A protest is announced, and suddenly the economy is in danger. Students hit the streets, and immediately they’re dubbed ‘foreign agents’. 

This week, Republic Bharat’s Aishwarya takes on the protest-jeevis and the ‘Laundry’... short for… you guessed it, Newslaundry. 

Meanwhile, Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge’s “Modi ka baap bhi jayega” line in Bihar was a jackpot for the godi studios, and once they were done with him, they moved on to Rahul Gandhi. His November 1 protest against Gyanesh Kumar will apparently ruin Delhi’s Diwali, they claim. Never mind skyrocketing inflation and the impact it is having on the rising cost of running a household. The real threat to the festive season is one day of people asking questions.

Arnab Goswami even asked BJP leader Smriti Irani why the government had been so democratic that it let NEET protesters sit at Jantar Mantar in the first place. So protests wreck the economy, and allowing them is a failure of governance.

Serbia has seen this script before. For nearly two years, students protesting corruption were called extremists and foreign agents by pro-government channels like Informer TV. Then they took on Vučić’s government at the polls, and around 30 people entered Informer TV’s newsroom and demanded an apology from its editor. A Serbian public broadcaster has since apologised for years of one-sided reporting.

The vocabulary changes, the playbook stays the same. When an anchor’s first instinct on seeing a protest is to ask why the government is allowing it, perhaps the protesters were never the problem.

Watch the full episode and let us know your thoughts in the comment section below.

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