The battle for the soul of The Hindu

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139 highlights

• Next to it, given pride of place, is a colourised portrait of S Kasturi Ranga Iyengar, who took control of the newspaper in 1905 and whose descendants still own it today.

• From behind the desk in her spacious office, Parthasarathy faced a portrait of her late father, Srinivasan Parthasarathy—one of Kasturi Ranga Iyengar’s four grandsons

• This July, Parthasarathy tweeted that she had “the privilege of calling on Prime Minister @narendramodi” for “an illuminating conversation in which he shared his perspective on issues of current public interest.”

• N Ram, Parthasarathy’s second cousin and predecessor as chairperson, felt compelled to tell the public that he had nothing to do with the meeting.

• Much of that position owes to The Hindu’s identification as a bastion of liberal and secular thought, but recent indications are that the fortress is embattled both from outside and within.

• Many also said that the opposition to Modi and the Sangh’s Hindutva ideology that permeated The Hindu’s work until not so long ago is increasingly at odds with the sympathies of its core readers, many of them Brahmins.

• By the accounts of The Hindu’s own leadership, the reliance on government ads was especially acute as private advertising dried up during the pandemic-induced lockdowns. Recent years have seen losses and shrinking revenues, and newsroom conflicts and downsizing have led to plenty of bitter departures.

• The Kasturi family has proven itself an unusual class of proprietors. Generations have been intimate with not just the business of publishing but also the work of journalism, unlike other clans in charge of India’s many family-owned publications.

• The family’s generational tenure also translates to an unusual distribution of control. The four main branches of the Kasturi clan, sprung from the grandsons of the original patriarch, each have roughly a quarter of the shares of Kasturi and Sons Limited, a holding company controlling all of the publishing house’s interests. The Hindu Group, a subsidiary, is governed by a board comprising 12 directors, all but one of them from the family.

• Where other newspapers are typically under more consolidated direction, here power is contested between shape-shifting family factions and alliances.

• The newspaper’s editorial tenor is subject to the board’s prevailing politics at any given time.

• The official described three broad ideological partitions within the family and the board: one stream hewed to the left, another has largely adopted liberal positions and a third is sympathetic to ring-wing causes.

• But Parthasarathy drew two hard lines. First, she said, “We cannot be anti-Hindu culture. It’s not our tradition.” Second, “Anything that is against basic democratic values, The Hindu will never support.”

• The Hindu’s contemporary rivals were the British-owned Madras Times and Madras Mail.

• Anglo-Indian (British-owned) newspapers in Madras criticised in unfair and unflattering terms the appointment of Mr (later Sir) T Muthuswami Aiyer as judge of the Madras High Court

• Writing as “A Dravidian Correspondent”—a hint at a non-Brahmin identity—a columnist in the Madras Mail opposed Iyer’s elevation on the grounds that a Brahmin was “the least fitted of all castes to deal with the masses … since he considered himself as a god and all others Mlecchas,” or outcastes.

• In 1905, the newspaper was purchased by two lawyers: Kasturi Ranga Iyengar, its erstwhile legal adviser, and C Sankaran Nair, an aristocratic Malayali rising rapidly up the legal profession under British rule.

• There is an obvious irony to a newspaper that claims the values of liberalism and secular nationalism in a country as diverse as India calling itself The Hindu.

• The Hindu’s most ardent readers have historically come from the top rather than bottom of Hinduism’s iniquitous social hierarchy.

• The writer and intellectual SV Rajadurai told us that EV Ramasamy, the Dravidian icon widely known as Periyar, frequently described The Hindu and the Tamil weekly Swadesamitran, also founded by Subramania Iyer, as “fountains of poison.”

• When the social reformer Muthulakshmi Reddy, backed by Dravidian forces, called for an end to the devadasi system, “that was directly and indirectly opposed by The Hindu,” Veeramani said.

• Veeramani is also the editor of the Tamil daily Viduthalai, which has its own history with The Hindu.

• Kasturi Ranga Iyengar stood firmly in Gandhi’s corner, and this was one reason he and Nair parted ways.

• The Dravidian movement had hit a relative lull around Independence, but Periyar remained on the front lines. In 1956, he spoke at a public meeting in Trichinopoly in defence of the local district collector, a non-Brahmin who had settled a wage dispute between a wealthy landlord and local peasants in favour of the latter. When the matter had landed in the Madras High Court, the judges, both of them Iyengars, chastised the collector, stating that the government should seriously consider “whether an officer of such totalitarian views and disregard of law should continue to be entrusted with the duties of maintaining law and order in any locality in this state.” Periyar took exception, and earned himself a notice for contempt of court. In his response, he questioned whether the court had ever reprimanded a Brahmin in the same way. He also pointed to an editorial in The Hindu in support of the judges’ ruling: “That The Hindu, which usually never criticised the authorities for their wrongful acts should suddenly devote an editorial and harsh criticism to an unremarkable ruling concerning an administrative order, and that the editor is, of course, a Brahmin, makes one think that that they are in on the conspiracy too.”

• Periyar remained at the head of the Dravidar Kazhagam, but a new force had also emerged: the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam. This was led by CN Annadurai, earlier a follower of Periyar, who formed his own breakaway party in 1949 after a falling-out.

• In 1937, the first Congress chief minister of Madras Presidency, C Rajagopalachari, had mandated that schools in the province teach Hindi. Periyar and the Justice Party reacted furiously, and British authorities later rolled the policy back.

• At Independence, the Constituent Assembly contentiously agreed to make Hindi the country’s sole official language, with a 15-year stay to ease implementation. As the expiry of the stay approached, revolts broke out.

• In the 1967 elections, the Congress lost Madras State to the DMK—part of a wave of legislative-assembly defeats that ended its post-Independence monopoly on power. Annadurai took over as chief minister of Madras State and saw it renamed Tamil Nadu—“Tamil country,” with the language at the centre of its identity. The state has never had a Congress government again.

• D RAVIKUMAR gave us a copy of Dalits in Dravidian Land: Frontline Reports on Anti-Dalit Violence in Tamil Nadu, 1995-2004. Released by the anti-caste imprint Navayana, which Ravikumar co-founded, the book compiles stories by the reporter S Viswanathan published in Frontline, the Hindu Group’s fortnightly. Ravikumar praised The Hindu and described Frontline as “the only magazine which supported Dalit castes.”

• Ravikumar, a writer-turned-politician who is now in the Lok Sabha, is a member of the Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi—formerly known as the Dalit Panthers of India.

• “Atrocities don’t happen in isolation. They won’t attack Hinduism, they will be in praise of Hinduism.”

• Pandian pointed out that The Hindu’s publishing arm has released numerous books glorifying Hindu culture.

• For a while, around the turn of the millennium, The Hindu’s opinion pages regularly gave space to anti-caste intellectuals such as Gail Omvedt, MSS Pandian and Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd.

• A 2019 column on the Bhagwat Gita read: “Like the waters of the sacred Ganga that have the power to purify the sins of those who have a dip in it, study of the Gita has the sanctifying power to cleanse one of the dirt of samsara itself.”

• Their ideas drew backlash from many of The Hindu’s readers. A letter to the editor in response to Shepherd’s piece described it as “an anti-Brahmin lecture”

• “For all the posturing that The Hindu has always done on its national and edit pages, its local bureaus across the country are full of Brahmin Sanghis,” Sudipto Mondal, a former reporter for the newspaper, said.

• Mondal told us he faced resistance when he attempted stories critical of caste practices. As an example, he described his efforts to cover the Karnataka coast’s traditional Kambala events—annual buffalo races sponsored by upper-caste landlords. The races involve Dalits running on the track before the buffaloes have their turn. In the olden days, Mondal said, this was because the landlords would try to sabotage each other’s racing animal, sometimes scattering sharp objects on the ground. People from oppressed castes were used to make sure the track was safe. Today, district administrations that organise the events continue to bring in Dalit runners to race barefoot before the buffaloes.

• Another journalist who spent many years with The Hindu told us, “For the years that I was there, I could never do the stories that I really got into journalism to do as a Dalit.”

• In 2014, the newspaper’s human-resources department issued a notice to staff at the Chennai office. It said that several employees had complained about colleagues bringing meat to the canteen, which served only vegetarian food

• Annadurai died of a chronic illness weeks after changing the state’s name from Madras to Tamil Nadu, in 1969. With Periyar also nearing the end of his life, custody of the Dravidian project passed to M Karunanidhi.

• Karunanidhi also pursued greater autonomy for Tamil Nadu within the republic’s federal framework. This put him on a collision course with the Congress government in Delhi, by then under the steadily more authoritarian control of Indira Gandhi. When Indira declared the Emergency, in 1975, the DMK was defiant. Karunanidhi’s government was forcibly dissolved.

• Even with civil liberties suspended and censorship in force, a few publications dared to protest Indira’s despotism. The Hindu was not one of them.

• The Emergency government also merged four standalone news agencies into Samachar, a unified news agency under its control. G Kasturi was appointed its head.

• With the return of democracy, in the 1977 election, the DMK was defeated by the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam. The AIADMK had earlier broken away from the DMK after a clash between Karunanidhi and its leader, MG Ramachandran. MGR, as he was known, had ingratiated himself with the Congress, backing the Emergency wholeheartedly. He continued with a Dravidian programme, albeit of a less strident variety than that of the DMK.

• In 1986, Rajiv’s government entered into a deal with a Swedish arms manufacturer, Bofors AB, for the purchase of field guns for the Indian army. The following year, Swedish radio broke the story that Bofors had paid massive bribes as part of the deal. Rajiv denied everything.

• Uncharacteristically, going against its sleepy reputation at the time, The Hindu added fuel to the scandal, publishing a series of incriminating documents.

• “We began our investigation in 1987 and by April 1988 our stringer in Geneva Chitra Subramaniam struck gold with a lead,” N Ram said in an interview years later.

• At a press conference in Delhi, an aggrieved Ram announced that just as the second part of the investigation was to be published, “Mr Kasturi insisted to me that no more material should be published in the columns of The Hindu.”

• With the opposition making the most of the Bofors scandal, Rajiv’s government was voted out in 1989. The new prime minister, VP Singh of the Janata Dal, moved to implement the recommendations of the Mandal commission, set up by the Janata Party government of a decade ago. This proposed to guarantee for the Other Backward Classes—caste groups identified to be lagging in their social development—just over a quarter of jobs and educational opportunities in central-government institutions.

• The newspaper agreed that “the traditional gap between the privileged and the underprivileged should be narrowed,” but felt the report “has not cared, as it should have done, to give due consideration to the economic criterion in determining who should constitute a backward class.”

• Singh’s announcement of the move cued a wave of vandalism and violence by anti-reservation protesters. The protests were backed somewhat discreetly by the Hindu Right and less discreetly by the Congress. When Singh faced a vote of no confidence, Rajiv, as the leader of the opposition, warned parliament of a “caste war” and appealed to the members of the house “not to remain idle, not to remain quiet and save this nation from the obstinacy of one person.” Singh lost the vote and resigned.

• The newspaper also echoed its earlier editorial on another point: “Any regime of reservation presupposes and carries with it a certain dilution of merit.”

• By mid 1991, after Rajiv was assassinated by a member of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, a depleted Congress was back in power at the head of a minority government, with PV Narasimha Rao as prime minister. At The Hindu, N Ravi was now the editor and Malini Parthasarathy was rising up the editorial ranks, with significant influence over the paper’s affairs.

• WHILE RAJIV GANDHI was in power and toying with the Babri dispute, The Hindu did not take a critical line against his government for it. Hindutva groups had had designs on the mosque site for decades, but it was Rajiv who allowed them to perform a consecration there, in 1989, in defiance of a court order. This was a calculated move to appease Hindu sentiment, a balm for the anger over his concessions to conservative Muslim demands as he tried to mobilise disparate communal interests behind him.

• The editorial denouncing the demolition, declaring that it marked “a dark day for India,” seemed to announce a sharper voice for The Hindu under its new editorial leadership.

• The end of Rao’s term brought with it a time of churn, with several coalition governments falling in succession. Through this, the dominant political theme was the rise of the BJP, culminating in Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s six-year rule from 1998 to 2004.

• A few weeks after the pogroms began, The Hindu ran an editorial titled “Ban the VHP and Bajrang Dal.” It said that the VHP “went on an unchecked minority-specific killing spree in Gujarat under the pretext of ‘retaliation’ for the Godhra carnage.”

• Parthasarathy herself urged Gujaratis to “reject the poisoned chalice.”

• After MGR’s death, Tamil Nadu settled into a habit of alternating between the DMK and the AIADMK at every election. It was the AIADMK’s turn in 2001, with MGR’s successor, J Jayalalithaa, at the head of the party. With a burgeoning reputation as an autocrat and a bully of the press, Jayalalithaa began to find some of The Hindu’s coverage objectionable, and the paper was hit by a series of defamation cases after the AIADMK took power.

• Among The Hindu’s editorials after the carnage in Gujarat was one titled “Mr Modi Must Go,” which accused Modi of “grave dereliction of Constitutional duties” and argued that Gujarat’s “administration as also the political establishment in office have turned into instruments of terror and persecution.” This, Ananth said, was one of the pieces that Kasturi found “not in The Hindu’s mould—in other words, it was too sharp and forthright.”

• For Kasturi, Ananth told us, it was not a question of being pro-Congress or pro-BJP—“he was going to be friendly with whoever was ruling.”

• “I am a centrist, really,” Parthasarathy said. “I have been very leftist myself in the beginning,” she added, looking back on when she was young. “Do I look like a right-winger?”

• Under Indira Gandhi, the Indian government had begun providing covert support to Tamil insurgents seeking an independent homeland in northern Sri Lanka. This followed anti-Tamil pogroms on the island that triggered outrage in India and especially in Tamil Nadu, where Sri Lankan Tamil groups had forged political connections. As the conflict escalated and became a full-blown civil war, Ram secured privileged access to the head of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, Velupillai Prabhakaran. In 1986, he interviewed Prabhakaran for The Hindu, allowing the LTTE leader to put across his view of the situation in Sri Lanka.

• In 1987, Rajiv and the Sri Lankan president, JR Jayewardene, signed a peace accord designed to end the war. This promised greater autonomy to rebel provinces in return for the insurgents agreeing to surrender arms, with an Indian peace-keeping force sent in to watch over the deal. The diplomat JN Dixit, who was privy to the proceedings, writes in his book Assignment Colombo that Ram was an intermediary in bringing Prabhakaran to the negotiating table, even as the rest of the media was kept in the dark.

• In 2005, Ram received the Sri Lanka Rathna, the country’s highest official honour for foreigners. He forged close ties to Mahinda Rajapaksa, who became the president of Sri Lanka that year. In 2019, while Ram was chairman of The Hindu Group, Rajapaksa was invited to the Hindu Huddle, an event organised by the publishing group in Bengaluru, where the two had a genial public chat.

• After Prabhakaran was killed in the final offensive, Ram published a piece in The Guardian comparing the LTTE leader with Pol Pot, the infamous revolutionary who instituted the Cambodian genocide.

• The magazine carried perspectives of various hues but “the editorial position of Frontline has been left, quite clearly,” Athreya told us. “N Ram had a great deal to do with that.”

• In 2007, the Indian and US governments concluded the terms an agreement, under Section 123 of the US Atomic Energy Act, that recognised India as a nuclear power and ended decades of restrictions on its ability to trade in nuclear materials and technology. But Manmohan Singh faced domestic opposition to the deal, including from the Left Front parties supporting his coalition government, which felt that it was not in the national interest. The future of what became known as the US–India Civil Nuclear Agreement was only secured after Singh narrowly survived a vote of no confidence, with the Left parties voting against him.

• The journalist Sanjaya Baru later chronicled the drama in The Accidental Prime Minister, his account of his time working as Singh’s media advisor. Baru recorded how Ram was supportive of the agreement at first and published an editorial in The Hindu titled “A Sound and Honourable 123.”

• Ram met Karat after the breakfast and came back to Baru with bad news. “You have to tell the PM that he should put the deal on hold,” Baru quoted him as saying.

• After that, Baru wrote, “The hypocrisy of the Left was exposed by the somersault Ram had to perform on the editorial pages of The Hindu.

• Since at least the turn of the millennium, The Hindu and Frontline had faced objections over their coverage of security issues, especially their readiness to propagate the often unverified accounts put out by official sources. After Ram took over at the newspaper, such criticism only intensified.

• In Frontline, under Ram, the reporter Praveen Swami described Magray as “a Hizbul Mujahideen operative active on the organisation’s wireless network with the code name Zamrood” and praised “the best interrogators from the ruthlessly efficient Jammu and Kashmir Police Special Operations Group.” Swami also reported minute details of Magray’s role in the attack.

• It was later revealed that the five supposed attackers had been innocent villagers abducted and killed by the army and the Special Operations Group. The Central Bureau of Investigation, after conducting a probe, stated in a charge sheet that army personnel “hatched a criminal conspiracy to pick up some innocent persons and stage-manage an encounter to create an impression that the militants responsible for the Chittisinghpora killings had been neutralised.”

• In 2008, in what came to be known as the Batla House encounter, the police killed two students of Jamia Millia Islamia, a historic university in Delhi. The Special Cell claimed that the two were terrorists. The Jamia Teachers’ Solidarity Association, formed after the incident, challenged the Special Cell’s version, pointing out multiple inconsistencies and lapses. The JTSA also documented how media coverage had unquestioningly followed the official narrative. The work of Praveen Swami in The Hindu figured prominently in its efforts.

• In a response to criticism of his Batla House coverage, published in The Hindu, Swami quoted from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass: “I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” Several journalists who worked at The Hindu told us Swami was favoured by Ram—one person described him as Ram’s “blue-eyed boy.”

• In 2014, the JTSA published a study of 24 cases from between 1991 and 2008 where the Special Cell had arrested people with alleged links to terror organisations, accusing them of crimes with severe penalties that included the death penalty. Except for one case where these were partially upheld, the courts eventually overturned the convictions in all the cases, but only after the accused had spent years in prison. The study, which cited numerous examples from The Hindu, argued, “Almost without exception, the media has acted as ‘faithful stenographers’ of the police; not only presuming the guilty to be innocent but also failing to follow cases where innocence is established.”

• In November 2010, the magazine Open began publishing the Radia tapes—leaked recordings of the lobbyist Niira Radia in conversation with a range of politicians and journalists to push the interests of her clients, which included high-profile politicians and corporations. This was a huge embarrassment for Indian journalism, and many mainstream news channels and newspapers blacked out the story.

• There were more eyebrows raised over The Hindu’s handling of what it called “The India Cables”—classified US diplomatic communications made available to it by WikiLeaks. This was around the early summer of 2011, as several states went to assembly elections. Indian Journalism Review, a media-criticism blog, observed that The Hindu ran a story in between phases of voting in West Bengal about a cable that that reflected poorly on the Trinamool Congress—a bitter rival of the CPI(M) in the state.

• Mondal made it a point to quickly get to the spot every time these vigilante attacks took place and his reports on them became a regular feature in The Hindu. Staff at the Mangaluru bureau soon began to object, Mondal said, and he was asked why he was only writing negative stories about their region.

• Afterwards, Mondal said, he was challenged by his superiors at the Mangaluru bureau to show his call records and prove that the Bengaluru office had called him and not the other way round. This was an especially sensitive point within the newspaper, where the editorial hierarchy was historically strict and almost sacrosanct.

• On another occasion, Mondal wanted to pursue a story on an Air India Express flight that overshot the runway on landing in Mangaluru, killing 158 people. “I had discovered some very interesting technical details about why the crash had happened,” he told us. Ram had asked for another story on the catastrophe, and in a response email Mondal also pitched his idea. Three senior colleagues pulled him up for this. Mondal recalled that they told him, “How can you reply directly on that mail? You are writing directly to N Ram. Who the hell do you think you are?”

• Raja, the minister of communication and information technology between 2007 and 2010, was under investigation for alleged procedural irregularities and favouritism that shaved massive sums from public revenues. While other media outlets tripped over each other to bring out new exposés, The Hindu secured two exclusive interviews with Raja himself. Raja was spared the toughest questions on both occasions and was instead given the opportunity to exonerate himself.

• Earlier that year, N Ravi had also sent a letter to The Hindu’s employees. It stated, “Very recently, those of us who were not privy to the deal making learnt to our shock that a major interview with A. Raja in defence of the telecom licensing policy … involved a direct quid pro quo in the form of a full page, colour advertisement from the Telecom Ministry that was specially and hurriedly cleared by the Minister personally for publication on the same day in The Hindu.”

• Besides the handling of the 2G scandal, Murali also pointed to another incident. Sanjiv Bhatt, a former police officer who served in Gujarat during the 2002 pogroms, had recently filed an affidavit before the Supreme Court alleging that a special investigation team formed to probe the violence had disregarded evidence of the complicity of the state government under Narendra Modi. Bhatt also submitted a series of emails indicating that S Gurumurthy, a Hindutva ideologue with links to the BJP, had obtained confidential reports on the SIT investigation and shared them with Ram, along with his own notes on them. Gurumurthy’s email to Ram asked him to read the note and “understand the issues before you talk to the person concerned.”

• In 2010, the company had hired the consulting firm McKinsey, reportedly to help set professional norms for the functioning of the board as well as business and editorial operations. In the wake of this, Ram and his supporters on the board suggested the appointment of a new editor, Siddharth Varadarajan, then the chief of The Hindu’s national bureau. In mid 2011, Varadarajan became the first person from outside the family to hold the role in the newspaper’s history. The board voted him in by a narrow majority, and the discontents quit.

• Murali wrote, “Any claim of professionalisation in the appointment of Siddharth Varadarajan as Editor of The Hindu is a sham as professionally qualified and experienced family members on the editorial side—N Ravi, editor, Malini Parthasarathy, executive editor and Nirmala Lakshman, joint editor—have been selectively targeted for removal.”

• ON 1 JANUARY 2012, The Hindu’s Delhi edition carried a full first-page advertisement by H Vasanthakumar, a Congress leader and businessman from Tamil Nadu. The ad was a tribute to the Congress president, Sonia Gandhi—“We remain, Madamji, ever at your feet,” it read. The cost of a regular jacket ad in the Delhi edition at the time was reportedly Rs 9 lakh.

• Several journalists who worked at The Hindu under Varadarajan told us that his arrival meant a palpable change in the order of the newsroom. “Anybody could approach Siddharth with a story and if it was good he would publish it,” one former reporter said. “He would give direct feedback and encouraged us, which never happened before.”

• The newspaper was heavily criticised for carrying the ad, and Varadarajan felt the need to voice his view. “To all those who messaged me about the atrocious front page ad in The Hindu’s Delhi edition on Jan 1, my view as Editor is that this sort of crass commercialisation compromises the image and reputation of my newspaper,” Varadarajan said. “We are putting in place a policy to ensure the front page is not used for this sort of an ad again.”

• Soon after Varadarajan took over, Praveen Swami was made a resident editor in Delhi. In April 2012, as cases related to the Batla House encounter were being heard in a Delhi court, The Hindu published a story questioning discrepancies in the phone records submitted by the police for one of the men who had been gunned down.

• As his executive editor, Varadarajan brought in MK Venu, a long-time Delhi journalist.

• Ram asked to meet Mondal’s source. Mondal said he protested but eventually agreed, and the source went through the whole story to clear up any doubts. The final draft of the story was completed, but there was no sign of it in print. Mondal said Varadarajan apologised to him, remarking that the incident was demoralising for a reporter.

• Mondal had a theory for one of the reasons the story was buried. “The judiciary, don’t forget, is part of the same pillars of Brahmin democracy in India that N Ram is part of,” he said. “Judges and senior lawyers have always been part of the op-ed pages of The Hindu. They provide the social support for the institution’s survival.”

• They started calling him ‘Varaatharajan,’ which means Rajan who doesn’t come to office”—in reference to Varadarajan’s frequent appearances at conferences and panels. This group was opposed to the changes that the new editor was introducing. “The other group was the CPM lobby because he is a liberal and not someone with the party line.” One of this group’s complaints was that Varadarajan, a US citizen, was bringing in American culture.

• Subramanian Swamy, a politician with the Janata Party who would soon join the BJP, raised an official complaint that a foreigner should not be allowed to edit an Indian newspaper, and took the matter to court.

• How The Hindu approached Modi, who was then cementing his position as the BJP’s favoured son, was to become a major question of Varadarajan’s tenure.

• Inside the venue, Modi delivered a speech typical of his style. “The youth of the nation has its finger on the mouse of computers and is changing the world,” one memorable line went.

• Meanwhile, outside, a large group of students protested against him, with black flags and placards that called Modi a killer or told him to go back.

• “For seventy-five minutes, nearly two thousand college students were left spellbound by the oratory of Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi,” India Today reported, adding that the students had discovered a new word: “Modi-vational.”

• Reports in The Hindu did not share the same enthusiasm. The paper carried two reports on the event: one on the manhandling of protesters and another foregrounding the BJP’s increased focus on Modi.

• “No mention of Modi in The Hindu on front page,” the journalist Rajdeep Sardesai wrote on Twitter. “First lead in TOI and Hindustan Times. Newspaper polarisation?” Varadarajan replied, “We refuse to be part of the herd. Every story on our p1”—front page—“was far more newsworthy than a speech by a CM to a Delhi college.”

• Some months later, Uttarakhand was hit by disastrous floods, and Modi made highly publicised efforts at aid. The Times of India reported that Modi, over a two-day visit to the state, had “managed to bring home some 15,000 stranded Gujarati pilgrims” using a fleet of vans and buses and four Boeing jets. This account was picked apart, and a follow-up story in The Hindu reported that the ludicrous figure had been fed to the Times of India reporter by a BJP spokesperson in the presence of the party’s state president. The story was carried on the newspaper’s front page.

• Within a month of this, in October 2013, Varadarajan took to Twitter to announce his resignation.

• Speaking on Varadarajan’s exit, N Ravi told the media that the “news desk was given standing instructions not to take any stories on Narendra Modi on page one. The Hindu has always been anti-Hindutva, but it was always kept out of our news judgement.”

• Varadarajan refuted this. He told the magazine Tehelka that his rule for Modi, Sonia Gandhi and other politicians was: “front page in the local edition, elsewhere only if newsworthy.”

• The alliances on the board had shifted. Ram, Ravi and Parthasarathy were now acting in concert. Ravi was given the post of editor-in-chief and Parthasarathy returned as the executive editor. The changes that saw Varadarajan elevated to the editorship had included the appointment of a CEO from outside the family, Arun Ananth. Now, he left the company as well. Varadarajan said the owners had decided to again make The Hindu “a family run and edited newspaper.”

• He also addressed Subramanian Swamy’s challenge to his position as the editor. Varadarajan said Swamy “was exercised not by my citizenship but by my refusal to print news stories about every statement and speech he used to make.” A member of the board even asked him to give Swamy the attention he craved, Varadarajan added, but he refused and Swamy filed his case in court. Ram had defended Varadarajan’s legal right to hold the editorship.

• The month after Varadarajan left, the prime-ministerial hopeful faced a scandal over leaked telephone conversations. The recordings, from 2009, had Modi’s closest lieutenant, Amit Shah, ordering the illegal surveillance of a young woman using government resources in Gujarat at the behest of “Saheb”—possibly Modi himself. The scholars Usha M Rodrigues and Maya Ranganathan later observed that the story, which “made it to the front page of all newspapers, was missing in The Hindu, which led to speculation that the newspaper was under political pressure to cover Modi favourably.”

• The Times of India launched a Chennai edition in 2008. This was part of a wider push by the Mumbai-headquartered giant into the south, The Hindu’s home ground, and more editions followed in other cities. By 2011, the two contestants were waging battle via television advertisements.

• The newspaper industry, like the rest of the economy, was feeling the after-effects of the 2008 global financial crisis. The Hindu had tried to branch out into the television business, as the publishers of the Times of India had done, but saw its efforts fail. In 2009, in partnership with New Delhi Television, it launched NDTV Hindu, a Chennai-focussed English-language channel. After two years, it was sold to the Dina Thanthi group, publisher of a major Tamil daily.

• “The problem is the Tamil newspaper had to react to the attacks and backlashes faced by the English newspaper.” For over a century, he said, “The Hindu as well as the Tamil Brahmin society were possessing a Congress kind of mindset towards the idea of India and its rulers.” After Modi’s election in 2014, “a strong conflict emerged in this,” and for The Hindu “it was truly a challenge.”

• A senior editor at The Hindu told us that critical coverage of Modi upset the paper’s traditional Tamil Brahmin readers—something echoed by a reporter who worked at the paper at the start of the Modi years.

• In a legal petition filed amid the boardroom battles of 2010, Murali and his supporters noted, “The company is taking care of the welfare of the members of the four families, like pension to the wives of the former directors, funding for the education of the children abroad, foreign travel for the directors at the expense of the company, etc.”

• In 2014, the Supreme Court upheld the recommendations of the Majithia wage boards, which had earlier set out binding conditions of service for media workers. At Kasturi and Sons, where the vast majority of employees fell under the wage board’s purview, this meant an increase in outlay on staff remuneration that pushed the company into losses. The company introduced an alternative contractual system of employment and has since prodded journalists towards it.

• The company has continued to cut its employee numbers since. During the COVID-19 pandemic, it first announced wage cuts and then mass layoffs.

• By 2019, before the pandemic, the Times of India had an advantage on The Hindu’s readership numbers in Chennai. Official filings show that the Hindu Group has seen tumbling revenues and significant losses in recent years. It posted a loss of Rs 55.5 crore for 2020–21—its third straight loss-making fiscal year. Its latest revenues have fallen to just under Rs 550 crore—less than half of what they were just three years earlier.

• Parthasarathy told us that advertising accounts for more than sixty percent of the newspaper’s revenues.

• In 2019, the Modi government cut off advertisements to The Hindu and two other newspapers. Critics said this was a deliberate move to punish these publications for stories the government did not approve of—an accusation that the government denied. A senior official of the Hindu Group told us that advertising definitely came down around this time.

• He said that incomes from government advertising were cyclical, depending on “the schemes of the government” and “the mix of central versus state government.” But, he added, “I can’t remember a time when government ads would be less than ten percent of revenues.”

• He explained that incomes from government and non-government ads had never been significantly different, but 2020 could be an aberration. During the peak of the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, he said, “when businesses were shut, government was the only active advertiser. So the ratios that way, last year, could get skewed.”

• After Ravi and Parthasarathy took charge, there were swift changes in The Hindu’s functioning.

• The staffer said it felt like The Hindu was out to shake off its staid image as “the newspaper for UPSC aspirants”

• The new regime did not sit well with some of the old guard, and a wave of veterans walked out. Joseph, for instance, replaced Praveen Swami, who continued to cover strategic affairs in the wake of Varadarajan’s departure only to quit less than a year later. P Sainath, The Hindu’s decorated rural-affairs editor, was another high-profile departure.

• Numerous journalists who worked under Parthasarathy told us they struggled with her style of management. Several pointed to the departure of Rahul Pandita, the opinion editor, who left with a letter to Parthasarathy: I am bogged down with this hourly need to consult you, and with the practice of selecting articles on the basis of whether you’ve been addressed as “Malini” or “Ma’am” in the covering letters.

• Perhaps the boldest move Parthasarathy made as editor was to take the fight to the Times of India in its own home territory of Mumbai. In November 2015, The Hindu launched a dedicated edition in the city. With this, Parthasarathy wrote in a note to readers, “The Hindu has fulfilled its historical destiny as India’s National Newspaper.”

• “Initially, for six or seven months, the bureau was functioning well,” a former journalist with The Hindu told us about the Mumbai edition. “But after then the reporters and editors felt abandoned.” The edition was shut down in June 2020 and the bureau dissolved.

• Once, he said, “The Hindu was known for empathetic reporting on Muslims, Dalits, Adivasis and farmers, even when it was done in a patronising manner,” but “this started changing slowly. One by one, these communities started going out of its circle of sympathy with the onslaught of corporate culture and Hindutva.”

• In April 2018, the New Republic, a US magazine, published an investigation into the Indian business interests of Donald Trump, the US president, including collaborations with individuals closely linked to the BJP. The story stated that it was produced in collaboration with reporters at The Hindu, and that the investigation had uncovered possible bribery, fraud, illegal land deals, tax evasion and money-laundering. No part of the investigation appeared in The Hindu.

• Several journalists told us that the newspaper had started being very cautious with certain terminology by this time. “They did not like it when we referred to the government as a Hindu nationalist government, but wanted to just stay Indian government or the BJP government,” a former reporter at the paper told us. Another found the term “Hindu mob” changed to “miscreants” in his stories on violence by Hindutva groups.

• AROUND THE TIME Padmanabhan stepped down, The Hindu ran a series of reports by N Ram on the Modi government’s controversial purchase of Rafale fighter jets from France. These covered many details reported earlier by independent outlets but that India’s legacy media had scrupulously ignored—for instance, how the government had waived anti-corruption clauses and bank guarantees, how Modi had held parallel negotiations that undermined his government’s own negotiating team and how the prime minister’s decisions had dramatically escalated the cost of each aircraft.

• The reports of the government’s freeze on advertising in The Hindu followed in June, soon after Modi won re-election. Parthasarathy had her “warm and illuminating” conversation with the prime minister the following month. That November, the Supreme Court dismissed petitions calling for an investigation into the Rafale deal. Parthasarathy tweeted to welcome the judgment

• In the newspaper’s Puducherry edition, one former employee said, “every Auroville story will be the lead story, no matter how mundane the story is.” Desk editors faced frustration “because N Ram will call them and yell at them for giving this coverage. But if they don’t, Malini will go on a different tangent.” Parthasarathy is a former member of the governing board of Auroville—a “universal town” on the edge of Puducherry founded by a self-styled guru in the 1960s.

• In 2019, The Hindu published a story on how schoolchildren in Karnataka were unhappy with the bland food being served as their free midday meal. The food came from the Akshay Patra Foundation, tied to the Hare Krishna movement, which refused to use onions or garlic in preparing it—a dietary restriction steeped in caste practice and superstition

• The story caused a small storm on social media. Some right-wing handles lashed out against what they saw as an attack on a Hindu spiritual organisation and Hindu values. Parthasarathy tweeted, “I agree the attack on Akshaya Patra was unwarranted.” She blamed Suresh Nambath, the paper’s current editor, for his selection of news content

• “IF YOU HAVE to understand the transformation of India under Modi, you have to understand the behaviour of Indian newspapers,” Mohammad Ali told us. “Especially institutions like The Hindu, which were the last bastions of the liberal—or rather left-liberal—kind of thinking.” With Modi’s rise, Ali said, “organisations like The Hindu have become nothing if not the enablers of the Modi regime in a variety of ways.”

• Modi and Mohan Bhagwat, the head of the RSS, came together in August 2020 for a religious ceremony to break ground for the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya. Afterwards, Hebbar published a story titled “The VHP monks who led the mandir movement.”

• Of late, the RSS and its affiliates have amplified Hindu claims to two other Muslim religious sites: the Shahi Eidgah in Mathura and the Gyanvapi Masjid in Varanasi. Now that the Ram Mandir was rising in Ayodhya, Hebbar wondered, will the VHP “create the same social energy in its call for ‘liberating’ Kashi and Mathura?”

• “Everything must be backed by facts, there must be rigour in analysis,” Parthasarathy explained. “Even blind data journalism, without a focus on why the data is being produced, I don’t like that kind of thing—do only COVID death, only COVID suffering, it looks like bias. And you don’t know what is the recovery rate.”