The Interview With Karan Thapar

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 fa...

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...

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...

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 t...

missing description

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 lac...

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 t...

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”. H...

In sharp criticism of the Supreme Court’s decision to deny bail to Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam, lawyer and former President of the Supreme Court Bar Association Dushyant Dave has called the decision “completely wrong”. Dave says its “really flawed both in facts and law”. He says the two judges have done a disservice to themselves as well as to the Supreme Court. He says increasingly in India, ju...

In sharp and focused criticism of the government’s new rural employment scheme, which he says is mistaken and misleadingly called a guarantee, Nikhil Dey, a founder member of the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan, says it has “completely demolished the idea of a rural employment guarantee scheme”.

It's time for our end-of-year tradition, an interview where Karan Thapar is the interviewee and is toughly or teasingly questioned by an interviewer we have invited on the show. On this occasion the guest interviewer is the highly popular YouTuber, journalist, radio jockey and political satirist Akash Banerjee, in the avatar of Bhakt Banerjee. 

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 gover...

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 t...

Author and columnist Tavleen Singh has said that Russia’s President Vladimir Putin is “a tyrant, a dictator, a despot and a monster”. She called his invasion of Ukraine “evil”. She says Prime Minister Modi has damaged his image with the gushing and effusive welcome he accorded President Putin last week. She also said that by welcoming Putin as a hero, India has let itself down and undermined what...

Former ambassador to the United States of America, who also served in Washington during the first Trump presidency, says that President Trump has “broken” India’s trust in America and skepticism is back. Navtej Sarna says the optimism that used to prevail in the relationship, what he calls “the positive unquestionable narrative”, is no longer true and no longer holds.

Both Justice Madan Lokur, a former judge of the Supreme Court, and Dushyant Dave, a well-known lawyer and a former President of the Supreme Court Bar Association, have strongly criticised the Supreme Court’s advisory opinion given in response to the presidential reference on how Governors and the President should handle legislation. Both believe that the advisory opinion is not well-thought throug...

Defending her paper, The Kashmir Times, its Executive Editor, Anuradha Bhasin, has said that the litany of charges brought against her paper by the Special Investigation Agency of the Jammu and Kashmir police, when it raided the paper on Thursday, are “absolutely false, absolutely fabricated”. She said reports that several arms and weapons were found in the newspaper’s premises are “completely fab...

In an interview to discuss both the Special Intensive Revision of the electoral rolls presently underway in Tamil Nadu as well as yesterday's Supreme Court advisory opinion on how Governors and the President respond to state legislation, Tamil Nadu's Minister for Information Technology and Digital Services, P. Thiaga Rajan, has said that he doesn't trust the Election Commission and has enumerated...

Do you believe in ghosts? Have you ever seen a spirit? Do voices speak to you from the other world? If you were to ask me that question my answer would be an emphatic and resounding no. But that’s not the case with my guest. He’s just written a book, published by HarperCollins, about his many and varied experiences encountering ghosts, spirits, ghouls and other sorts of apparitions. It’s called ‘T...

After the National Democratic Alliance's seemingly unbelievable victory in Bihar and the Mahagathbandhan's shattering defeat there are two questions that are crying out for an analytical answer - why do the BJP and Narendra Modi keep winning? Why do Congress and Rahul Gandhi keep losing? These are the key questions posed in this interview with Yogendra Yadav, one of India's well-known political an...

In an interview to discuss the recent constitutional amendment in Pakistan (called the 27th constitutional amendment) one of Pakistan's most senior diplomats, and its former Ambassador to USA, China and Russia and former High Commissioner to India, Ashraf Jehangir Qazi, has said it is "the blackest day" in Pakistan's constitutional history. He said it was "a serious setback to the rule of law and...

In an interview to discuss and analyse the media coverage of the Bihar election campaign, the former Editor-in-Chief and Publisher of The Hindu, N. Ram, has said that India's news television channels "must be amongst the worst in the world". "Broadcast television … has been awful. It must be amongst the worst in the world, whether you look at either the Hindi television sector or the so-called nat...

In an interview to discuss critical questions thrown up by Monday's terror attack in the Red Fort area of Delhi, the Executive Director of the Institute for Conflict Management and the South Asia Terrorism Portal Ajai Sahni says that the Red Fort bomb "could be the start of a nationwide terror campaign" but, if it is, this time India is much better prepared. He adds: "The Red Fort blast demonstrat...

The Director General of the BBC and its Head of News have resigned, raising the critical question: Is the BBC a corporation in crisis? Its flagship documentary Panorama has been accused by President Trump of 100% fake news. Internal documents have accused the BBC of a Hamas bias and believing the worst of Israel. And other critics say the BBC is guilty of what’s called gender ideology. It’s believ...