Sabki Dhulai, Except Theirs: Why Newslaundry Covered JLF Ireland Like a Festival Brochure

✍️ Written by Saket Suman

Media outlet Newslaundry has, since its founding, positioned itself as the press that covers the press, the one outlet with the institutional courage to hold the mirror up to Indian journalism. Its tagline, sabki dhulai, translates roughly as: everyone gets washed. The promise, burnished through years of subscription pitches, is seductive. You know the stories that get buried or ignored by mainstream media? With your support, we can do those stories.

On June 1, 2026, Newslaundry published a piece about the Jaipur Literature Festival's Island of Ireland edition. It was titled, with characteristic efficiency, "JLF's Ireland edition wraps up." It reads, in its entirety, like a festival brochure written by a team who enjoys the hospitality rather thoroughly.

Representational Image: Why Newslaundry Covered JLF Ireland Like a Festival Brochure

The dispatch opens with a graceful sentence about a festival that "refuses to stay put." The speaker list is recited reverentially — Shashi Tharoor, Leo Varadkar, William Dalrymple, Gopalkrishna Gandhi, Fintan O'Toole. The festival's "distinct feature" — that Ireland and India share a complicated relationship with the British Empire — is presented as received wisdom, like the things Namita Gokhale says at the opening of the festival and everyone nods along, almost always. 

The Irish Ambassador to India gets a quote that reads as though it arrived pre-drafted from the embassy's communications desk. The festival's Managing Director, Sanjoy K. Roy, gets two full paragraphs of unchallenged commentary. The piece then pivots, without breaking stride, into an advertisement for the Newslaundry–News Minute Book Club, inviting the reader to "sign up for the newsletter, Tell Tales" and "keep the conversation going long after the festival caravans have parked."

No critical voice. No absent name observed. No question asked that the festival organisers had not already answered for themselves. This, from the outlet whose subscription pitches informs paying readers that the media holds a democracy to account, but what about the media itself? They say they believe news organisations should be accountable, including them. Italics, we note, are noted as theirs.

The Question the Piece Did Not Ask

Among the sessions at JLF Ireland was one convened under the heading: What does a constitution really protect — law, liberty, or the idea of a nation itself? The speaker chosen to represent the Indian constitutional tradition at Trinity College Dublin, one of the world's great repositories of constitutional thought, was Shashi Tharoor.

This is a choice. All curatorial decisions are choices. But choices, when made by organisations that ask to be taken seriously, must invite scrutiny.

In February 2025, Gautam Bhatia, a practising constitutional lawyer whose work has been cited by the Supreme Court of India and various High Courts, who has personally argued the Article 370 challenge, the electoral bonds case, and the right to privacy case before the court, published The Indian Constitution: A Conversation with Power. It is the third book in a trilogy that began with The Transformative Constitution (2019) and continued through Unsealed Covers (2023). Yale University invited him to deliver a lecture on precisely the subject JLF Ireland staged as a panel: the Constitution as a document that creates, shapes, channels, and constrains power, and the centralising drift that has marked its contested history.

Bhatia was not at JLF Ireland. Nor, for that matter, were Rohit De and Ornit Shani, whose Assembling India's Constitution offers a paradigm-shifting account of how ordinary citizens across the subcontinent transformed constitutionalism into a medium of struggle, exactly the kind of history an Ireland audience, intimate with the relationship between popular constitutionalism and colonial aftermath, might have found electrifying. They were not there either.

Instead, the festival chose a sitting parliamentarian whose recent book on the Constitution — and it is important to say this on the record, since Newslaundry did not — has been characterised by more than one serious reader as absurdly evasive. A book that knows the right authorities to cite, the right phrases to repeat, and the right reverence to perform. A book that prefers counting to questioning, quotation to confrontation, and ceremony to critique.

This is not, one hastens to add, a personal indictment of Tharoor, that’s saved for later. The indictment is of the machinery that keeps producing the same name, edition after edition, country after country, while the scholarship that might disturb the furniture remains, year after year, without an invitation.

JLF has featured Tharoor at nearly every edition for over a decade. That is not literary programming. That is brand management with an author-face who is also a politician. That is a dangerous game of manipulation through monopoly.

The Thing Newslaundry Did Not Disclose

Here is what the JLF Ireland dispatch neglected to mention about the man it quoted twice, unchallenged, in its closing paragraphs.

Sanjoy K. Roy, Managing Director of Teamwork Arts — the organisation that produces and operates the Jaipur Literature Festival — is also the co-organiser of The Media Rumble, Newslaundry's own flagship annual event. This is not a sponsorship arrangement. It is not a banner on a wall or a logo in a footer. Teamwork Arts is a named institutional co-producer of the event that Newslaundry presents to its subscribers as proof of its journalistic seriousness. The Media Rumble's own website describes itself as "South Asia's largest news media forum, brought to you by Newslaundry and Teamwork Arts." Editions typically open with an inaugural address delivered jointly by Abhinandan Sekhri, Newslaundry's co-founder, and Sanjoy Roy.

When Newslaundry covered a JLF festival that Teamwork Arts organised, quoted Teamwork Arts' managing director approvingly and at length, and omitted any disclosure of this institutional relationship, it was doing precisely what it built its reputation accusing others of doing. Producing coverage whose shape is determined not by the story but by the company. There is a word for this in the trade of news and that word is not independemce.

The Standard Newslaundry Applies Elsewhere

In March 2026, Newslaundry published a piece about India Today's decision to platform Laura Loomer, a Trump-aligned influencer with a documented record of anti-Indian racism, at the India Today Conclave. The piece was specific, named its sources, dissected the choice, and asked the uncomfortable question that India Today would have preferred left unasked: what does it tell us about an organisation when it decides whom to platform?

The methodology is sound. The question is exactly right. The rivalry is known to the most known. It is also, almost ironically, the question that Newslaundry declined to apply to its own partner's festival. What does it tell us about JLF when it chooses, year after year, to platform the same parliamentarian-author for discussions while Gautam Bhatia and others, who have litigated constitutional questions before the Supreme Court, and whose books engage the Constitution as a battlefield rather than a monument, remains obscured? What does it tell us about a media organisation that covers this choice without noting it is a choice, and without disclosing that the festival's producer is its own co-event partner?

Sabki dhulai, Newslaundry reminds us, means everyone gets washed. Everyone, it turns out, except the people who share a stage with you.

A Note on the Subscription

Newslaundry's subscription pitch is a moral contract, not merely a commercial one. Subscribers are not purchasing content. They are, as the pitch frames it, making independence possible by powering journalism that is not dictated or influenced by corporate or institutional interests. This is true but it is also incomplete. Advertising capture is not the only form of capture. Access capture, the softening of coverage towards powerful people and institutions on whom an organisation depends for content, credibility, and the social currency of shared platforms, operates without a single invoice changing hands. It produces a piece that looks like journalism, reads like journalism, and is formatted like journalism, but in which the questions that matter most have been quietly, professionally, and knowingly omitted.

The JLF Ireland dispatch was free of advertisements. It was not free of interest. Paying subscribers of Newslaundry deserved to know the difference. 

(Saket Suman is the author of The Psychology of a Patriot. Among other roles, he was a Special Correspondent at The Times of India and the head of Arts/Books/Culture verticals at what was India's largest independent newswire.) 

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