New Delhi: Hari Krishan (Hong Kong) Dua, former editor-in-chief of Hindustan Times, died on Wednesday after a brief illness. He headed the newspaper from 1987 to 1994, and held senior editorial positions at The Times Of India, The Indian Express and The Tribune. He also served as media advisor to former prime ministers HD Deve Gowda and Atal Bihari Vajpayee, was a member of Parliament in the Rajya Sabha, and served as India’s ambassador to Denmark.
From the lanes of Sargodha (in present-day Pakistan), Dua – who was 10 years old at the time – migrated to India like thousands of other people in 1947. His brother-in-law, General Pramod Sehgal, told HT: “His family arrived in India with only the clothes they were wearing. They had lost a lot. They moved to Gurgaon when they migrated. He studied under a lamp post and worked hard to make it in life.”
His last rites were performed on Thursday at Lodhi Road crematorium.
After completing school, Dua joined Delhi University’s Hindu College, but left midway to pursue a degree in journalism from Punjab University. “At that time, the department was based in Delhi. He wanted to do something for the country, and journalism was the path he wanted to take. He faced many rejections initially and then got his job at UNI, whose office was located above Bahrisoon Booksellers in Khan Market,” Prashant recalls.
Growing up, Prashant said he witnessed his father taking it all in his stride — the pressures, the late nights, the competition. “He always said that his first duty was always to his readers. He remained a wonderful father till the end. I still remember that no matter what time he came home from work, he always dropped me off at school. That was our time and nothing came in the way of that… He was distraught when my mother died in 1992 and it took him many years to recover. Much later he got married again,” Prashant said.
Congress leader Shashi Tharoor took to Twitter to express his grief and said: “A journalistic giant has left us,” while Manish Tiwari wrote: “A very warm and utterly humble human being – who knew how to call a spade a spade.”
Prashant recalls that even a day before he was hospitalized in Delhi three weeks ago, Dua appeared at a “Saturday group lunch” at the India International Center — his second home — where every week a guest was invited to discuss one issue or the other informally over lunch. “He was still very active. He had a stroke in 2024 and his left side was paralyzed, but his mind was as sharp as ever. He never missed his Saturday lunches,” he said.
Satish Kumar Bahl, 84, who was Dua’s secretary at HT for seven years, remembers him as a “good man, interested only in facts, and with a pleasant sense of humour”. The two were reconnected two years later when Dua was nominated to the Rajya Sabha post by the Manmohan Singh government. “He asked about me all those years later only to find out I had retired. He asked me to meet him and the next day I came back to be his secretary and remained that way until the day he died. He was truly one of a kind,” Bahl said.
For Saigal, this is Dua’s favorite story of all time and one that has stayed with him – when Dua, a young reporter, dropped off a young opposition MP, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, on his scooter, in Lutyens’ Delhi. “I think he wrote about that too – when Dua took Atal on a trip. He was a funny guy,” Segal said.
