Mainstream WeeklyThe 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