A Review of NL Hafta by Vedant Bhatia

Letter from Vedant Bhatia 

Hello Newslaundry team,

First off, I want to start by apologising to Madhu ma’am, she probably doesn’t remember but I met her at the India Today conclave in Mumbai last year and promised to mail her that week but did not. What has prompted me to get off my lazy ass and finally write to you is the fact that for the past many months hafta sessions are turning into one sided Modi/BJP bashing sessions. There is no sense of balance on the panel anymore, everyone is left/liberal and seems hell bent on proving it. Anand (Ranga) left without any explanation while the other Anand appears only occasionally, even most of your guests are hardcore left wingers. I used to love listening to hafta for the different points of view and the healthy debates, nowadays if someone says something against the BJP the rest all agree and make snide remarks and start peloing BJP for everything wrong happening under the sun. There is no right winger on the panel to give a counter view. What is worse is the fact that there is a great sense of condescension for not just an individual but all conservatives including sophisticated journos and columnists like Jaggi, Paranjape and Swapan Dasgupta with Abhinandan dismissing all their arguments as that of lowly twitter trolls or in the case of paranjape, calling him unhinged. Also, when the topic of fake news comes up,everyone is guilty of making mistakes, not just the right. For example, on last week’s Hafta you guys attacked Modi for saying that he has given permanent commission to women in the army when it already exists, the truth is that permanent commission exists only for a few branches of the military and Modi is now extending it to all others.

https://indianexpress.com/article/india/permanent-commission-women-officers-army-5309102/

Even on electrification, Modi was right. What he said was that if electrification had happened at the pace of 2013-14 it would have taken 15 years to electrify every village, while the people who ‘fact checked’ him made it out that he said that if electrification had continued at the pace of the average of the 2004-14 rate it would have taken 15 yrs. Since only around 1000 villages were electrified in 2013-14 and 17000 plus villages were un-electrified in 2014, it would have indeed taken us 15 plus years to electrify them all. Another piece of fake news spread by the left is that 97 percent of lynchings have happened after 2014, this is based on the data provided by IndiaSpend. What is not known to most people however, is that it compiled the data based not on the number of FIRs filed but based on ENGLISH MEDIA REPORTS. Given that english media reporters based in Delhi neither know about nor report most of the incidents that happen in the villages, it’s quite clear that the data compiled by IndiaSpend is biased and false. Even the reports by vernacular papers are not taken into account but liberals parade the data as the gospel truth.

So please try to get more representation from the right on the panel and make hafta more balanced again. Apart from that, NL Hafta is brilliant, you guys are awesome, keep doing what you are doing and yes I’m a subscriber.

Regards,

Vedant