Swapan Dasgupta

In 2019, he published Awakening Bharat Mata: The Political Beliefs of the Indian Right.

The Right is an endangered community in India’s English-language media. I happen to be one of the few to have retained a precarious toe-hold in the mainstream media.

Dasgupta was awarded Padma Bhushan (the third highest civilian award in India) in 2015, for his contribution to Literature and Education.

In February 2015, Swapan Dasgupta was appointed on the Board of Directors of Larsen and Toubro as a nominee of the Unit Trust of India. In April, 2016, Dasgupta was nominated by the President of India Pranab Mukherjee to the Rajya Sabha. His term would continue till 2022. These appointments have though attracted criticism from other commentators as a reward for political allegiance. He stepped down from Directorship of Larsen and Toubro upon being appointed to the Rajya Sabha.

Meera Nanda notes him to be one of the most prominent center-right public intellectuals in the Indian polity. Tanika Sarkar et al have located parallels between Swapan's writings and the thought-school of Hindu nationalist organisations like Vishva Hindu Parishad. Manisha Basu, writing in The Rhetoric of Hindu India, deems Dasgupta similarly and further notes of his consistent attacks upon left-liberal commentators—people who have supposedly leveraged their social privilege to dominate the socio-political consciousness of the "Anglophone national bourgeoisie" for long enough—in his process of becoming one of the few self-appointed interpreters of the Indian Right.

Basu also notes him to be a vocal exponent of exploiting English as a tool in reaching out to the masses and substituting the appeal of prevalent ideologies of the socialist left-liberals with that of hindutva; he was one of the most fierce critics of the pro-vernacular policies followed by the communist government of West Bengal. Back in the early 2000s, Dasgupta had noted in his blog:-

Swapan Dasgupta (born 3 October 1955) is an Indian conservative journalist and a presidential nominee to the Rajya Sabha (India's Upper House of Parliament). He is an influential conservative writer, writing columns espousing Hindu nationalism for leading English dailies.

He was born into a Bengali Baidya Brahmin family on 3 October 1955 in Calcutta, West Bengal. He received his early education at St. Paul's School, Darjeeling, La Martiniere Calcutta and St. Stephen's College, Delhi, graduating from the latter in 1975. He thereafter went on to earn an MA and PhD from the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, where he received an exhibitionership to fund his studies. Subsequently, he returned to India for a brief period in 1979 to take up a management position at his family’s pharmaceutical business ‘Calcutta Chemical Company’. He eventually returned to the United Kingdom as a Junior Research Fellow at Nuffield College, University of Oxford, where he taught and researched on South Asian Politics. An excerpt from his thesis concerning the intersectionality of local politics in the Midnapur district of Bengal has featured in a volume about subaltern studies, edited by Ranajit Guha.