Siddharth Varadarajan

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Siddharth Varadarajan (b. 1965) is an Indian journalist and editor of Gujarat: The Making of a Tragedy. He has reported on the NATO war against Yugoslavia, the destruction of the Bamyan Buddhas by the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, the war in Iraq and the crisis in Kashmir. He now works for The Hindu.

After studying economics at the London School of Economics and Columbia University, he taught at New York University for several years before joining The Times of India as an editorial writer in 1995. In 2004, he joined The Hindu, India's leading English-language newspaper, as Deputy Editor.

In November 2005, the United Nations Correspondents Association awarded him the Elizabeth Neuffer Memorial Prize Silver Medal for Print Journalism for a series of articles, Persian Puzzle on Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency. [1] In March 2006, he was awarded the Bernardo O'Higgins Order by the President of Chile -- that country's highest civilian honour for a foreign citizen -- for his contributions to journalism and to the promotion of India's relations with Latin America and Chile. [2]

Mr.Varadrajan's writings on international affairs are stridently critical of United States policies. He has also called for an end to the appeasement of the U.S., in the context of the Iranian nuclear crisis and has also called for the end of "discriminatory practices" in the nuclear non-proliferation regime.

Recently Mr.Varadarajan was involved in a controversy over a report published in The Hindu over the alleged statements made by a former Senior U.S. Government official Stephen G. Rademaker at a conference organised at the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, New Delhi.Mr. Rademaker was reported by Mr.Varadarajan as having stated that India's votes against Iran at the IAEA over Iranian nuclear proliferation as "coerced" by the U.S and that the U.S. would expect more of India in the future. In response to the article, U.S. Ambassador to India David C.Mulford issued a communique stating that "Mr. Rademaker is not a U.S. official and the statements attributed to him are inaccurate." The Hindu however claimed that quotes attributed to Mr.Rademaker were "wholly accurate."

Gujarat: The Making of a Tragedy, edited by Varadarajan, contains accounts of the violence against the Muslims of that province of India. The book was published by Penguin Books in 2002.