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Kanchan Gupta (Bengali: কাঞ্চন গুপ্ত) is an Indian journalist, political analyst, and activist.
Journalist and columnist
Born to Bangladeshi refugee parents, Kanchan Gupta was raised in Jamshedpur and Patna where he attended missionary schools. He later moved to Kolkata where he studied English literature, political science and economics at St Xavier’s College, University of Calcutta.
In 1982, he joined The Telegraph as a sub-editor on the news desk, where he learned editing from M.J. Akbar. In 1987, he was invited to join The Statesman by the paper's then-editor, Sunanda K. Datta-Ray. He became the youngest Assistant Editor in The Statesman’s history.
In 1991, he moved to Delhi with a new assignment as Assistant Editor of The Pioneer, then edited by Vinod Mehta. He was promoted to Deputy Editor in 1994.
A year later, in December 1995, he gave up full-time journalism to concentrate on a public career and began to assist L.K. Advani and Atal Bihari Vajpayee in their parliamentary work. As an official in the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) when the NDA came to power, he worked in close association with National Security Advisor Brajesh Mishra on foreign affairs and security issues. He was the PMO’s representative on the National Security Advisory Board.
As part of the Government’s public diplomacy initiative in Arab countries, and to engage and influence opinion-makers and the intelligentsia in the Middle East, Kanchan Gupta was sent to Egypt as director of the Maulana Azad Centre for Indian Culture in Cairo. He held this post till the summer of 2004, when he returned to India and to journalism, and again joined The Pioneer for some time, edited by Chandan Mitra.
Kanchan Gupta writes on national and regional politics, international affairs and security issues. His weekly column, Coffee Break, appears in The Pioneer every Sunday. He writes a weekly column for the popular Mumbai daily, MidDay. He participates in Indian television programs on political and national security issues. He is politically conservative, socially liberal. He lives by the precepts of the Brahmo Samaj.