Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay embarked on a career in journalism in the early 1980s and is best known for his reportage and analysis of the rise and growth of Hindu organisations, their politics and agitations. He was among the first journalists to track the emergence of the Ram Janmabhoomi-Babri Masjid conflict from the late 1980s. He has followed, and written about, the political and electoral emergence of the BJP and its allies from that period.
He is the author of The Demolition: India at the Crossroads (1994), one of the first books on the Ayodhya discord and the rise of Hindutva. He is also the author of Narendra Modi: The Man, the Times (2013), Sikhs: The Untold Agony of 1984 (2015), The RSS: Icons of the Indian Right (2019) and The Demolition and the Verdict: Ayodhya and the Project to Reconfigure India (2021). He is a regular columnist in, and contributor to, several leading newspapers and web portals, and a well-known commentator and host on Indian television news and video channels. An unabashed college dropout, he lives in India’s National Capital Region.