, and goodwill that she encountered over two years of traveling across the country to report on the pandemic.

In this interview with Manisha Pande, Barkha speaks about personal experience, from reporting the Covid story to becoming it when she lost her father to the virus in April 2021. She describes harrowing cases where medical workers were attacked, why she refused to report on the 2021 assembly elections, and the divisive role played by Big Media during the pandemic.

Given the decline of TV news, she firmly says she would not advise a young journalist to join the broadcast industry today.

On billionaire industrialist Gautam Adani’s takeover of NDTV, Barkha says most of the news channel’s senior management didn't know until much later about another billionaire Mukesh Ambani’s loan to NDTV, which would prove crucial to Adani's takeover. This should compel us to talk about the revenue model of TV news, she argues, which is dependent on big businesses and governments, and what that means for the editorial integrity of a news organisation. 

The conversation also spans the Radia tapes scandal, access journalism, the 2002 Gujarat carnage coverage, work-life balance, and the question of media regulation.

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Kunal sits down with Naila Chogle to talk about her life and work as a writer on CID, one of India’s most watched TV shows, her mentor and the show’s creator BP Singh, the show’s promotion of the films of stars such as Shah Rukh Khan, Salman Khan and Kareena Kapoor; and striking the balance between reality and fiction in a police procedural drama.

Listen to the full podcast by being a subscriber on newslaundry.com.

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In episode 2, Kunal and economist Montek Singh Ahluwalia explore how India achieved liberalisation in 1991 – the economic crisis and what caused it, and what led India to open up to the world. On the nature of India’s economy at the time, Montek says, “India had locked itself in a highly restricted situation.”

They also discuss public investment in industries, income inequality, and how private industry can push public industry to do better.

Listen to the full podcast here.

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Welcome to Back In Time, our brand new show hosted by Kunal Kamra. Kunal sits down with writers, filmmakers, journalists, lawyers and economists to, well, go back in time and discuss critical moments in independent India’s history. 

In episode 1, Kunal revisits 1990s India with documentary filmmaker Anand Patwardhan. Anand takes us back to his time shooting Ram Ke Naam, which explored the sociopolitical climate leading up to the Babri Masjid demolition. Hindu fundamentalism drummed up wide support for the demolition, he says, adding specifically about BJP grandee LK Advani’s mobilisation campaign, “Wherever the rath yatra went, people were being killed.” 

They also discuss how patriarchy and caste played into the Ram Janmabhoomi movement.

Listen!

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At Newslaundry, we always strive to produce in-depth stories. And thanks to your contributions to our NL Sena projects, we’re able to do just that.

Most recently, we published a series of reports as part of two Sena projects – The Yogi Who Has It All and Bulldozing a New Imagine in MP. 

The first is a look at Ramdev’s journey from a schoolboy in a small Haryana village to a yoga guru helming a Rs 10,000-crore business empire, and the second delves into the demolition of mostly Muslim homes and shops in Madhya Prades by Shivraj Singh Chouhan’s BJP government.  

In this Session with Sena, Basant and Newslaundry managing editor Raman Kirpal talk about the reporting with those who contributed to these projects.

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Last November, in an interview with Newslaundry, data scientist and former Facebook employee Sophie Zhang described the social media company’s reluctance to act against fake accounts in India. 

Now, in this interview with Chitranshu Tewari, Sophie explains how she had offered to testify before India’s parliamentary standing committee on information, and why she shared documentation on her work on India with local journalists and media houses.

Sophie says Facebook chose not to take action on “inauthentic networks” linked to Vinod Sonkar, a BJP MP from Uttar Pradesh. “Facebook rules favour whoever is in power,” she says. “IT cells drown out the voice of the common man.”

Sophie also describes the inherent “conflict” in the role played by Facebook’s public policy teams. 

Watch.

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In this episode of NL Recess, film critic and founder of Film Companion, Anupama Chopra, speaks to Manisha Pande about her journey from the world of print and TV into the digital landscape, consequences of vicious demonisation of Bollywood on mainstream television news and the reflection of jingoistic nationalism in Hindi cinema. 

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What does it take to cover assembly elections on the ground? On March 9, the team that covered the polls – in Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Goa and Punjab – interacted with subscribers on Newslaundry’s Discord server to talk about how they searched for reports and gauged the pulse of the electorate.

They took subscribers through their experiences of meeting voters with various political ideologies, the campaigns that stood apart, the issues that mattered, and how parties fared across the spectrum.

Listen.

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