Q. During your tenure at The Week, you did spot reporting from Tunisia, Libya, Sri Lanka, and Pakistan among others. Could you describe your experience as an Indian journalist reporting from Pakistan?
Bhattacherjee: After 26/11, Pakistan opened up, because they said they were also victims of terrorism. So I went there, and found out that it was true - some of the attacks had occurred very close to Kahuta, where the Pakistani nuclear program is based. It seemed as if the Pakistani government was about to fall because of terrorism. [A/N: according to Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, terrorism in Pakistan had killed 35,000 and wounded over 40,000 from 2004 to 2010].
On the whole, I found Pakistan captivating, even though it was very risky for me because I travelled alone. I used to walk about on my own around Karachi, and I was followed around by intelligence officers, but this was for my own safety. We were journalists of the post-Daniel Pearl generation, so [the risk at hand] . . . was always in the back of our mind. [A/N: Daniel Pearl, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, was kidnapped and murdered in Pakistan in 2002].
We knew that their government was always looking at us. For example, it was impossible for us to get a local mobile phone, because the Pakistani government would never approve our SIM card. Whenever we went to apply for a SIM, the gentleman would very politely tell us that we would get it soon, but then it would never arrive!
Q. What is one major insight that you gained from your time in Pakistan?
Bhattacherjee: You know, the Indian state tightly controls its national narrative, and you don’t get to read the books which the state considers unacceptable, especially those which are ideologically oriented towards Pakistan. So when I went to Pakistan, I was confronted with a very different reality, a very different society, and I for the first time really understood that Pakistan is in some ways the absolute opposite of India. That can be a really overwhelming experience for an Indian journalist.
Q. Can you elaborate on that last point— in what way is Pakistan the opposite of India?
Bhattacherjee: One example is history. Pakistan doesn’t view our freedom struggle as their freedom struggle — for them the freedom struggle is the Pakistan movement, and accordingly the cast of characters is very different. For us, Jinnah is the villain of the piece, but for them he is the hero, the paigambar, the Quaid-e-Azam. Not just Jinnah, there are many others that we have forgotten— because we have stopped studying this history. There is Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, the great leader from Bengal, who rose from East Pakistan to become the leader of the whole of Pakistan, and was such a contentious figure that Ayub Khan had to exile him to Beirut, where he died in 1960.
Q. Shifting tack from Pakistan - you reported on the ground from Libya and Tunisia during the Arab Spring for The Week. Was this your first visit to a war zone?
Bhattacherjee: I had gone to Israel before that, visited Sderot and those areas where all the hits happen. [A/N: Sderot is less than a mile from the Gaza border and a frequent target of rocket attacks by Palestinian militants].
Q. How was your experience reporting from Libya?
Bhattacherjee: This was in 2011. I flew from Delhi to Istanbul to Tunis. From Tunis, I rode a truck to the Libyan border, and at night I bribed a Libyan border guard to let me into Libya. I ended up in Libya the day after Muammar Gaddafi was killed!
I spent 11 days in Libya, in Tripoli, Misrata [A/N: both sites of heavy fighting during the Revolution] and other areas - everywhere except Sirte, in the eastern part of the country, where my guide refused to take me because it was too dangerous. These are all areas that are absolutely devastated and bombed out, like today’s Gaza.
[. . . Survival] was a difficult thing. I was walking around bullets and unexploded mines and cluster bombs on the ground. The first lesson I learnt was, in a conflict zone, don’t use a camera with a flash at night, because other people will think it’s the muzzle flash of a gun. The first time I did it, my taxi driver dragged me inside, snatched away my camera and told me never to do it again.
Then I got into trouble while trying to cross back into Tunisia to catch my return flight from Tunis. My visa was a single-entry Tunisian visa, so the border guards arrested me and my photographer colleague Sanjay Ahlawat, saying that we couldn’t re-enter the country. They locked us up and demanded a 1,000 USD bribe to let us go.
We were locked in this room for hours, till 01:00 a.m., when suddenly I heard Bengali being spoken outside! So, I opened the window and said “Aapni Bangali?” [“Are you Bengali?”]. The voice responds “Dada, ki khobor? [“Brother, what’s up?”]. I said, what dada ki khobor , I am here locked up, do something, save me!
[The gentleman] got the border guards to come down to 200 USD each for me and Sanjay, and they let us go. I was extremely fortunate to come across this gentleman who saved us - Imran bhai, a Bangladeshi from Dhaka, who was a labour contractor in Libya who was fleeing the war. He has been a friend for many years now, we still keep in touch.
Q. At the time, did you think there was an interest in India in reading about the Arab Spring? Do you feel there is an appetite generally amongst Indian audiences to read about foreign affairs?
Bhattacherjee: In Libya, I was working for The Week magazine. The Week is a part of a media group called Malayala Manorama, which is extremely popular both amongst Malayalis in India and the Malayali diaspora abroad. Kerala, of course, has a huge community of expatriates, particularly in the Gulf and in North Africa, including in Libya, so much so that the stereotype is that when every Malayali household wakes up, their first phone call is to their family in the Middle East! So when the Arab Spring happened. . . it made absolute commercial sense for my publication to write about this crisis that their readership was very [invested in], because their own families were getting affected.
Q. On a parting note, do you have any advice to give to students aspiring to be journalists?
Bhattacherjee: I don’t know if I can give any advice, because I don’t know if I’m a role model. But if I had to say one thing, then it would be that one must follow one’s heart’s calling. It may be costly, it may not fetch you the dreams you once had, but it will give you some sort of satisfaction at the end of the day.
I always think of Satyajit Ray in these cases. He was a man who was into the arts, so even the first profession he chose was something in a creative line, where his talent would be utilised. [A/N: Ray worked initially as an artist for an advertising agency]. So even while he was earning his keep, he was not denying himself the very selfish pleasure that derived from the arts— which he would end up getting many fold in life because he went on to become an extraordinary filmmaker! If he had become a fish-seller on the other hand, he probably would have been a very good fish-seller, but would it have given him the kick or the satisfaction he got from making Charulata? I don’t think so.
So in one line, I will say [. . .] follow your heart’s calling.
Kallol Bhattacherjee is a journalist with more than two decades of experience covering India’s diplomatic and foreign affairs. Some of his notable stories include the first interview of President Rajapaksa of Sri Lanka after the defeat of LTTE in 2009, interviewing Imran Khan in 2012, and reporting from the ground during the Libyan Revolution of 2011. From 2005 to 2015 he reported on international affairs for The Week magazine, and for the last nine years he has been the Diplomatic Affairs Correspondent at The Hindu. He is the author of The Great Game in Afghanistan: Rajiv Gandhi, General Zia and the Unending War (2017), A Baloch Militant in Delhi (2018), and Nehru’s First Recruits: The Diplomats Who Built Independent India’s Foreign Policy (2024).
Swapnil Ghose (UG’26) is a third-year Political Science major and a staff writer at The Edict. He aspires to be a war-zone correspondent.
(Edited by Keerthana Panchanathan)
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