Newslaundry Podcast

This week on Hafta, Newslaundry’s Abhinandan Sekhri, Jayashree Arunachalam, Raman Kirpal and Shardool Katyayan are joined by The News Minute’s Pooja Prasanna.The panel begins with protests in Bihar against a ‘paper leak’ in the Bihar Public Service Commission preliminary exam. Jayashree explains, “The normalisation process for exams has been rejected outright by the BPSC, but it’s a standard procedure in other competitive exams.” Shardool emphasises systemic delays and negligence, stating, “Students are aging out of eligibility because of these recurring delays – it’s a vicious cycle.”The conversation turned to the lynching of a Muslim man in Moradabad over allegations of cow slaughter. Shardool calls it an “economic issue as well as a social issue” since “most victims of lynchings are from the lower economic strata, unable to defend themselves legally or socially”. Jayashree criticises the media’s reportage of such incidents: “We don’t report these as murders; they are contextualised as actions driven by all