This week’s NL Hafta brings together our in-house team of Abhinandan Sekhri, Manisha Pande and Raman Kirpal along with Rohan Venkataramakrishnan, Associate Editor, Scroll. The panel discussed a range of issues — the Supreme Court calling the public interest litigation for an independent investigation to Justice Loya’s death ‘frivolous’, the continuing outrage over the Kathua case, the Mecca Masjid blast verdict and a lot more.
The discussion starts with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s interview with Prasoon Joshi in the Westminster Hall of the United Kingdom Parliament. Rohan says, “The idea of an unscripted town-hall is itself problematic because then it suggests that most of his other town-halls are filtered, which they are.” To this, Abhinandan adds, “To expect any PM to go overseas among NRIs in Westminster hall and then do a hardcore interview is ridiculous.”
Manisha says that it is naive to expect the interaction to be journalistic. “Prasoon Joshi has been associated with the BJP for a very long time. He was one of the key guys in planning the Acche Din campaign.”
Moving on to, the panel brings up a Sunday Guardian ‘fake news’ piece by Sushil Pandit. Rohan says what the Sunday Guardian did is ‘insidious’ from a media standpoint. He said, “You’d expect this sort of thing on WhatsApp and in a rally. But to use this attempt at ‘let’s print whatever we would like to’ and hide under the guise of saying it’s fiction, is deeply problematic.”
Next, Supreme Court calling the petition for an independent investigation into Justice Loya’s death ‘frivolous’ is discussed. Raman makes the point that, “The only thing that surprises me is that the Justice’s sister had made some claims. She is a relative. If she has raised certain claims, I think there’s no harm to conduct the investigations. If somebody is raising a doubt, you hold the investigation.”
This is followed by the panel deliberating on the 11-year-old Mecca-Masjid blast verdict, in which all accused, including Swami Aseemanand, were acquitted by a special NIA court. Rohan raises an interesting question, “I’m actually quite curious as to how you rate the NIA now. The CBI has always been known as a caged parrot, often a tool. IB is what it is. The NIA showed up as being this investigative agency that is going to be above politics and that will actually worry about internal terror. Over the last few years, it’s become an organization that’s investigating marriages.”
Raman adds, “In 90 per cent of the big cases, CBI as well as NIA fail in prosecution. In small cases, there are so many of them and they do so well in those cases, that they show their success as 70 per cent.”
The panel then discusses the removal of Atishi Marlena and Congress’ Ajay Maken’s strange conspiracy theory on it.
On the issue of the recent cash crunch, while Manisha and Abhinandan feel that they didn’t witness it in Delhi, Rohan says, “We have been hearing about the cash crunch particularly from the Telugu states. They have been complaining since demonetisation. ”
All this and more on this week’s podcast. Listen up.
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Produced by Shubham Mishra
Recorded by Anil Kumar
Audio switching by Umrav Singh
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