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As world leaders from the United States to France welcome Prime Minister Narendra Modi, we look at press freedom in India under the leader of the Hindu nationalist party BJP. One of India’s last bastions of free media, NDTV, has been taken over by Indian billionaire Gautam Adani, believed to have close ties to Modi. NDTV’s former executive editor and longtime anchor Ravish Kumar, one of India’s most prominent TV journalists who has reported critically on Modi’s Hindu nationalist policies, is the subject of Vinay Shukla’s film While We Watched, which is being released this week in theaters in the United States. We speak to Kumar and Shukla about the “anti-opposition, anti-minorities, anti-Muslim” state of media in India, where dissent is suppressed and pro-Modi nationalism is the de facto rule. “No sober society can afford to have a kind of rogue media, which is so weaponized,” says Kumar.
