'The Hindu' family drama's outcome; Varadarajan quits as Editor-In-Chief

In a surprising development, that becomes the climax of the boardroom drama of Kasturi & Sons Ltd (KSL) owners of The Hindu; the Editor – in Chief of the English daily, Siddharth Varadarajan called it quits as he announced his resignation from the newspaper on Twitter. Varadarajan served for two years after he took over the mandate from N Ram as the first professional editor of The Hindu in 135 year old history of the publication. This was the outcome of an unusual general meeting where the shareholders of KSL had voted to designate him this mandate. Prior to his appointment, The Hindu’s editors were drawn from the family of the company’s owners.
Varadarajan had joined The Hindu as deputy editor. He worked as The Hindu’s Chief of National Bureau. On completing his degree in economics at the London School of Economics and Columbia University, USA, he taught at New York University for several years before joining The Times of India as an editorial writer in 1995.

Announcing his decision Varadarajan twitted: “With The Hindu’s owners deciding to revert to being a family run and edited newspaper, I am resigning from The Hindu with immediate effect.”

According to sources close to the development, following the patch-up of KSL’s family members, the decision to bring back editorial control within family had been taken. Hence, Varadarajan, along with other non-family editors that were brought on board earlier have fallen prey to this family saga. 
“The decision to make deep-going changes was made chiefly on the ground that there were recurrent violations and defiance of the framework of the institution’s longstanding values on the business side, and recurrent violations and defiance of ‘Living Our Values’, the mandatory Code of Editorial Values, applicable to The Hindu. The whole effort is to restore employee morale, good industrial relations, and the trust of this newspaper’s more than two million readers”, said the statement issued by N. Ram, The Hindu’s former editor, a family and a forerunner in the dispute scene with N. Ravi and Malini Parthasarathy. The statement also maintained that the current editorial arrangements for Business Line, Frontline, Sportstar, and The Hindu (Tamil) will continue unchanged and the process of professionalisation, now involving a mix of shareholder-Directors and other professionals, will continue as well.

Following the alteration in the editorial and management teams, role of Editor-in-Chief will be bestowed onto N Ravi while Malini Parthasarathy has been appointed Editor of The Hindu. While on the other hand, N Ram would remain Director of Kasturi and Sons Ltd and continue as Chairman and Publisher, N Murali would be the Co-chairman. Interestingly, Arun Anant is no longer Chief Executive Officer of Kasturi & Sons Ltd.