An Unfinished Revolution: A Hostage Crisis, Adivasi Resistance and the Naxal Movement review: From ground zero
The Hindu December 30, 2017
On March 14, 2012, two Italian tourists, Paolo Bosusco and Claudio Colangelo, were taken hostages by
Naxalites in Kandhamal district of Odisha. During the month-long crisis, Kishalay Bhattacharjee was part of a team of journalists that engaged with Sabyasachi Panda, leader of the Maoist group, and facilitated the release of Colangelo.
The Byline is Dead
The Caravan Magazine December 01, 2018
The word “byline” first appeared about a century ago in Ernest Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises. Overtime, for idealists among us, the byline came to represent the power of journalism—the courage it provided an ordinary reporter to challenge the high and mighty. As a young journalist, this was the sort of byline I aspired for, whose sanctity, I believed, was to be doggedly protected by editors. Over my career, I have watched the byline die a slow and violent death. It has been killed not only by power-hungry politicians and corporate barons, but also by media owners and their servile editors.
Arms and the middleman
The Hindu May 3, 2016
Allegations of wrongdoings in military procurements are as old as independent India. Within months of the country becoming free, there were insinuations that India’s first High Commissioner to London, V.K. Krishna Menon, had not adhered to procurement norms while ordering 200 jeeps for the Indian Army. Some 150 jeeps that finally landed in Madras port were refurbished second-hand ones, probably used in the recently concluded World War II. The allegations could do nothing to the maverick leader, who had become a cult figure of sorts in pre-Independence London with his oratory at Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park. Menon’s blazing political career ended only in the wake of India’s humiliation at the hands of China in 1962, when he contributed to the disastrous conduct of the war as the Defence Minister.
The brave new world of retail violence
The Hindu March 2, 2016
It may be a sheer coincidence that actor Sanjay Dutt, convicted for possessing an AK-56 rifle in 1993, was released from jail on the same day last week when a European Union-commissioned study said a large number of improvised explosives of the Islamic State (IS) contained many Indian components. However, there is an underlying commonality behind the two developments – of the actor obtaining an AK-56 for self-defence and the IS finding Indian detonators, detonating cord, and safety fuses in 2015-16 along the Syria-Iraq stretch. Both the incidents help understand the flourishing of the underground arms bazaar across continents in the intervening period.
Subscribe Newsletter
