Hartosh Singh Bal

Hartosh Singh Bal is an award-winning Indian journalist, director and essayist. He is currently the Political Editor of the Indian business magazine, The Caravan and a regular commentator on politics and national affairs for Indian television and news outlets. Bal has been honoured with several awards for his journalism, including the 2014 Red Ink Award for Excellence in Journalism for his coverage of the 2014 Indian general election.

Born in Amritsar, India on August 9, 1968, Bal graduated from St. Stephen’s College, Delhi in Modern History and completed an M.A. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Journalism in 1993. He began his career in journalism in 1994 as a correspondent in New Delhi. In 1995, he moved to Pakistan as a Special Assignment writer and covered the Kashmir conflict. He then went on to write for several publications including India Today, The Hindu and Tehelka, and before joining The Caravan in 2006.

In 2008, Bal released his first book, The Illustrated Guide to Sikhism, a comprehensive guide to Sikh scriptures, thought and history. Bal was awarded the Prem Bhatia Award for political reporting in 2010. His most successful book to date is A Second Republic: India Near and After Emergency (HarperCollins, April 2017), an investigation into the political and intellectual roots of the 1975 Emergency imposed on Indian citizens by the then-Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi.

Bal has continued to write and report extensively on Indian politics and his work has been cited in major media outlets globally. In 2018, he was one of the 15 international journalists to report from North Korea alongside BBC and CNN in an unprecedented reporting trip.

More recently, Bal has released a new book in 2021 entitled Waterfalls Down The Ganges: Hindu Nationalism and India’s Reorientation (Speaking Soul, April 2021) which delves further into the complexities of Indian politics. In this book, Bal examines the political implications of Hindu nationalism and carefully crafts a narrative that shows how the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has managed to reorient and control vast sections of the Indian polity, economy and media by leveraging Indian culture and mythology.

As an essayist and commentator, Bal’s work has appeared in The Hindu and The Telegraph, among other publications. He was one of the writers who participated in ‘The God Delusion’ at Mumbai’s Prithvi Theatre. Bal’s first collection of essays, The Political Biography of an Elephant, was published in 2014.

Bal is also an enthusiastic photographer who has been documenting cultural events, political movements, protests, riots and other moments in time, many of which have been included in his books and reporting. He lives in New Delhi with his wife and two sons.