Twenty years after the Gujarat pogrom, Suchitra Vijayan speaks to Zahir Janmohamed about the moment, his experience on the ground and his work since. The conversation delves into the deep seated anti-Muslim sentiment in India and looks for ways to heal. The conversation was originally held as a Twitter Space session.
In this conversation, Urvi Khaitan sits down with Mytheli Sreenivas to discuss her book, "Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India'. The book explores colonial administrators, postcolonial development experts, nationalists, eugenicists, feminists, and family planners all aimed to reform reproduction to transform both individual bodies and the body politic.
In this conversation, Suchitra Vijayan speaks to Arvind Narrain about his book India's Undeclared Emergency: Constitutionalism and the Politics of Resistance. They touch upon the provisions in the constitution that have been interpreted to shove India into an unofficial emergency situation, reflect on how this compares to India's emergency of the 1970s and imagine what the way forward can look like.
In this conversation with Francesca Recchia, Pakistani activist Ahmad Waqas Goraya speaks about the repercussions facing those who dare to criticize the military establishment in Pakistan, his own personal encounter with the institution and the subsequent experience of torture and exile.
Francesca Recchia speaks to Ashley Jackson about her book Negotiating Survival: Civilian–Insurgent Relations in Afghanistan. Based on over 400 interviews with Taliban and civilians, this book tells the story of how civilians have not only bargained with the Taliban for their survival, but also ultimately influenced the course of the war in Afghanistan. While the Taliban have the power of violence on their side, they nonetheless need civilians to comply with their authority. Both strategically and by necessity, civilians have leveraged this reliance on their obedience in order to influence Taliban behaviour. Challenging prevailing beliefs about civilians in wartime, Negotiating Survival presents a new model for understanding how civilian agency can shape the conduct of insurgencies.
Suchitra Vijayan sits down with author Jessica Namakkal to discuss her book "Unsettling Utopia". The book presents a new account of the history of twentieth-century French India to show how colonial projects persisted beyond formal decolonization. Through the experience of the French territories, Namakkal recasts the relationships among colonization, settlement, postcolonial sovereignty, utopianism, and liberation, considering questions of borders, exile, violence, and citizenship from the margins. She demonstrates how state-sponsored decolonization—the bureaucratic process of transferring governance from an imperial state to a postcolonial state—rarely aligned with local desires.
Suchitra Vijayan speaks to Prasanna S. about data privacy in India, the state's use of the Pegasus spyware to surveil voices of dissent and what it means for civil rights in the country. The discussion was originally held on Twitter Spaces.
Francesca Recchia speaks to Adrian Levy, co-author of The Forever Prisoner: The Full and Searing Account of the CIA’s Most Controversial Covert Program. Based on four years of intensive reporting, on interviews with key protagonists who speak candidly for the first time, and on thousands of previously classified documents, The Forever Prisoner is a powerful chronicle of a shocking experiment that remains in the headlines twenty years after its inception, even as US government officials continue to thwart efforts to expose war crimes.
In this podcast, Francesca Recchia speaks to Hassan Javid about the decision to introduce electronic voting machines in Pakistan for the general elections to be held in 2023. Javid explores the circumstances under which the legislation was passed, the viability of the plan and its impact on electoral transparency given the history of military interference in Pakistan's democracy.
In this podcast, Francesca Recchia sits down with Abbas Nasir to discuss the rapidly deteriorating press freedoms in Pakistan. They discuss the Pakistan military's intervention into the news media industry, news outlets that provide regular platform to state propaganda and the hope for the future. Abbas Nasir is a former editor of Pakistan's English language newspaper Dawn and the former executive editor at BBC Asia Pacific Region, BBC World Service. He tweets at @abbasnasir59.