Siddharth Varadarajan

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Siddharth Varadarajan (born 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 as its Strategic Affairs editor. He has taken a sabbatical now and is now a visiting professor at the Graduate School of Journalism at University of California at Berkeley. ^[1]

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. ^[2] In March 2006, he was awarded the Bernardo O'Higgins Order by the President of Chile -- that country's highest civilian honor for a foreign citizen -- for his contributions to journalism and to the promotion of India's relations with Latin America and Chile^[3].

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.

Recently, a report written by Mr.Varadarajan and published in The Hindu^[4] quoting a former senior U.S. Government official, Stephen G. Rademaker, as acknowledging that the United States had coerced India into voting against Iran at the International Atomic Energy Agency generated a controversy with the Cambridge-based Campaign against Sanctions and Military Intervention in Iran (CASMII) calling for an "international investigation into U.S. coercion of IAEA members.^[5]

Though Mr. Rademaker has never disputed the accuracy of the remarks attributed to him, the U.S. Ambassador in Delhi, David C. Mulford, issued a press release stating that "Mr. Rademaker is not a U.S. official and the statements attributed to him are inaccurate." The Hindu, however, confirmed that the quotes attributed to Mr.Rademaker were "wholly accurate".^[6]

Vardarajan's account of the fate of a Hindu woman, Geetaben, killed in the Gujarat violence of 2002 by a mob affiliated to the ruling alliance in the province led to a formal complaint against him at the Press Council of India on the grounds that he had allegedly intended to "discredit the Hindu community as a whole". The Council, however, ruled in Varadarajan's favor.