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Rahul Pandita

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Rahul Pandita
Born (1976-02-07) 7 February 1976 (age 48)[1][2]
Jammu and Kashmir, India
NationalityIndian
Occupation(s)Journalist, Author
AwardsInternational Red Cross award (2010)

Rahul Pandita (Hindi pronunciation: [raːɦʊl pŋɖɪt̪aː]) is an Indian author and journalist.[3][4]

Early life

Rahul Pandita is a Kashmire Pandit born in the Kashmir Valley.[5] At the age of 14, he had to leave the valley along with his family in January 1990 as part of the Exodus of Kashmiri Pandits.[1][2]

Career

Pandita's recent job was the Opinion and Special Stories Editor of The Hindu, one of India's leading newspapers.[6] He quit The Hindu citing frequent and childish interventions in edit pages by Malini Parthasarathy, the owner-editor of the paper. He was one of the founding members of the much-acclaimed Open magazine and has also previously worked with the Indian Express and the TV Today group. He is a conflict-writer, who has reported extensively from war zones, including Iraq and Sri Lanka. His vast experience in reporting on India's Maoist insurgency has resulted in two books: Hello, Bastar: The Untold Story of India's Maoist Movement and The Absent State.

Pandita is also the author of the best-selling memoir on Kashmir, Our Moon Has Blood Clots, covering the ethnic cleansing of Kashmiri Hindus, which was described as the "most powerful non-fiction book of the year".[7][8] The book inspired many parts of the 2020 Hindi film Shikara.[9]

Pandita has worked as a war correspondent, and is known for his journalistic dispatches from the war hit countries like Iraq and Sri Lanka. However, in the recent years, his focal point has been the Maoist movement in India's red corridor.[10] He has also reported from North-Eastern India.[11] In 2009, he became only the third journalist to have interviewed the Maoist supreme commander, Ganapathi.[12]

Works

Hello, Bastar

The book covers the Naxalite–Maoist insurgency in the Bastar district beginning the 1980s.[13] The book includes several interviews and real life accounts and was published by Tranquebar.[14] He claimed to have worked on the subject for 12 years in a bid to differentiate between a terrorist and a naxal.[13]

Reception

Jasodhara Banerjee of Forbes India felt that the book "leaves much unanswered, much unasked." Writing: What is starkly absent is the touch of his own experience of spending time in some of the most feared regions of the country."[15] Freny Manecksha of Daily News and Analysis called it a "hastily produced and written" book that "suffers from a lack of focus and clarity of thought."[16] Akash Banerjee of India Today wrote: "Hard-hitting, well researched and penned with a lot of passion, this book has all the ingredients of a fictional socio-political thriller; ambition, deceit, love, revenge and nationalism, except that it's not."[17]

Awards

Pandita was awarded the International Red Cross award for his reportage from the Maoist-affected areas in central and east India, in 2010.[10] In 2015, he was named a Yale World Fellow.[18]

References

  1. ^ a b "30 years of Pandit exodus: Living as a refugee in one's own country".
  2. ^ a b "rahul pandita speaks".
  3. ^ "Rahul Pandita". The Hindu. 28 November 2013. Retrieved 26 November 2018.
  4. ^ "Two days in the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir".
  5. ^ "https://twitter.com/rahulpandita/status/1219495570496032768". Twitter. Retrieved 17 March 2022. {{cite web}}: External link in |title= (help)
  6. ^ Pandita, Rahul (28 May 2014). "A requiem for moral coherence". The Hindu. Retrieved 6 October 2019.
  7. ^ Narayan, Shyamala A. (2014). "India". The Journal of Commonwealth Literature. 49 (4): 535–567. doi:10.1177/0021989414553750. S2CID 220679984.
  8. ^ "Book Review: 'Our Moon Has Blood Clots: The exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits' - Latest News & Updates at Daily News & Analysis". dna. 10 February 2013. Archived from the original on 11 May 2018. Retrieved 15 May 2018.
  9. ^ Sharma, Devansh (7 February 2020). "Shikara movie review: Vidhu Vinod Chopra's account of Kashmiri Pandit exodus is strikingly poetic but seldom urgent- Entertainment News, Firstpost". Firstpost. Retrieved 7 February 2020.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  10. ^ a b "about me". rahulpandita.com. Retrieved 16 October 2013.
  11. ^ The Absent State: Insurgency as an Excuse for Misgovernance (illustrated ed.). Gurgaon: Hachette India (Local). 2010. ISBN 978-93-50092-15-6. OCLC 636921104.
  12. ^ "We Shall Certainly Defeat the Government – Somewhere in the impregnable jungles of Dandakaranya, the supreme commander of CPI (Maoist) spoke to Pandita on issues ranging from the Government's proposed anti-Naxal offensive to Islamist Jihadist movements" (Document). Dandakaranya: OPEN. 17 October 2009. {{cite document}}: Unknown parameter |access-date= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |url= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |work= ignored (help)
  13. ^ a b Sharma, Jyoti (19 July 2011). "'Hello Bastar' an untold story of India's Maoist movement". The Times of India. Retrieved 23 November 2018.
  14. ^ "Hello Bastar: The Untold Story Of Indias Maoist Movement". Rediff.com. Retrieved 23 November 2018.
  15. ^ Banerjee, Jasodhara (7 September 2011). "Book Review: Hello, Bastar". Forbes India. Retrieved 23 November 2018.
  16. ^ Manecksha, Freny (4 September 2011). "Book review: 'Hello Bastar: The Untold Story Of India's Maoist Movement'". Daily News and Analysis. Retrieved 23 November 2018.
  17. ^ Banerjee, Akash (29 July 2011). "Review of Hello, Bastar". India Today. Retrieved 23 November 2018.
  18. ^ Sharma, Betwa (18 April 2015). "Two Indians Named 2015 Yale World Fellows In US". HuffPost India. Archived from the original on 26 November 2015. Retrieved 15 May 2018.
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