Most editors and journalists accepted censorship without protest but Kuldip persuaded about 100 journalists to sign a protest and send it to Gandhi.

He would not, and Gandhi did call the election.īy then Kuldip had already been editor of the Delhi edition of the Statesman and had moved on to edit the Indian Express. The head of the government’s information service knew nothing of the election and threatened to arrest Kuldip if he did not withdraw the story. It was widely believed that Gandhi intended to retain the emergency much longer. In 1977 Kuldip broke the news that Indira Gandhi intended to call an early election, following her 1975 declaration of a draconian state of emergency, suspending fundamental rights and censoring the press. He was first with the news that Shastri had died at Tashkent, the day after signing the 1966 peace agreement with the president of Pakistan, Mohammad Ayub Khan, after the 1965 war between the two countries. Kuldip’s close association with Shastri and other members of the cabinet was an invaluable education in politics, which made him one of the best informed journalists when he joined UNI (United News of India), India’s second news agency. He then joined the Indian Information Service, where he became spokesman for the home minister Lal Bahadur Shastri, who went on to be the second prime minister of India. So, to work in English, in 1952 he joined the United States Information Services, which enabled him to go to the US and earn a degree in journalism from the Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University. Although he loved the language and its poetry he was told there was no future in Urdu journalism because it was now the national language of Pakistan. He began his career on an Urdu newspaper, Anjam, in 1948. Kuldip, who had dropped the Singh from his name, settled in Delhi. When violence broke out at partition in 1947, the family migrated to India. Kuldip studied at Forman Christian College then the Law College in Lahore, obtaining a law degree. Kuldip was born in the Punjab city of Sialkot, which is now in Pakistan, the son of Puran Devi and Gurbaksh Singh, a doctor who, Kuldip said, “blended the traditions of Sikhism and Hinduism”.

He worked throughout his life to improve relations between Pakistan and India, and established the vigil that is still held on the Wagah-Attari border near Amritsar at midnight on 14/15 August, the hour that marks the end of Pakistan’s independence day (and Kuldip’s birthday) and the beginning of India’s. The day after he died, an article he had just written was published, saying: “It is paramount that the centre should concentrate more on good governance rather than imposing its Hindutva policies.” He also spoke out against the current Hindutva (Hindu nationalist) policies of Narendra Modi’s government and what he saw as the “soft Hindutva” of today’s Indian media.

Kuldip nayar emergency