You write about Indian democracy from below, from the perspective of people living with precarity rather than power. What does that perspective reveal about Indian democracy that is often missed in elite political debate or mainstream media coverage?

The one thing to look at in any democracy, not just in India, is whether the people who are most vulnerable and marginalized also have any say. What is happening globally, and also in India, is that people from socioeconomically marginalized communities, Muslims, Dalits, and Indigenous communities called Adivasis in India, are often not part of the conversation. They do not hold decision-making positions.

A lot of mainstream news organizations are now driven by a corporate-political nexus. Journalism was traditionally supposed to be in the public interest. But corporatization has turned reporting into something driven by profit, and that reporting is targeted toward people who can consume and afford that reporting. That says a great deal about the systemic exclusion of people at the margins of society and about how they are left out of conversations on democracy and human rights.

Media narratives can play a major role in shaping public ideas of who belongs and who does not. How have journalism and media in India contributed to either reinforcing or challenging the exclusion of marginalized communities?

I have an example from my own reporting career. About 13 or 14 years ago, I was working at a news organization when a large corporate group bought a significant share in it. Marketing teams then began briefing the editorial team on what kind of news we should report. We were categorically told that our target audience was now going to be urban, wealthy people, and the imagined viewer was an upper-caste man sitting in Bangalore watching the news.

We were also told to stop doing what they called “bleeding heart stories,” because if you are trying to sell kitchen appliances during prime time, you cannot be talking about malnutrition. It would interfere with the buying mood of the viewer. Hence, in a very systematic way, editorial teams were being told not to report on the kinds of issues that affect people on the socioeconomic margins.

If that is the strategy most news organizations are following, then exclusion becomes built into the structure of reporting itself. Even now, digital media often caters to consumers who can buy products. You will see plenty of stories about how to lose belly fat in ten days, but not deeper reporting on public health, public health care, or government support. Those conversations are missing because the content is designed for people who can purchase wellness products. That is how news organizations give up on the idea of the public interest in order to sell more stuff. That is one of the key reasons so many people are excluded.

In The Many Lives of Syeda X, you trace the life of someone who is often invisible to the state except when she is being regulated, documented, or controlled. What does Syeda’s story reveal about who is allowed to fully belong in a democracy like India?

My book The Many Lives of Syeda X is the story of an urban poor, migrant Muslim woman in Delhi. Through her life, and through the lives of many women like her, the book looks at the last 30 years of India, and the world really, through the eyes of people who keep global corporations running while also being marginalized by deeply fundamentalist political ideologies.

It is important that we are sitting in California talking about this book. In the winter months, Syeda does almond shelling and processing work. California grows 80 percent of the world’s almonds, and India is the biggest export market for them. Most California almonds go back to India for shelling because labor is cheap. Because the almond needs to be kept whole, the shelling cannot be fully mechanized. So, people like Syeda do that work manually.

For this, they are paid about half a dollar for a 23-kilogram bag. The most experienced workers can do two bags a day and earn about one dollar each day after working 12 to 16 hours. That same product can generate around 100 dollars per bag in the market. That is the disparity we are talking about.

There is a joke among almond workers in Delhi that California almonds teach them how to eat with a spoon. That is because while breaking the shells, their fingertips corrode, and they can no longer eat with their hands. We often talk about larger trade relations and global markets, but the fact that women from the extreme margins are forming the bedrock of manufacturing and processing for global corporations, and that most of us know nothing about it, is deeply troubling.

Your work often shows that exclusion does not only happen through dramatic moments of violence, but also through paperwork, bureaucracy, policing, and everyday suspicion. How do these quieter systems shape who is seen as a legitimate citizen and who is treated as disposable?

In the Western world, the moment you start talking about the abysmal work conditions of cheap labor in the Global South, people tend to zone out. That is because it has been normalized to such a degree that it is taken for granted.

In Syeda’s case, she was originally a silk weaver in Banaras. Because of sectarian riots and the dominance of a Hindu supremacist political party, her loom was burned down, and as a Muslim woman she had to move to Delhi. Over the next 30 years, she did around 50 jobs without ever making more than one-fifth of the daily minimum wage. This is not only her. Millions of women are part of this system. They live in India, and they also form the bedrock of multinational and global corporations. Everything we use, like footballs for the World Cup, garments, hardware, carpentry materials, are made by these women. They are paid by the piece, and global corporations are aware of this and continue to depend on it.

Documentation also requires privilege, influence, and power. If you look at history, we can trace the people who commissioned monuments and grand buildings. Who were the people who actually constructed them? There is no documentation of that. The same thing applies to people like Syeda.

States also deliberately do not document the lives of these people, because documentation would create accountability for the conditions in which they live. Often the only thing that remains is oral history, because we are talking about people who are not literate, who cannot write, and who cannot maintain records. That is why they are repeatedly erased from larger conversations about democracy and policy. And if you do not even document their problems, how can you move the conversation about citizenship forward?

In your reporting, gender, religion, class, and labor insecurity often intersect. How do these forces work together to make certain people, especially poor Muslim women and migrant workers, more vulnerable to surveillance and exclusion?

Let’s take the example of Syeda. She is a migrant, working-class woman in Delhi. Every once in a while, she and her family are marginalized because they are Muslim, and that has a great deal to do with the political ideology governing India right now, which believes in Hindu supremacy.

Why is this intersection important? I covered sectarian riots in 2013 in India, when there was violence between Hindus and Muslims. Sadly, 100,000 working-class Muslims were displaced. A lot of women experienced sexual violence during those riots. I reported on those incidents, but afterward I realized that many of these women went back to work in the fields of the very people who had committed that violence.

What that meant to me was that sexual violence was just one episode in their lives. These were also farm workers. In other words, nothing can be understood in isolation. They are minority women, working-class women, women living with violence, but there are also questions of displacement, migration, employment, livelihood, marginalization, and economic policy. All of it goes together.

The same thing applies in Syeda’s case. Her loom was burned down in the 1990s because she was a Muslim woman. That forced her to move to Delhi, where she became part of the cheap female labor economy that global capital depends on. Then in 2020, her house was burned down again in the Delhi riots. There is a cyclical violence that remains part of their lives, and it repeatedly brings them back to zero.

That exclusion does not happen just because she is Muslim, or just because she is a woman, or just because she is a worker, or just because she is a migrant. It happens because all of those things come together. That is why looking at these issues through an intersectional lens is so important.

At a time of shrinking media freedom and democratic backsliding, what can journalism still do to resist erasure and hold power accountable? Where do you still see the greatest possibility for journalism to defend democratic belonging?

I am an old-school journalist. We were taught that journalism is always anti-establishment and always in the public interest. If you are not reporting in the public interest and are instead reporting only to make money, then journalism is not the field for you. There are plenty of other sectors where people can make profits, but journalism cannot work that way.

India has consistently slipped in the World Press Freedom Index. We are now ranked 151 out of 180 countries, in the “very serious” category. Criminal cases have been filed against journalists under draconian laws. But at the same time, this is the best time to do journalism, because there is so much that still needs to be done in the public domain and so much that needs to be brought into public discourse.

There is still a long way to go. The greatest possibility for journalists is to keep reporting and not fall into the trap of only giving opinions, which is a real problem right now. We need to return to good, shoe-leather journalism, actually going to the ground and reporting. Unlike the both-sides framing that dominates debate programs, a ground report can have more than two sides. It can have five sides. It can have six sides. And that, for journalists, is incredibly important to bring into public discourse.