Who are we reading?
Week Three: Hindustan Times
If Ramnath Goenka was the big name behind The Indian Express, the one behind the Hindustan Times is Shobhana Bhartia. The first ever woman chief executive of a national newspaper, she was on the Forbes Most Powerful Women list in 2016 and is currently also the pro-chancellor of BITS Pilani (the very institute where the student body managed to successfully abolish curfews for the women’s hostel without a single public protest). Daughter of K.K. Birla, Shobhana Bhartia is linked to more than half the big time industrialists in India today. Her son Shamit Bhartia owns Jubilant Foodworks — the company that runs both Dunkin Donuts and the entire Domino’s Pizza franchise in India. What’s more, this guy is married to the granddaughter of Ambani himself. And it doesn’t end there. Shobhana Bhartia’s sister Jyotsana is married to Saroj Poddar who brought Gillette razors to the Indian market for the very first time. In fact, she has so many connections that I think I’ll have to save the rest for another piece altogether.
Moving on from the newspaper’s industrial connections to its political ones. If you’ve already read the post on the Indian Express, the name K.K. Birla should ring a bell. Yes, he was one of the men Indira Gandhi appointed to that board of directors she wanted to replace Goenka with. No surprise then, that K.K. Birla was a very pro-Congress man and given that it is his company that owns Hindustan Times, the paper’s leaning is a fairly easy guess. The clearest example of this bias is one that involves B.G. Verghese.
Former information advisor to Indira Gandhi (he used to write her speeches and all), B.G. Verghese was editor of the Hindustan Times when India plunged into Emergency. Highly critical of her policies, he wrote an editorial titled “Kanchenjunga here we come”, that attacked her decision to annex Sikkim and for this, he was fired from his post. He then promptly joined the Indian Express under Ramnath Goenka (whose biography he later wrote). Verghese, who died in 2014, was known for his development journalism and won the Ramon Magsaysay award in 1975.
Returning to the paper, its leaning remains pro-Congress today, since Shobhana Bhartia too, is a Congress member and Rajya Sabha MP.
However, it wasn’t always a Congress paper. Founded in 1924, the Hindustan Times was actually created by the Akali movement in Punjab. The Shiromani Akali Dal party that was once it’s backbone, recently suffered a humiliating defeat in February, ending 10 years of its rule. The Congress was the party that won. Newspapers in the past were known for their ability to influence election results and I wonder if today, they still do.
In 1924, K.M. Panikkar was the man in charge, but in two years he barely managed to get the newspaper beyond a circulation of 3,ooo copies. Soon, Madan Mohan Malaviya—Congress member, freedom fighter and founder of Banaras Hindu University—bought it over, supported by G.D. Birla who took full control in 1933.
Now enough of history.
In college, during our Journalism lab hours when we’re asked to recreate newspaper layouts, the one paper we all fight over is the Mint. It’s quite simply one of the most well designed papers of the lot and compared to the clutter and chaos of the TOI, is really pleasant to look at. Being taller and wider than a tabloid, yet narrower than a broadsheet, it’s the first newspaper in India to be produced in what’s known as the Berliner format. Fun fact: it’s owned by HT Media and was actually seen as a challenge to The Economic Times (owned by TOI) when it was founded in 2007, by Raju Narisetti—present CEO of Gizmodo. The current editor of Mint is Sukumar Ranganathan, alumni of BITS Pilani.
Clearly HT Media and TOI hate each other, maybe ever more than The Hindu and TOI do. In fact, they compete with everything, not just dailies and business newspapers but also radio stations! Team HT Media has Fever104, while team TOI has Radio Mirchi.
Today the Hindustan Times is second to TOI according to the Indian Readership Survey, and this success is often credited to its previous editor Sanjoy Narayan who recently stepped down from his post in 2016. The one who replaced him is a guy named Bobby Ghosh who has worked abroad with Quartz and the TIMES, before returning to India. This is going to sound really judgemental but I just can’t take him seriously because seeing his pictures always reminds me of those rude CEO villains who talk with an NRI accent and yell at their parents in Hindi movies.
Some of it’s regular columnists include Barkha Dutt, Karan Thapar, Manu Joseph, Rajdeep Sardesai and Ramachandra Guha.
FURTHER READING:
