Kuldip Nayar

Kuldip Nayar was an Indian journalist, columnist and former Rajya Sabha member whose reporting on the Punjab crisis Gurmit Singh's History of Sikh Struggles uses again and again as the evidence of a non-Sikh witness, calling him a well-known and an eminent Hindu journalist. The Daily Star says he was born on 14 August 1923 at Sialkot, then in British India, studied at Forman Christian College and law at Lahore, began in journalism in 1948 at the Urdu daily Anjam, and moved to the United States in 1952 to study journalism at Northwestern University. He headed several newspapers, among them The Indian Express and The Statesman, was one of the first journalists jailed when Indira Gandhi declared the Emergency in 1975, and was nominated to the Rajya Sabha in 1997. He died in Delhi on 23 August 2018, aged 95.

What he reported on Punjab

• September 1981: Gurmit Singh quotes his account that Home Minister Giani Zail Singh told Haryana Chief Minister Bhajan Lal that Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale should not be arrested, and that Bhajan Lal arranged his escape from Chando Kalan in an official car.
• 5 April 1982: after the talks with Indira Gandhi broke down that day, Gurmit Singh quotes Nayar as writing that the distance between the government and the Akalis began to grow, and that both sides slid step by step into a situation that spelt disaster.
• 1983: in his autobiography, excerpted in The Sunday Tribune on 8 July 2012, he wrote about Swaran Singh's mediation with Sant Harchand Singh Longowal after the Akali prisoners were released on 15 October 1983. He says the statement placed before Parliament differed substantially from the draft shown to the Akalis, who called it a betrayal, and that it is unclear who was responsible.
• July 1984: Gurmit Singh quotes him, against the Government's White Paper of 10 July 1984, as writing that the agitation was led by reasonable men seeking reasonable demands and that on at least three occasions agreement was in prospect at the negotiating table before Indira Gandhi sabotaged it. That is Nayar's view as Gurmit Singh presents it.
• 31 March 1985: his interview with Sant Longowal appeared in the magazine Sunday, and Gurmit Singh prints it in translation as an appendix to his third volume.

With Khushwant Singh he wrote Tragedy of Punjab, which Gurmit Singh cites in his notes. Nayar is remembered as a veteran editor, a jailed critic of the Emergency, an Indo-Pakistan peace campaigner who lit candles at the Attari-Wagah border, and a Hindu journalist whose account of the failed talks Sikh historians quote.