Jaspal Singh Sidhu

Jaspal Singh Sidhu is a Punjabi journalist who retired as Special Correspondent of the news agency United News of India (UNI) in New Delhi in December 2008. Since then he has written on media, politics and the environment. He is known for arguing that the Indian press in the 1980s acted as an “embedded” arm of the government instead of reporting Punjab independently.

Key work

• Embedded Journalism, Punjab: co-edited with Anil Chamadia, who heads a media studies centre in Delhi. It collects critiques of 1980s and 1990s coverage by Patwant Singh, Ram Narayan Kumar and Pritam Singh, and two unpublished government-sponsored reports: the V.G. Verghese Committee report of the early 1990s and Tirlok Singh Deep's report of the early 1980s. The title borrows the term used for US-managed press coverage of the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
• April 2014: in his own report on a Chandigarh discussion of the media's conduct during the agitation, Sidhu recorded speakers saying that journalists were sorted into “red, blue and white” categories by how pliable they were, and that police killings were reported as “encounters”. Those are the speakers' views, as he reported them.
• 29 April 2016: release in Chandigarh of his Punjabi book Sant Bhindranwale De Ru-B-Ru: June 1984 Di Pattarkari (“Face to Face with Sant Bhindranwale: Journalism of June 1984”). Sikh Siyasat describes it as an extensive account of the embedded journalism practised by the Indian media in the 1980s.
• 2012 to 2017: regular guest on Sikh Siyasat discussion programmes, including episodes on opposition to a memorial for the June 1984 attack on Sri Darbar Sahib and on the 2017 Punjab elections.

What he is known for. For turning a retired wire-agency journalist's eye on the press's own conduct in the years before and after the attack on Sri Harmandir Sahib. His argument, that the Indian media worked as embedded journalists in Punjab in the 1980s, is his own and that of the writers he gathered; it is not a finding of any court or commission.