Rana Ayyub on India’s Crackdown on Muslims
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
The New Yorker
4.3 • 3.9K Ratings
🗓️ 2 December 2019
⏱️ 26 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In August, India suspended the autonomy of the state of Kashmir, putting soldiers in its streets and banning foreign journalists from entering. Dexter Filkins, who was working on a story about Narendra Modi, would not be deterred from going. To evade the ban, he sought the help of an Indian journalist, Rana Ayyub. Ayyub had once gone undercover to reveal the ruling party’s ties to sectarian and extrajudicial violence against the Muslim minority. In a conversation recorded last week, Filkins and Ayyub tell the story of how they got into Kashmir and describe the repression and signs of torture that they observed there. Ayyub’s book “Gujarat Files,” about a massacre of Muslims in Gujarat, has made her a target of Hindu nationalists; one of the book’s translators was killed not long ago. She spoke frankly with Filkins about the emotional toll of living in fear of assassination.
Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choicesTranscript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hi there, I'm Lale Arikoglu, and this podcast is brought to you by Wilderness, a conservation-driven |
| 0:06.4 | hospitality company that offers intimate world life encounters in extraordinary remote landscapes. |
| 0:12.5 | Last year, I embarked on two separate solo adventures with Wilderness, one to Botswana and the other |
| 0:18.2 | to Namibia, where the expert guides delivered a truly once-in-a-lifetime |
| 0:23.6 | experience. I promise you, whatever you watch and see before you go won't prepare you for the thrill |
| 0:29.4 | of a wilderness adventure. eBay, it's a place to fall in love with new pre-loved vintage and rare |
| 0:36.6 | fashion over and over again. |
| 0:39.0 | Your favorite designers, expertly authenticated. |
| 0:42.5 | Yeah, eBay. Things people love. |
| 0:47.9 | This is the Politics and More podcast. I'm David Remnick. |
| 0:52.9 | Dexter Filkins has spent a lot of time in conflict zones, whether it's the war in Afghanistan, |
| 0:58.3 | the American occupation of Iraq, and the uprisings in Syria and Yemen. |
| 1:03.4 | But one conflict older still than all of those wars is the trouble in Kashmir, the only |
| 1:09.0 | Muslim majority state in India. |
| 1:11.6 | Dexter traveled to Kashmir earlier this year to observe firsthand a violent crackdown |
| 1:16.5 | instigated by the Indian government. |
| 1:18.7 | And his article, Blood and Soil in Narendra Modi's India, was just published by the New Yorker. |
| 1:24.4 | Here's Dexter. |
| 1:26.0 | Like so many things in the modern world, the current conflict between India and Pakistan |
| 1:31.4 | over Kashmir dates to the dissolution of the British Empire in 1947. And what happened |
| 1:37.3 | was, it's a fascinating story. Generally speaking, the Muslim majority states became Pakistan. |
| 1:44.9 | The Hindu majority states became India. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The New Yorker, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of The New Yorker and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.