Hafta letters: Gyanvapi, bets on next PM, laws against religious conversion

Hello NL team,

This letter has little to do with NL Hafta. I love your journalism and will continue supporting it and asking others to support it.

I have a small suggestion about making your reports more accessible to the differently abled. My dear aunt lost her hearing ability because of tuberculosis, but she still loves looking up programmes on TV or videos on YouTube. Most of the time she picks the context from visuals, little subtext or body language, but I also see her struggling to make sense of all of it. It would immensely help if your video reports also had subtitles in various Indian languages. Thinking from a perspective of the visually impaired, your video reports at times lack verbal clarity about whom you are interviewing and their relationship with the topic of discussion.

You might already be working on this. In that case, keep it up and hopefully, accessibility would one day become an inherent property and not something that needs to be pointed out.

Mehul

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Hi NL team,

This is a long overdue thank you email for the election coverage. Special mention of Lipi who read all the YouTube comments and took suggestions on panellists for future Hafta episodes.

I'm so happy to hear Mehraj again and want to know how he feels on returning to India, even if it was after a short sojourn.

I'm currently in the US and will return to India next year myself. I recently had this conversation with my Hindu friends, about how the Indian Christian community unfortunately is a silent spectator to the horrors being unleashed on our Muslim brethren only because we know, that in a perverse way, they are our last line of defense. I do see the “and then they came for us” poem playing out for everyone watching silently. While I do appreciate everything NL and other like-minded news outfits do by just doing their job honestly, I'm at my wits end on how to engage my family (except my journalist sister who's been on Media Rumble), let alone the larger community.

Keith Rebelo

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Hi, this is in response to Ibrahim wanting you to speculate on one of the next prime ministers. I'm taking bets that Smriti Irani will be PM by the time she is 60. Who wants to play? I volunteer to be held for dinner at a place of your choice (I'm from Lucknow, so those are attractive stakes).

Also, it'll be a cold day in hell when Yogi becomes PM. He won't. Period. No matter where this communal shitshow goes.

Salman

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It takes special skills to blame all negative stories on the Hindu caste system. This skill was on full display in Hafta 380, when you guys converted a straightforward case of a Muslim family killing B Nagaraju into a caste related problem. Newslaundry ki jai ho!

Sagar Prasad

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Hi NL team! Glad that you covered the Karnataka anti-conversion law last week. Another bizarre fact is that the “newer” versions of this law (Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, Karnataka, Haryana) includes the reverse burden of proof. Which means, one is guilty until proven innocent.

Would appreciate it if your team does a detailed report on the conviction rate under this law. With 11 states now having adopted this law, I may be able to propagate my religious beliefs under Article 25, but if you start believing what I'm saying, I am an offender. What does that say about Article 25 now?

Jaiwant Patankar

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Hello to the NL team. Your 200-word limit forces me to write an email directly to the point.

I wanted the panel's view on the ongoing polarisation, by the BJP and the Sangh using Hindutva on the basis of lies (e.g. the fawwara being claimed as something else). Is every U-shaped object or stone, a shivling? Whichever masjid has a pond, has a fountain similar to what has been found. Would that mean every fountain is a shivling?

When these forces are using Hinduism falsely to fulfil their Hindutva objective, what are 80 crore Hindus supposed to do? Sit and watch their atrocities? And by the way, the ones who keep mum on the atrocities committed by the oppressor, are by default with the oppressor.

Stop them by proving them to be liars or what? I don’t know what, when and where the Indian Hindus are supposed to do.

Lastly, I would strongly recommend NL Charcha to everyone. For me the discussions on Charcha are a class apart.

Saquib Shaikh

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Dear Hafta team,

First of all, thank you for the work that you do. It’s a pleasure to listen to you every week, and to come away feeling better informed and also (unrealistically) just a little bit brighter.

With the Gyanvapi mosque-temple issue, it seems to me as if the Indian Muslim community is about to let its most retrograde and regressive members buy us all tickets to the potential blockbuster: "Ayodhya II". Do you believe that we are foolish enough to let this happen? What impact would it have if it did?

Regarding the role of “secular India” (leftists, jholawalas, etc.), do you think they will act as enablers to Indian Muslims in this endeavour, or will they step up and cut off our supply?

Clearly I think we shouldn’t buy tickets for this journey and that nobody should enable us to do so, but what is your opinion?

Many thanks,

Zafar