| Nikhil Chakravarty, a top Indian political columnist, dead at 74 | |
| Nikhil Chakravarty, one of India 's best known journalist s, has died. He was 74. | |
| Chakravarty was suffering from brain cancer and died in hospital on Saturday, his family said. | |
| Politics was his forte and his columns appeared in leading Indian newspapers and magazines. | |
| Chakravarty also started a weekly news magazine, "Mainstream,'' in 1962 and edited it for more than three decades. | |
| Last year, the government appointed him chief of Prasar Bharati , an autonomous corporation set up to end government control of radio and television. | |
| Chakravarty declined a top government award in 1990, saying no journalist should be identified with the governing establishment. | |
| He graduated from Calcutta University and studied at Oxford University's Merton College in England. | |
| Chakravarty taught history at Calcutta University in the 1930s before taking to journalism as correspondent of a weekly brought out by the Communist Party of India . | |
| He later joined the CPI and remained a member until 1978. | |
| He closed the Mainstream weekly for a while when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi imposed emergency rule in India 1975-77, jailing political opponents and imposing censorship on newspapers and magazines. | |
| Chakravarty was born November 3, 1913, in India's northeastern state of Assam. | |