Rahul Pandita's recent job was the Opinion and Special Stories editor of The Hindu, one of India's leading newspapers. 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. He is also the author of the best-selling memoir on Kashmir, Our Moon Has Blood Clots. 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. He has also reported from North-Eastern India. In 2009, he became the first ever journalist to have interviewed the Maoist supreme commander, Ganapathi.
Literary Career
Pandita has written several books including the best-seller 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".
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." 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." 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."
Awards
Pandita was awarded the International Red Cross award for his reportage from the Maoist-affected areas in central and east India, in 2010. In 2015, he was named a Yale World Fellow.
