Remembering G S Bhargava

BY B G Verghese| IN Opinion | 03/10/2009

Another of the old guard has departed with the sad demise of G.S. Bhargava in Delhi after a prolonged illness. He was a quiet and soft spoken man and an old friend whom I had first met in Bombay in 1949. I had just joined the Times of India and he was with the Socialist Party weekly, Janata. He was more a publicist for the party than a party worker; but his loyalty to the party never faded, though the Party itself went into slow decline with the passage of time after the JP-Lohia heyday.

GS, as he was popularly known, remained an active journalist and entered the mainstream, following more or less the same path as I did with the  Hindustan Times and the Indian Express. His main interests lay in the fields of political affairs, external relations and security and he wrote editorials and columns on these topics.

He worked for the Washington Post's Delhi bureau for a while and was the Hindustan Times' Pakistan correspondent in 1961-62.

He wrote on the 1962 India-China conflict and on the 1965 war and brought out a book, published by Vikas, on the latter with Ram Mohan Rao, as a tribute to the fallen heroes.  

Bhargava was with the AFP Delhi Bureau in the 1960s and was then a Fellow with the Harvard Centre for International Studies and the International Institute for Strategic Studies, London, before taking up an assignment as Principal Information Officer in the Press Information Bureau during the Janata period after the Emergency. He was later with the Indian Express and became the paper's Resident Editor in Hyderabad with an oversight over the Express editions in Vijayawada, Chitoor and Vizianagaram.

He returned to his academic pursuits as a Fellow at international studies centres at Cornell and Moscow  and then briefly at Delhi's Centre for Policy Research. After formal retirement, he continued writing columns for several newspapers, the Tribune included. He also wrote a popular media watch column for some years under the title Blue Pencil.

GS was a prolific writer and published books on the War in NEFA, Left Leaders, the communist movement in Andhra, the Simla Summit, corruption, After Nehru?, several biographies (Acharya Kripalani, V.V. Giri, Morarji Desai, Bhim Sen Sachar), pursued various scandals, and wrote more than one book on Pakistan.

His closing years were devoted to reviewing the Indian Press. I am not sure he approved of the new journalism of more recent years, especially after the transforming effect of the print medium of television. He belonged to the old school and upheld its values.

He is survived by his wife, Lily, two sons and a daughter.