InFocus with Ejaz Haider, Ep 35, May 9: "India: Constitutional Democracy or Majoritarianism"

Guests: Dr.Yaqoob Khan Bangash, Suhasini Haidar and Siddharth Varadarajan
Dr.Yaqoob Khan Bangash is a historian of modern South Asia. His research interests lie in the emergence of Pakistan as a post-colonial state, with broader interests in decolonisation, modern state formation, formation of identities, and the emergence of ethnic and identity-based conflicts across South Asia. Dr. Bangash’s first book was published by Oxford University Press as, ‘A Princely Affair: Accession and Integration of Princely States in Pakistan, 1947-55,’ in 2015, and he has recently completed another book: ‘Between the Sword and the Pen: The History of the Lahore High Court.’ Furthermore, he is working on a monograph on the imagination of Pakistan as a country after its creation, using the debates of the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan (1947-56) as primary material. Dr.Bangash has received several grants and honours including the British Academy Writing Workshop grant, 2021, (Co-PI with Professor Faisal Devji at Oxford), the Barakat Trust Major Award Grant (2021), a Research Excellence Fellowship at the Central European University (2019), the Chevening Fellowship to Oxford University (2019), a British Academy Visiting Fellowship at Royal Holloway, University of London (2018), Senior Fellowship at the Religious Freedom Institute (2017), the David M. Stowe Research Fellowship at Yale (2017), and the American Academy of Religion Collaborative Grant (2017), and the Fellowship of the Presbyterian Historical Society (2015).
Suhasini Haidar is the Diplomatic Editor of The Hindu, one of India’s oldest and most respected national dailies (www.thehindu.com), regularly writing on Foreign policy issues, and hosts a weekly online show "WorldView with Suhasini Haidar" (KZbin playlist). Prior to this, Suhasini was Foreign Affairs editor and prime time anchor for India’s leading 24-hr English news channel CNN-IBN (2005-2014), and Correspondent for CNN International’s New Delhi bureau before that. In 2015, she was the recipient of the most prestigious Indian print journalism ‘Prem Bhatia’ award, and has won a series of awards for her work in Television as well. Over the course of her 28-year reporting career, Suhasini has covered the most challenging stories & conflicts from the most diverse regions including Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Libya, Lebanon and Syria. In India, she has covered the foreign affairs beat for over a decade and her domestic assignments include political profiles and in-depth reportage from conflict zones including Kashmir, where she was injured in a bomb blast in 2000. Suhasini Haidar worked with CNN International from 1995-2005, regularly reporting from India, Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.She was part of the CNN team that won the Columbia-Dupont Broadcast Journalism Award in 2005 for coverage of the tsunami in India, and worked for CNN.com in New York for a month during its 9/11 coverage. Suhasini began her career in journalism as an intern at CNN's United Nation's bureau in New York in 1994, after which she joined CNN New Delhi bureau as a producer in April 1995.
Siddharth Varadarajan is a journalist and well-known commentator on foreign affairs and nuclear issues. He is the Founding Editor of The Wire (www.thewire.in), India’s leading online news and analysis portal and an anchor for ’Indian Standard Time’, a weekly interview show on Rajya Sabha TV, the channel of India’s upper house of Parliament. Earlier, he was Editor of The Hindu newspaper. An economist by training, he taught at New York University before turning to journalism. The recipient of journalism awards for his writings on the Iranian nuclear issue and the Indo-US nuclear agreement, he is a co-author of NonAlignment 2.0: A Foreign and Strategic Policy for India in the Twenty First Century.