Rahul Pandita
Rahul Pandita is a journalist and an author based in Delhi. He is a 2015 Yale World Fellow. He has also authored the bestselling Hello, Bastar: The Untold Story of India's Maoist Movement, and co-authored the critically acclaimed The Absent State. He has extensively reported from war zones, including Iraq and Sri Lanka. In 2010, he received the International Red Cross award for conflict reporting.
Pandita has been a speaker at international forums like the Carnegie Endowment Center, Stanford University, Brown University, State University of New York, Michigan University and the World Affairs Council. He was a visiting fellow at the University of Pennsylvania's Center for the Advanced Study of India, in 2014.
Rahul's last job was as editor (opinion and special stories) of The Hindu.
NIF Books
Rahul Pandita was fourteen years old in 1990 when he was forced to leave his home in Srinagar along with his family, who were Kashmiri Pandits: the Hindu minority within a Muslim-majority Kashmir that was becoming increasingly agitated with the cries of ‘Azadi’ from India.
The heartbreaking story of Kashmir has so far been told through the prism of the brutality of the Indian state, and the pro-independence demands of separatists. But there is another part of the story that has remained unrecorded and buried.
Our Moon Has Blood Clots is the unspoken chapter in the story of Kashmir, in which it was purged of the Kashmiri Pandit community in a violent ethnic cleansing backed by Islamist militants. Hundreds of people were tortured and killed, and about 3,50,000 Kashmiri Pandits were forced to leave their homes and spend the rest of their lives in exile in their own country.
Rahul Pandita has written a deeply personal, powerful and unforgettable story of history, home and loss
Reviews:
‘This powerful and moving book throws a sharp new light onto one of the most tragic conflicts in the modern world’— Ramachandra Guha
‘I can only thank Rahul for telling our story and bringing it out for the world to know what actually happened to the Kashmiri Pandits and non-Muslims who had to just get up and leave overnight’—Vidhu Vinod Chopra
‘Gives a searing account of the displacement, struggle and survival of the community’—The Hindu
‘A gripping hidden history of a community which suffered displacement . . . A firm rejoinder to the act of forgetting . . . The thread of life has been broken, families destroyed and traditions interrupted. But as in Pandita’s case, the remembering must go on’—India Today
‘Pandita presents a deeply personal, powerful and unforgettable story of Kashmiri Pandits’—Sunday Indian
‘Brings a much-needed credibility to this unacknowledged episode of our recent history’—Mid-Day
‘Essential reading for any student of the Kashmir issue . . . Challenging monochromatic clichés that romanticise the myth of a culturally and communally homogenous Kashmiri society’—Business Standard
‘A riveting and deeply disturbing account of the recent history of conflict-ridden Kashmir’—Seminar
Other books by this author:
