The Interview With Karan Thapar

In a wide ranging interview to discuss the outcome of the recent elections in Bangladesh and the new government that will be formed by the Bangladesh Nationalist Party with Tarique Rahman as the new Prime Minister, Zafar Sobhan, the Editor of Counterpoint and former Editor of the Dhaka Tribune, has said that Bangladesh is now a democracy, even if credible questions can be raised about an election that excluded the Awami League, a m...

With the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) picking up immigrants  especially brown looking people, and even deporting them, a climate of...

We present two separate interviews, packaged as one, with Ashok Gulati, Distinguished Professor at ICRIER, and Avik Saha, National President of the Jai Kisan Andolan, on the question has India been successful in ensuring that genetically modified produce or its derivatives are not given access to the Indian market? The government insists that is the case but could there be room for doubt? We explore the extent to which there is cre...

Historian, author and political commentator Ramachandra Guha, believes that India is becoming a Hindu Pakistan and that the treatment of Muslims is a form of “medieval barbarism”. He says: “India in 2026 is as close to being a Hindu Pakistan as it has ever been … in politics and in the law, in symbol and in substance, in word and in deed, India is … becoming ever more like Pakistan, except that here it is Hindus, and not Muslims, w...

In an interview to discuss and analyse Sunday’s budget, economist, former Chief Statistician and former Country Head of the International Growth Centre Pronab Sen says the prime minister’s description of the budget as historic is not correct.

Instead, Sen described this as “a business-as-usual” budget which he called “unremarkable”. Asked how well the budget has tackled the problems the economy faces, Sen made clear that it has no...

In an interview to discuss the politics, personality and legacy of the former Deputy Chief Minister of Maharashtra, Ajit Pawar, who died yesterday in an air crash, political analyst Suhas Palshikar says he was secular and did not indulge in the Hindu-Muslim “bashing” associated with the Pawar’s ally the BJP. However, Prof. Palshikar says that Pawar’s style of politics was akin to “running with the hare and hunting with the hounds”.

Sharda Ugra, who is widely considered India’s foremost sports journalist, says the Board of Control for Cricket in India’s ego is responsible for the potential crisis facing the T20 World Cup due to start on the 7th of February. As she put it: “The ICC is basically just the Dubai office of the BCCI”.

The crisis facing the T20 World Cup emerges out of Pakistan’s threat to boycott this event. Mohsin Naqvi, the head of the Pakistan C...

Former judge of the Delhi high court Justice Rekha Sharma has said that the police treatment of journalists in the Kashmir Valley is “a direct attack on our freedom, an attack on our personal liberty … and an attack on democracy itself.” She says its “extremely extremely distressing”, adding “it’s totally without jurisdiction” and is in “disregard of the law”.

Justice Sharma was referring to the treatment of the Assistant Editor o...

The Science Editor of The Hindu says that Monday’s failure of ISRO’s PSLV rocket is a major setback and a very big blow to the organization. He agrees that it raises worrying questions about the reliability of the PSLV rocket which is ISRO’s workhorse. In an interview to Karan Thapar for The Wire, Vasudevan Mukunth raised questions about the functioning of ISRO Chairman V. Narayanan and ISRO’s lack of transparency during his tenure...

In an interview where he seeks to explain the many reasons why Bangladeshis have reservations about India as well as the historical character of Hindu-Muslim relations within Bangladesh, the former CEO of Prasar Bharati and former Trinamool Congress Rajya Sabha MP, Jawhar Sircar, has called for India to moderate the anti-Bangladeshi fury sweeping through the country and to “refrain from reacting to every provocation” from Banglades...

India’s former Ambassador to Venezuela, who has also served as High Commissioner to Sri Lanka and the United Kingdom and, subsequently, as Chief Information Commissioner, says that Trump’s action in Venezuela to kidnap and spirit away the country’s President and his wife was “a brilliantly executed military operation”. Yashvardhan Sinha adds that “the Venezuelan military was caught flat-footed”. However, Sinha declined to say that ...

Chairman of Cerg Advisory and economist Omkar Goswami has said that IndiGo, which controls nearly 66% of domestic air travel and on many routes is the only airline flying, has become too big to regulate. As Goswami put it: “When one player accounts for almost two-thirds of the passenger market and when it’s often the only carrier to many airports, the shoe is firmly on IndiGo’s foot. Not the governments, irrespective of what the DG...

Professor of history Mridula Mukherjee, who taught at Jawaharlal Nehru University and is a former director of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, says Prime Minister Modi was “economical with the truth” in his Vande Mataram speech in the Lok Sabha on Monday when he accused Jawaharlal Nehru of removing stanzas from Vande Mataram under pressure to appease Jinnah and thus put the country on what the PM called the path of “appeaseme...