The Wire Talks

“The youth movement consisted of many who were supporters of this government and that is significant”, says Tariq Ali, the icon of protest movements in the 1960s and after.

“This is not a movement orchestrated by China, or Pakistan, or internal opposition parties. This is a movement that has risen from below,” he said in a podcast discussion with Sidharth Bhatia.

Ali, apart from being a campaigner and activist, is also a film maker and author of novels, biographies and even a play. He closely follows global events and particularly of South Asia. His most famous book, Street Fighting Years, An Autobiography of the Sixties, has gone into multiple editions and provides a ring side glimpse of the big events of that decade.

When asked about accusations against the protesters of using abusive language, he said that it goes on in many parts of the world.

“One country where the president is subjected continuously to ridicule is the United States of America. I mean, it's difficult to go into a social network without seeing absolutely vicious and savage attacks on Trump who replies in kind.Unlike the Indian prime minister, he doesn't say, oh, I'm above all this, you shouldn't abuse me.”

The BJP and RSS too used to mock Nehru and Gandhi and no one said to them don’t do it, he said.

Speaking of global demonstrations against Israel’s bombing of Gaza, he said, “Of all the big countries in the world, the only one where there haven't been any big demonstrations in solidarity with Palestine is India.

The Indian left has a lot to answer for. They should have organized them, even if just a few thousand people turned up.”

Did he have anything to say to young protesters? “You've won a temporary victory. It's partially psychological, partially political. It can disappear very quickly. Don't let it disappear. That would be my message.”

The sudden takedown of the film Satluj from an OTT platform within 48 hours of release sparked a lot of discussion. The film was made four years ago and the censors had asked for 127 cuts which the director Honey Trehan refused. Once it was pulled down, it was distributed all over Punjab for free for audiences to watch.

“I'm quite surprised at the way the government has behaved in the whole thing”, veteran journalist Kanwar Sandhu said in a podcast discussion with Sidharth Bhatia.

He said the manner in which the film was pulled down “raised the curiosity of the people.” He managed to see it online but “in the last two minutes there was a message that there was a technical error and I couldn’t see any more. What is it that they don't want the people to know?”

He said Khalistan was not an issue at the moment at all in Punjab. “There are Sikhs abroad who have certain grievances, they feel slighted, they feel hurt,” he said.

Sandhu also spoke of the government’s handling of the protests of the last few weeks. “My mind goes back to the farm protests. I see similarities in the playbook. You take decisions without consulting the stakeholders. That's what they did when they brought in the farm laws.” When the prime minister finally relented, it was done in a “half-hearted way.”

Actor and activist Shabana Azmi was among those who joined the protestors at Jantar Mantar and says she saw “hope and anger” among them. “I and Javed saab (Javed Akhtar) wrote a letter directly to the prime minister appealing initiate a dialogue with the students. We got an acknowledgement” but nothing else, so she joined the protests.

In a podcast discussion with Sidharth Bhatia, Azmi said the students had insisted they wanted the protest to be peaceful. But “I saw the tear gas and then the lathi charge.” After that the students were “very angry.” She added, “We have a ruling party and the leaders always saying the youth are our biggest strength”. But, “They were not even ready to address any of these issues.” She said now the opposition parties must come together and work out a strategy and meanwhile the government has to rethink its attitude.”

Asked why her colleagues from the industry were not speaking up, she said many had. But, if someone hasn’t “I think it's not fair for us to judge them. The people who choose not to can do so because they weigh the consequences differently and that is their right. Why is it necessary that just because we are actors, we should have a view on everything?”

Congress leader Salman Khurshid, was among those who attended the funeral of Ayatollah Khamenei in Tehran in early July. He was invited personally and was also representing the Congress party.

“I saw a lot of resilience and confidence in Iran. There was no sense of victimhood,” he said to Sidharth Bhatia in a discussion.

“There weren’t policemen everywhere. It looked like very relaxed, but an extremely disciplined populace. Despite what people say about women not being involved in public life in Iran, most of the photographers who were around us were women.

“Very well spoken, very elegant in the English language. And I saw, I saw women moving easily on two wheelers, et cetera, riding pillion, with or without hijab.” He said the visiting delegations were “not shown any destruction of property”

Khurshid, a former External Affairs Minister, said “not once did they say that you could have sent an official delegation of a higher level.”But, he said, “the Indian prime minister visiting Israel on the eve of the war being unleashed was completely, completely wrong.”

“The point really is for future time to take stock of our foreign policy, because we will hit a crisis once again. For us to miss the opportunity to rework a relationship with Iran will be a very sad thing.”

A new book, Indian Caliphate: Exiled Ottomans and the Billionaire Princes floats the tantalising possibility that the Nizam of Hyderabad’s dynasty came close to becoming the Caliphs in the 20th century.

“With the wealth of the Asaf Jahi dynasty, Mukarram Jha, the son, the grandson of the last Ottoman caliph, and the grandson of the seventh Nizam of Hyderabad, when he became the Nizam, he could then have claimed the title”, according to the author Imran Mulla, a London-based journalist.

“it would have been more of a soft power role in the Muslim world. And it would have depended entirely on the recognition of Muslims elsewhere in the world,” Mulla said to Sidharth Bhatia in a podcast interview.

Mulla’s book explains how after the Ottoman Caliph Abdul Majid had been exiled to France by the Modernist ruler of Turkey Mustafa Kamal Ataturk, his daughter Durrushevar was married to the Nizam’s eldest son Azam Jah in Hyderabad. It was their son who would have become the Caliph.

“So Hyderabad was claiming to be the successor of the Mughal cultural legacy and the new flowering of Indo-Islamic civilization. So it had this cultural prestige within India, but also within the wider Islamic world. And that really set the stage for things,” he said. But once Hyderabad was integrated into a united India in 1948, this became impossible.

The new report by the UN appointed Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory has revealed shocking details about Israeli attacks on Gaza and specifically the torture and killings of Palestinian children.

Several instances of children being shot, tortured and sexually abused have been recorded in the report. “This includes a girl who was stripped. So, you know, this public shaming, we call it public nudity. If you subject children to this kind of, it's actually a very deep psychological trauma,” Justice Srinivasan Muralidhar, who was the chairman of the Commission said in a podcast discussion with Sidharth Bhatia.

“In our report, We say that mental harm has become intergenerational, producing a distinctive occupied psyche in which the freedom to play, imagine, hope and develop an identity has been eroded,” he said.

“No Palestinian child has been able to have a formal education in the last three years. Where a child should be sitting in a classroom, the child is running around looking for firewood. Gaza city had the highest literacy rate even as recently as 2021 and yet you target a place like that, you destroy all its schools. The message is so clear.”

The Israeli government has issued an 18 page rebuttal of the report. “Israel says Hamas is using children as shields and that is something that we have missed. A 10-day-old baby breastfeeding on his mother is not involved in any hostility,” he said.

Justice Muralidhar stated that Israel was sent all the Commission’s reports and asked to comment, but never got a response. “We have absolutely nothing to gain by falsely accusing either the state of Israel or its soldiers.”

Speaking about India, he said, “We can't afford to keep silent. We have been in the forefront of many of the international human rights movements. The values of human dignity, human liberty, which also forms the fundamental constitutional values in our Indian constitution. So, we're not acting contrary to anything at all. When we stand up for the rights of the Palestinian people, particularly Palestinian children."

India has not backtracked from its official stance that it stands with the Palestinian people. And it stands with the two state solution. People should also realize, your viewers should realize that the origin, one origin of all of this is 1947, a UN resolution, which talks of the creation of two states, the State of Israel and the State of Palestine. India should seriously introspect and ask itself, with this level of evidence having come forth on the atrocities against Palestinian children, does India want to take a stand at all or not? This is a moment of reckoning.”

When three Indian nations on neutral merchant ships were killed in attacks by the US forces at the Strait of Hormuz, it created an uproar in India. The Indian government called the US Charge d’Affaire, and PM Modi mentioned it to US President Trump. But was it enough? Admiral Arun Prakash, former Naval chief of staff and now a commentator, does not think so. “Mr Trump is not just an unpredictable person. He can be quite intimidating also as we've seen in the past. So one can understand our statesmen and diplomats treading with caution. But the fact remains that Indian lives have been put at risk. We've lost three seafarers,” he said in a podcast discussion with Sidharth Bhatia. “When Indian lives are jeopardised at sea, the mother country has to raise its voice.” India, he said, tends to “punch below its weight.”

The definition of obesity has changed. Even those who look slim, without a big belly, may be obese. And this leads to many other health problems. The definition now includes a waist circumference of “about 80 cms for females and 90 centimetres for males, and this correlates with the amount of fat in your vital organs,” said Dr Aabha Nagral, who is, Director of Gastroenterology at Jaslok Hospital in Mumbai and also runs their Fatty Liver programme, in a podcast discussion with Sidharth Bhatia. She mentioned not just changing lifestyles, which have become sedentary, and diets, which are full of processed fats, but also genetic and other factors for this. “If you have obese parents, you'll have obese children very often. So that's the genes, but they eat the same food, they have similar physical habits as well.”

Joe Sacco is An internationally known cartoonist journalist famous for his books on Palestine and Gaza. His first book on India — The Once and Future Riot — was published last year, about the Muzaffarnagar riots of 2013 between Jats and Muslims that ended in the death of 60 people and the displacement of 60000, mainly Muslims. The book was set to be sold from August onwards, but last week, the distributors Penguin Random House India stepped back from it. He got a five page list of queries from Penguin UK asking for clarifications and changes. “The main thing for me was changes that seemed like editorial changes they were asking for, which were removing quotes, removing quotes about public figures, removing quotes from a public figure I talked to, even to the extent of move this caption down the page. And I mean, there were like four or five things that were called requirements that I simply wasn't going to do,” Sacco said in a podcast conversation with Sidharth Bhatia.

India is extremely hot right now. Recently, it was reported that 50 of the world’s hottest cities in the world were in India. The media calls it a “heat wave.” This is only going to continue and get worse, says Amita Baviskar, Professor of Environmental Studies and Sociology and Anthropology at Ashoka University.

“We're going to see many, many more deaths of workers on building sites… We're talking about huge levels of distress, including fatalities, including people dying. And I think people are already struggling. My imagination fails me, but I can see that there will be violence around water because water is going to become more scarce,” she said in a podcast conversation with Sidharth Bhatia.

Baviskar paints a grim picture of the situation now and in the future. She says it is getting hotter not only in the plains of north India but also in the mountains. She points to the ‘urban heat island effect’— “our buildings, the fact that they trap heat and they release that heat in a way that adds to the solar radiation that we are experiencing as a part of summer. The fact that we have a lot of traffic, a lot of motorized vehicles that are releasing exhaust fumes.”

She says to untangle this problem and change things it would require a consensus—“It would be not only the government, it would also have to be the media, you know, civic, civil society, NGOs. Everybody would have to come on board and say we need to do this.” She adds, “this is what is a classic, you know, binding crisis. A binding crisis is one that affects everybody, irrespective of class and caste and region and gender and religion.”