Five directors quit editorial posts after ‘outsider’ Varadarajan was appointed editor-in-chief.
For the first time in its 133-year-old history, The Hindu will be led an editor of a foreign nationality. Siddharth Varadarajan, an American and national bureau chief of The Hindu, has been appointed the new editor-in-chief of the daily by the board of directors of Kasturi and Sons, the owners of the newspaper.
Varadarajan will also be the first editor of the paper who does not belong to the newspaper’s founding family.
Following Varadarajan’s appointment, five directors of The Hindu put in their papers: the editor N Ravi, senior managing director N Murali, executive editor Malini Parthasarathy, senior editor Nirmala Lakshmanan and Nalini Krishnan. All five are members of the newspaper’s founding family and have quit in protest of the appointment.
Chennaites, who begin their day with a cup of “steaming kaappi” and a copy of the The Hindu, were in for a shock on Thursday when the family feud was out in the open after a letter written by executive editor Malini Parthasarathy to the board of directors was widely circulated.
“Strong family jealousies and prejudice intervened to pull away all my editorial responsibilities, reflecting in an extremely personal and vindictive hate campaign against me. Editor-in-chief N Ram and a cabal tried every trick in the book to discredit my work for The Hindu,” she wrote.
“In bringing in Siddharth Varadarajan, an outsider with no familiarity with The Hindu’s rich editorial inheritance and no particular institutional loyalty, in the guise of “professionalising and contemporising”, what is sought to be done is to eliminate qualified successors from the family,” the letter further stated.
Though N Ravi remained unavailable, sources close to him blamed N Ram for troubles in The Hindu family. “It seems Ram is being manipulated by outside elements with some vested interests, I don’t think he will do all these things on his own,” said a family member who did not want to be identified.
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