Ghulam Rasool was a

journalist A journalist is an individual that collects/gathers information in form of text, audio, or pictures, processes them into a news-worthy form, and disseminates it to the public. The act or process mainly done by the journalist is called journalism ...

working for the

Telugu Telugu may refer to: * Telugu language, a major Dravidian language of India *Telugu people, an ethno-linguistic group of India * Telugu script, used to write the Telugu language ** Telugu (Unicode block), a block of Telugu characters in Unicode S ...

newspaper ''Udayam'' and was killed in 1992 in what the

Andhra Pradesh Andhra Pradesh (, abbr. AP) is a state in the south-eastern coastal region of India. It is the seventh-largest state by area covering an area of and tenth-most populous state with 49,386,799 inhabitants. It is bordered by Telangana to the ...

police claimed as an encounter with Naxalites.

Incident

Ghulam Rasool, a reporter with the Telugu daily, Udayam, and his friend Vijaya Prasada Rao had a track record for being Naxalite sympathisers. The police claim the two were killed in an encounter when they were holding a meeting in an abandoned house in Ranga Reddy district's Masjidguda village.

Scepticism

But the state journalists had a different version that Rasool and Rao were picked up by some police officers in a jeep and taken to a police station. They died during the third degree torture to which they were subjected.

Arundhati Roy's tribute

While delivering a memorial lecture on Ghulam Rasool,

Arundhati Roy Suzanna Arundhati Roy (born 24 November 1961) is an Indian author best known for her novel ''The God of Small Things'' (1997), which won the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1997 and became the best-selling book by a non-expatriate Indian author. S ...

said in 1996 that the murder of Gulam Rasool and Vijayprasada Rao in a fake encounter is part of large scale killing of unarmed citizens in the name of "curbing extremism" in the state where as many as 106 people were killed in these encounters in 1991 alone.

References

1992 deaths Indian male journalists Journalists killed in India Year of birth missing Journalists from Andhra Pradesh {{India-journalist-stub