Scaling the Media Mountain- Modi 1.0 and the Indian Press

Days before the results of the 2019 general elections came in, and just 48 hours before his own constituency went to the polls, millions of Indians watched Prime Minister Narendra Modi, election campaign done, labour his way up the steep hills of Kedarnath, pray inside the temple’s sanctum sanctorum, meditate inside a cave. Television channels…

Elections 2019: Democracy in the face of majoritarianism

If the strength of a liberal democracy is judged by the space it offers for critique and dissent; or by the protection it offers to all its citizens, irrespective of caste, creed or gender, then Indian democracy is on a perilous path. Whether it was in the case of a young Kerala girl’s right to…

After Balakot, time for a diplomatic offensive

War is politics by other means, said Karl Von Clausewitz, the Prussian military strategist in the eighteenth century. As societies change, and politics changes, so does the nature of war, and the battlefields wars are fought on. The two weeks since the Pulwama attack has shown us that the battlefield is now also on television…

Indus Treaty: Why India Cannot Afford to Fight Fire With Water

Water is meant to douse fires, yet it is the one natural resource that has, time and again, either been a cause for global conflict or been weaponised by enemy states to score victory. In the case of decades of volatile India-Pakistan relations, the Indus Waters Treaty – brokered by the World Bank and signed…

The Parliamentary Panel Will Reinforce Bias on Twitter, Not Fix It

Round one of the bout between the parliamentary panel on information technology, led by BJP MP Anurag Thakur, and representatives of Twitter ended as expected – with an extension. The committee asked Twitter’s global CEO, Jack Dorsey to appear before it on February 25 to answer to charges of a ‘liberal’ bias that drowns out…

26/11 and the Media: Where were the Protocols?

Walking down the Colaba Causeway, past the renovated face of Cafe Leopold, in the shadow of the iconic Taj Mahal, or in Kalaghoda, abutting the Jewish Chabad house where scars of violence have been swallowed up by the cracks in its decaying walls, it takes a minute to remember the bloodshed and mayhem let loose…

UNHCR, OCHCR Urge India not to Deport Rohingya

New Delhi. October 3, 2018 Officials from UN High Commissioner for Refugees based in India have said that seven Rohingya men being deported from the Silchar central jail in Assam to their home village in  Central Rakhine in Myanmar should be given a chance to make an “informed decision”  about their return in the current…

Digital Hatred, Real Violence

This paper  was triggered by a study of social media commentary I had released earlier this year, that had shown a spike of 11 percent in religion based hate speech between 2016 and 2017. Here I try to delve into the causes and spread of such speech on social media and the intersections between free…

Israel’s Nationality Bill Is Challenging the Core of Jewish Identity

As the sun sets over the Mediterranean off the coast of Tel Aviv on Sabbath evening, Israelis, young and old, head down to the many bars along Ben Yehuda Street, or to the beach to cool off in the July heat. Ideally, Jewry across the world is meant to be indoors on this day, focused…

To Delete or Not to #DeleteFacebook, That is the Question

For the last few days, I’ve been grappling with an unexpected existential crisis over whether or not to delete my Facebook. While the harvesting of data of 50 million Facebook users in America for political gain, without consent, is unconscionable, the issues the Cambridge Analytica scandal has raised — of privacy, consent and data security…