Talk Summary
The world’s largest democracy is being weakened from within. Elections are held regularly and there are no legal suspension of constitutional rights, but the subversion of democracy in India now appears to have gone further than during the Emergency.
Under a veneer of legality, almost all institutions of the state have been captured and few of them have resisted being bent to the will of a centralised political leadership. These institutions are used to intimidate critics of the government in power. There is an air of fear in the world of commerce. Businesses small and large are worried about harrassment, while a handful of large firms appear to be favoured by the government. The media has by and large been supine; as a rule it goes out to praise the government and participate in the demonisation of minorities. The few media outlets and journalists that have dared to be independent live under the fear of harrassment by different arms of the state.
How can this whittling away of our constitutional democracy be resisted ?
About
Siddharth Varadarajan is one of the finest journalists and editors we have today. He is co-Founder and Editor of The Wire, one of the few truly independent media houses standing taking upright positions on issues that matter.
He is among 17 journalists from across the world recipients for the Germany-based prestigious Deutsche Welle Freedom of Speech Award. The Freedom of Speech Award 2020 is for all courageous journalists worldwide who are suffering repressions because of their reporting on the pandemic.
He is the former editor of The Hindu, one of India's leading English language newspapers. He has reported on the NATO war against Yugoslavia, the destruction of the Bamyan Buddhas by the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, the war in Iraq, and the crisis in Kashmir.Varadarajan has edited a book titled ‘Gujarat : The Making of a Tragedy’ which is about the 2002 Gujarat riots.
In November 2005, the United Nations Correspondents Association awarded Varadarajan the Elizabeth Neuffer Memorial Prize Silver Medal for Print Journalism for a series of articles, Persian Puzzle on Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency. In March 2006, he was awarded the Bernardo O'Higgins Order by the President of Chile—that country's highest civilian honor for a foreign citizen—for his contributions to journalism and to the promotion of India's relations with Latin America and Chile. In July 2010, he received the Ramnath Goenka award for Journalist of the Year (Print). He also is the 2017 recipient of the Shorenstein Journalism Award.
Varadarajan was a visiting professor at the Graduate School of Journalism, University of California, Berkeley, and a Poynter Fellow at Yale University.
Varadarajan is a member of the International Founding Committee of The Real News, a board member of the inter-governmental B.P. Koirala India-Nepal Foundation, a member of the Indian Council of World Affairs and member of the editorial board of India Quarterly: A Journal of International Affairs and a member of the Executive Council of the Maulana Abul Kalam Azad Institute of Asian Studies.
