Remembering Tapan Bose | Pritam Singh

The death of Tapan Bose (1946-2025), documentary filmmaker and a leading campaigner for human rights and peace in South Asia, in Delhi on January 30 after a period of illness has been widely mourned by the human rights community in South Asia and beyond. He was more popularly and affectionately known as Tapan Da. My friendship with Tapan Da started over 30 years ago when a friend from London called to say he was coming with an Indian friend, Tapan Bose, to meet me in Oxford. I had already known about Tapan’s sterling work on human rights in Punjab, so I was delighted to meet him. We spent many hours sharing experiences and thinking about ways to strengthen the mechanism for protecting human rights in India. Knowing my special interest in Punjab in the overall context of the global and South Asian human rights movement, Tapan da asked me many searching questions about my research on human rights and shared about the work he had been involved in.

After studying at St Stephens College, Delhi University, where he was a well-known Leftwing student activist, Tapan Da’s activism extended beyond student activism to defending democratic rights during the 1975 Emergency. Later, he filmed the victims of Bhagalpur blindings (1979-80) and got centrally involved in fighting against human rights violations in Punjab and Jammu & Kashmir. Tapan was also well known for his films and activism around the Bhopal disaster and his advocacy for the victims. Tapan became a vital member of the people’s groups that tried to stop the November 1984 anti-Sikh violence in Delhi and was part of the support group for the Sikh community in the city and Punjab. One of the many film documentaries he made, a crucial one on Punjab, was: From Behind the Barricade (Punjab) (1993).

Our shared concerns led to the deepening of our friendship. Whenever I visited Delhi, he and his partner Rita Manchanda were among those I would long to meet, though it was impossible to do this during every visit. Tapan and the late Ram Narayan Kumar, along with their associates Rita, Priya Jain, Ashok Agrwaal, Ritu Menon, and others, have been among the leading public figures who have fought for minorities and the persecuted. No organised state likes human rights critics of the flaws in the state’s mode of governance. In India, human rights have unfortunately become an especially suspect subject due to the flawed discourse of Indian nationalism that prefers to flaunt India’s achievement in GDP growth rates, irrespective of the impact of such growth on the people and the planet. The state looks upon human rights work and human rights activists as a hindrance to singing the glory of India’s rise. Due to the logistical difficulties faced in India due to constant harassment, some human rights activists associated with Kumar and Tapan had to move to Nepal to register the formal presence of their organisation, the South Asia Forum for Human Rights. Tapan Da, Kumar, and others organised an excellent international conference on human rights in South Asia at Kathmandu, where I participated. I remember that conference as one of the most memorable, where eminent scholars working on South Asia and activists from all South Asian countries experienced an enriching feeling of belonging to one South Asian community.

Tapan facilitated the publication by the South Asian Forum for Human Rights, a monumental work on disappearances in Punjab, ‘Reduced to Ashes: The Insurgency and Human Rights in Punjab’ (2003) that Ram Narayan Kumar produced with Amrik Singh, Ashok Agrwaal and Jaskaran Kaur. Tapan and Kumar understood the importance of meticulous documentation of human rights violations in making a credible case, especially in international forums. They were hugely respected for this work at such forums. Human rights work is very demanding on the body and the mind. It demands contradictory pulls on the activists. On the one hand, it demands acute sensitivity to listen to the pain and sufferings of the victims and record that evidence. On the other hand, it takes strong willpower to avoid depression when witnessing the tragedies of victims. It takes its toll on the body and the spirit. It affected both Kumar and Tapan acutely.

Tapan strongly supported and advocated peaceful relations between South Asian countries. Peace activists and human rights defenders in South Asia neighbours of India highly respected him. Tapan was amazingly affectionate in personal ties and a real gem. In his death, his family and friends have lost an adorable human being, and South Asia, India, and Punjab have lost one of the central pillars of the human rights movement.