Truth Vs Hype

This week we travelled to Bangladesh, which is seeing a unstoppable purge of anyone perceived as blasphemous by Islamist vigilantes. The scope of those being murdered has expanded - from secular blogwriters to professors, to gay activists, to the country's Hindus. We question whether the Sheikh Hasina government's claims of crackdown on extremists is genuine, or is it just to settle political scores. We probe Bangladesh's death squads: freelancers, local outfits - as the government suggests - or part of turf wars between global jihadists? And we travel north of Dhaka, where the tragic murder of a Hindu tailor has exposed the frailties in the country's attempt to rein in violence.

In a blazing hot rally in Salem, Tamil Nadu, Jayalalithaa told a massive gathering all that she has done, or given to them in her past five years: an endless list of election freebies. Using that rally as a starting point, we analyse whether the "mixer-grinder" competitive populism of Tamil Nadu's main parties is degrading its political culture, and its economy.

India is in one of the worst droughts in recent memory. But is the crisis entirely because of rain gods, or is there also a man-made dimension? On Truth vs Hype, we report from Marathwada, India's drought central, and from across the country to trace the three big reasons why official incompetence may have worsened the impact of drought 2016.

This week, the government announced that one billion Indians had been enrolled into Aadhaar, a major landmark for the Unique Identity scheme. Using a mix of data and ground reportage, we investigate whether the claims that Aadhaar will ensure smoother, corruption-free delivery of government services matches the ground realities. And whether the supposed benefits of Aadhaar outweigh concerns over data privacy.

This week, Maoists struck Chhattisgarh with a deadly intent at a time when the state appears to have the upper hand. Over the past year, the police have claimed a big spike in arrests, surrenders and killings of Maoists. But anyone who tried to question the claims of security forces - journalists, activists, lawyers - have been arrested, intimidated, or forced out of Bastar. This week, we investigate if the war against Maoists is being used to stifle dissent and shrink civil liberties.

For the media, the public and the policymakers, Vijay Mallya has become the face of bank fraud. But in the balance sheets of India's biggest government banks are many more Mallyas who owe similar amounts of money, running into crores.Except you would have never heard of them. This week we investigate the big invisible defaulters of the Indian banking system, and how their modus operandi exposes the rot within.

On the face of it, the case of Vijay Mallya is on one hand of a businessman who claims he is a victim of bad economic policies, too bankrupt to pay his dues, on the other of banks who claim that despite their best efforts they lost crores of money, and of a political establishment that claims they have zero tolerance for defaulters, no matter how well connected. But as we shall see this week, no one comes out clean in the murky waters of the Mallya financial empire.

The encounter of Ishrat Jehan and three others has once again hit the headlines. If earlier, the BJP was under fire, accused by CBI of a fake encounter. Now it's the Congress on backfoot, with more and more voices coming forward to claim the UPA government had tampered with information related to the case, particularly to bury Ishrat's links with the Lashkar-e-Taiba. The deluge of information is confusing, and so this week we sift the facts from the propaganda of the Ishrat encounter.

Demands for Jat reservation that degenerate into violence are not new, but what Haryana witnessed over the past week was an unprecedented degree of rioting. This week we travel to the epicenter of the violence - Rohtak and Jhajhhar - to investigate how changing power equations, political and police incompetence and the shifting economies of country side all come together in a combustible mix.

On Truth vs Hype this week, we cut through the fog of claims and counterclaims in the row over the Jawaharlal Nehru University where a student leader was arrested under charges of sedition over a controversial event to commemorate 2002 Parliament attack convict Afzal Guru. (Video courtesy: Zee News)

This week we investigate the darker side of India's real estate boom - this phenomenon of thousands of potential home-owners left stranded by builders with half complete or poorly-built apartments. It's a malaise not specific to the National Capital Region, but the NCR is the worst manifestation of it compared to anywhere in India. Since it's not possible to focus on every single developer, we have zeroed in on the key players, the ones who face the most complaints about their projects. We try to understand the root causes: is it as the developers claim, mainly because of delayed clearances, and the economic downturn, or is it malpractice?

So far, the ISIS threat to India, while making for sensational headlines, has not been taken very seriously mainly because the numbers of Indian Muslims said to be fighting alongside the ISIS seem minuscule in relation to their population. But the arrest of 14 men in a nationwide sweep - accused of links to ISIS, and of plotting terrorist attacks - appears to be the first indication that India might have its own ISIS franchise. This week, we travel to 4 cities to examine these arrests in great detail - both the claims made by investigators , as well as by the families and neighbours of these men - to ask what this means for India.

One of the big global headlines this week was a report by the global advocacy Oxfam that points to how inequality has steadily worsened - about a handful of people own as much as the bottom half of the world - a report meant to coincide with the World Economic Forum at Davos. The report once again underlines how inequality remains a burning challenge to the world - not just in poorer countries like India, but even developed ones. This week, we examine the riddle of inequality: why is inequality, despite all the hand-wringing over it - on the rise? How does this tally with the decline in poverty? What sort of threat does it pose to India and the world? And how do you get rid of it?

Imagine being treated by a doctor who is not fully trained, because his/her college used what is known as ghost faculty, private practitioners who are rented out to medical colleges - not to actually teach - but to simply to get the permission to operate. This business - of renting doctors, even patients - is an organised racket across India, but we investigate it in Punjab, where a group of insiders are attempting to expose it. The government, far from showing interest, appears to be hushing it up, which only shows the extent to which the tentacles of this enterprise has penetrated the system.

The appearance of Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi in court has escalated the politicking around the National Herald case. We step away from the noise and try and dissect the often confusing set of claims and counterclaims being made about the case, which centres around allegations that the Gandhi family attempted to wrongfully capture the real estate assets of a legacy newspaper.

This week we traveled to Bundelkhand, one of the 50 districts in Uttar Pradesh where drought has been officially declared, and where repeated crop failures has pushed people to the brink of hunger. The most dramatic example of this was the revival of long-abandoned habits of eating rotis made of grass. But when our story aired, the Uttar Pradesh government attempted a rather clumsy cover-up, trying to 'sanitise' the village on which we had based our report. This ignores the reality we discovered, of a collapse of government safety nets meant to protect the rural poor, not just in one village, but across an entire region.

As the waters rose to dangerous levels in Chennai once again, the focus has justifiably been on the human scale of the disaster; focusing attention on getting help to those stranded across the city. But watching the images of the city drowning, it was impossible to ignore what we had discovered from just a week ago, of how much reckless, unchecked urban planning had aggravated the extent of the crisis. This time, even though the rains seem more intense than earlier, and new records for rainfall are being set, activists and environmentalists say that once the immediate crisis tides over, it is all the more critical to focus once again on the man made dimension of the crisis. And that the images from Chennai should be a warning, not just for that city, but for urban centres across India.

In flood-hit Chennai, as the rains recede, questions are being asked whether the crisis that hit the city was a natural disaster, or - as many hare arguing - man made. This week, Truth vs Hype investigates how reckless planning, unchecked growth, and the familiar proximity between politicians and developers may have exacerbated the impact of the floods, and how there is little evidence of lessons being learned.

The attack on Paris has centre-staged more than ever the menace of ISIS, and also the complexity of tackling it. This week, we look at the Truth vs Hype of the commonly held perceptions about what led to the attacks, and how to fight back. Does Paris suggest that ISIS is on the rise, or is ISIS is on the retreat, desperately trying to stay relevant? Are more air strikes the answer, or will that strengthen sympathy for the militant cause? Will stemming the flow of refugees into the West reduce the risk of terrorism, or will that play into the hands of the terrorist group? (Video courtesy: France 24, Sony Six, @sylla98)

In the aftermath of its defeat in Bihar, the BJP's once-cohesive image seems shaken. This week on Truth vs Hype, BJP insiders speak up about what led to the unravelling of the Modi-Amit Shah formula, raising questions as to whether the party be able to contain the mutiny.