'A little less than two years after it brought in professionals from outside the family to head the editorial and business wings of the company, Kasturi & Sons Limited (KSL), the publishers of The Hindu daily, carried out drastic changes on Monday in the leadership structure by bringing in family members at the helm of affairs and easing out the editor and the company's CEO.
The KSL board of directors appointed N Ravi as the editor-in-chief of The Hindu, replacingSiddharth Varadarajan, who took over from N Ram in January last year. N Ram will now be the chairman of the board, and Malini Parthasarathy, who left the paper as its executive editor in 2011 and now heads The Hindu Centre for Politics and Public Policy, is back as The Hindu editor.
Monday's board meeting also decided to abolish the post of CEO, which was held by Arun Anant since it was created around the last revamp. Anant's new role is yet to be defined.
In what appears a sharp indictment of Varadarajan and Anant, a statement signed by N Ram (who had brought in these two), said: "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." He added that the effort was to restore employee morale, good industrial relations, and the trust of the newspaper's readers.
Varadarajan, who was redesignated as the contributing editor and senior columnist, has submitted his resignation. Asked about alleged violations of policy under his stewardship, he told TOI, "If indeed policies or editorial values were flouted, the solution would have been to get another professional editor. The fact that the owners have come back into editorial itself provides the answer to your question."
He added, "Of course, there were occasional instances of editorialising that slipped in, just as they did when Mr Ram or Mr Ravi edited The Hindu earlier. But I fear this is merely an excuse to reverse the earlier decision to professionalise the newspaper."
Asked if the board was unhappy with his periodic absence from the newspaper's headquarters, Chennai, he said, "As editor, the lion's share of my time was spent in Chennai, where I put in 12-hour days; except for two brief holidays in Kerala and Sri Lanka, any travel was almost exclusively linked to my job as editor of a national paper which has more than a dozen editions. Even then, there was not a single Chennai edition front page that I did not personally decide on, even when I was out of the country."
When contacted, Arun Anant declined to comment on the development.
Ravi, the current editor-in-chief, had resigned as the paper's editor in July 2011, along with other family members Malini Parthasarathy and Nirmala Lakshman, who was the joint editor, after Ram insisted on "separation of ownership from management on the editorial as well as the business side." Varadarajan took over as editor on January 10, 2012 after Ram, who held the post for eight years. That marked the conclusion of a series of debates within the family since 2009, starting with the appointment of N Balaji as the managing director of Kasturi & Sons.
On April 20, 2011, about three months before his exit, Ravi, in a bitter letter to The Hindu employees, said Ram and some of the directors at the meeting of the board two days earlier had sought to remove him and appoint Siddharth Varadarajan. He called it a "shocking display of bad faith that has left me deeply anguished" and that they were entering "the second, and what might turn out to be a prolonged, phase of conflict and turbulence in the institution."
(Source: Hindu reinstates family members at helm of affairs, The Times of India, Oct. 22, 2013)
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