I could go on.ĭespite having interviewed the best voices and people who are still unafraid to say what they think, the BBC stitched them together in a way that said nothing new and is therefore guilty of painting a tired, wan picture of the same facts regurgitated in the same way. And Christophe Jaffrelot, one of the best-known academics researching and writing profusely on the Hindu right. Siddharth Vardarajan, one of my favourite journalists and the founder of one of the last standing independent press spaces. Aakar Patel, the activist and India chair of Amnesty International, fighting the good fight relentlessly. Arundhati Roy, the writer who has never minced her words. It also had a glittering cast of characters from the liberal left – people I have always and will always admire and hold up as my heroes. The documentary was sold in advance to an expected subversive audience like myself as a pathbreaking investigation that would bring to light new information and show us something we had not seen before.

I felt as if I was looking at that bride in old lace and white net, out of sync with time. The BBC’s two-part documentary on Prime Minister Narendra Modi, India: The Modi Question, had the same effect on me. A bride jilted at the altar is found for the rest of her years to be stuck in time, wearing her wedding dress forever since then, trapped in a freeze-frame when her world came crashing down. There’s a freeze frame from an old English classic I’d like to bring up before you – it’s that of Miss Havisham from Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations.

Revati laul the anatomy of hate