Smita Gupta, currently Senior Fellow, The Hindu Centre for Politics and Public Policy, has worked for mainstream newspapers, including the Hindustan Times, Indian Express, The Times of India and The Hindu, apart from a stint at the news magazine, Outlook. In a journalistic career spanning four decades, she has covered all major political parties, the Prime Minister's Office, Parliament, and national and State elections, especially in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, West Bengal and Gujarat.
For her reportage on the Hashimpura massacre in Uttar Pradesh in 1987 (when she broke the story of five survivors of the police pogrom) and on human rights violations in the Kashmir Valley, she won The People’s Union for Civil Liberties Award Award in 1991. She had also reported on caste violence in Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan; the Salwa Judum in Chattisgarh; Nandigram and Lalgarh in West Bengal; and anti-Christian violence in Kandhamal, Odisha.
In 1992-’93, she as a Reuter Fellow at Oxford University, U.K., she wrote a long paper on The Emergence of the Far Right in West Europe. She has contributed chapters in academic books on the Bharatiya Janata Party, the politics of Uttar Pradesh, and Parliament. She is also the recipient of the Prem Bhatia Award for Political Reporting (2014) and the International Committee of the Red Cross/Press Institute of India Award for "Humanitarian Reporting in Indian Media” (2010).