Dhiren Bhagat

Dhiren Bhagat was an Indian journalist and essayist who wrote on Punjab and on the killing of Sikhs in Delhi in 1984. Wikipedia gives his birth as 1957 and his death as November 1988, in a road accident in Delhi at the age of 31, and says he studied at Merton College, Oxford. It lists The Sunday Observer and The Indian Post among the papers he wrote for, and says some of his writing on Punjab criticised the Indian government's role in the insurgency. His essays were collected in The Contemporary Conservative, edited by Salman Khurshid and published by Viking. Ensaaf's report, which quotes him often, calls him “the late reporter”.

What he wrote, as Ensaaf cites it

• 7 July 1984, The Spectator: writing after the Army opened Harmandir Sahib to the public on 24 June, he described pilgrims pushing towards the shrine and stretching out hundreds of hands to trace each bullet hole in the marble and gold (Ensaaf, p. 21).
• 25 November 1984, The Sunday Observer: from the Delhi relief camps he reported that volunteers at a camp in Karol Bagh, run by Sardar Mehtab Singh, refused 200 blankets offered by a senior minister's wife because of the part the Congress (I) party had played in the killings (Ensaaf, p. 65).
• 8 April 1987, The Spectator, “Bloodstained Whitewash”: he compared the Misra Commission's report with Lord Hunter's inquiry after Jallianwala Bagh and asked why H. K. L. Bhagat was never cross-examined, and whether Shyam Singh Tyagi, his family or his neighbours were questioned about the meeting at Tyagi's house. He noted that Justice Mishra dealt with those affidavits in a single sentence while writing at length on children's television viewing and good manners, and he criticised the Misra Commission's report, writing that Justice Mishra “has thrown away one of the great opportunities of our time” (Ensaaf, pp. 91 to 92).

What he is remembered for: for contemporary reporting that later accounts of 1984 still quote: the scene at Harmandir Sahib after the attack, the refusal of government blankets in the relief camps, and the sharpest contemporary criticism of the Misra Commission's report, which he saw as a lost chance to establish the truth.