When the whole country was thumping their chest after operation Bluestar ( Serves the Khalistanis right was the mood), I wrote a front page editorial in The New Republic criticising it. "Beginning of the end" was the headline.

Uttam Sengupta

The joke in my family and among friends is that I am a champion of lost causes. When the whole country was thumping their chest after operation Bluestar ( Serves the Khalistanis right was the mood), I wrote a front page editorial in The New Republic criticising it. "Beginning of the end" was the headline. When Rajiv Gandhi became PM, in the backwaters of Ranchi I wrote critical pieces objecting to the way he was chosen. Nobody paid any attention. In the nineties when nobody supported the cause of a Jharkhand state, I was an ardent advocate and wrote freely in TOI to justify it though Lalu Yadav was saying it would be created over his dead body and revered Raghuvansh Prasad Singh called me a traitor after a talk I gave at the A.N. Sinha Institute. I have written against capital punishment and found flaws in the trial of Dhananjay Chatterjee, Afzal Guru and now Yakub Memon. So, this is not the first time that I have been abused as a traitor, an anti-national and of course pseudo secular. But I strongly feel it is the job of journalists to question, to swim against the current and object to popular views. Most of the time, my instincts have turned out to be correct.