SP Singh’s Daleel takes you through the issues that are dominating the Indian General Elections scenario. More than seven decades after Independence, India has woken up to the glories of nationalism, an issue that seems to have defined the 2019 Election Campaign. Anyone with an opposing view is being called anti-national. We are suddenly talking about the acute need to keep the country secure.

The referee for these elections, the Election Commission, is itself facing questions of credibility. We discuss all of these, and more, including Pakistan, Kashmir, and even Nuclear Bomb! On the Daleel panel of this episode, you interact with Dr Pramod Kumar, Director, Institute of Development and Communication (IDC), Chandigarh and Mr Ramesh Vinayak, Editor, Hindustan Times, Chandigarh.

They engage with the question about why nationalism has come to top the narrative in these elections, and why have some slogans gone missing? Whatever happened to the narrative about Skill India, Digital India, Make in India and a whole lot of other such phrases that were bandied about in the last five years.

The panellists ask if Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the BJP are getting panicky, and what could have prompted careless references to India’s nuclear weapons? The panellists also dwell upon the state of the institutions in the country with particular reference to the Election Commission, currently facing questions of credibility.

The panellists were asked why we have landed in a situation where Pakistan is being projected as a huge issue when we had constructed a very different narrative with great effort, projecting India as a major power with a throbbing democracy, an advantage of young demographic, major IT power, impressive GDP growth while having strong armed forces. We wanted to be taken seriously and behaved as a responsible nuclear power, but now fling-around atom bomb threats so casually.