About Me

Former political editor of the Times of India, Rajiv Shah represented the paper in Gandhinagar, Gujarat’s capital, covering the state government from late 1997 to early 2013. In formal journalism since 1979, he believes in what George Orwell once said: “Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations.”
Before joining TOI in 1993, Rajiv was in Moscow, covering Mikhail Gorbachev’s rise and fall between 1986 and 1993 for Delhi’s semi-left daily Patriot and the Link newsweekly.
Though ideologies have always fascinated him, Rajiv feels that in the current scenario, they are losing ground. And when someone asks him what is replacing ideologies, he has just one answer: “I am a newsperson. How do I know?”

Upon being appointed political editor, and apart from doing routine news stories from Gandhinagar, he began writing blogs for the Times of India’s online blogging site in 2011. His column, which he continued until 2017, was called True Lies — and his TOI blogs can still be accessed there. They have also been preserved here.
Some of the clippings from Rajiv’s Link and Patriot days (1979–93) can be accessed here.
Many of his byline stories published in the TOI between 2001 and 2013 — when he covered the Gujarat government under Narendra Modi as chief minister — can be accessed here and here.
Rajiv’s write-ups on Counterview, a continuation of his journalistic pursuit since 1979 and his blogging since 2011, are modest attempts to present impressions of life around us — and the establishment’s efforts to influence it.
Email: editor@counterview.net