Praveen Swami


Praveen Swami is an Indian journalist and author specialising on international strategic and security issues. He was the Diplomatic Editor of The Daily Telegraph newspaper between September 2010 – October 2011 and is currently the National Editor of The Indian Express newspaper. Swami is the author of two books on the India-Pakistan conflict in Kashmir. He was described by the BBC as "one of India's foremost experts of Islamist terrorism".

Career

Swami was the Associate Editor of the Indian newspaper The Hindu from 1993, for which he reported on topics such as the conflict in Kashmir, the Left-wing Maoist insurgency in India, and Islamic groups. He reported on Kashmir, Punjab and security issues for much of the 1990s before becoming the Mumbai bureau chief in 1998. He was appointed as Resident Editor New Delhi, The Hindu in October 2011. Swami, along with Rural Affairs Editor P Sainath, resigned from The Hindu in mid-2014. Both journalists hinted they found it difficult to work under the new system which emerged after the shift in power structure in Kasturi and Sons Ltd in October 2013. Former editor Siddhartha Varadarajan and Executive Editor MK Venu were ousted from their positions in October 2013.

Awards

Praveen Swami has won several awards for his work. He received the Sanskriti Samman Award in 1999 for a series of investigative stories on Indian military and intelligence failures preceding and during the Kargil conflict. His work on the Indian army's counter-terrorist operations won him the Prem Bhatia Memorial Award for Political Journalism in 2003. In 2006, he also won the Indian Express - Ramnath Goenka Excellence in Journalism prize for "his extensive and in-depth reports on terrorism in Jammu & Kashmir, and investigations into the merchants of terror." Swami was a Jennings Randolph Senior Fellow at the United States Institute of Peace in Washington in 2004–2005.

Books