Siddharth Varadarajan


Siddharth Varadarajan is an Indian American journalist, editor and academic. He was a former editor of the Indian English language national daily The Hindu, and is one of the founding editors of the Indian digital news portal The Wire.

Early life, education and activism

Siddharth Varadarajan was born to an IAS officer, Muthusamy Varadarajan, and Usha, a housewife-turned-businesswoman. He did his initial schooling at La Martiniere in Lucknow and Mayo College, Ajmer.
In 1978, he shifted to England and joined the Brockley County state school, when his father was sent on a diplomatic posting to the Indian High Commission in London. Siddharth later enrolled for an undergraduate degree in economics at the London School of Economics and went on to pursue his Masters and PhD from Columbia University.
During his days in England, he was heavily involved with left-activism, which would eventually leave a deep influence on his journalistic career. Even in America, he strove for ensuring justice to the victims of the 1984 massacres and other riots, and the Bhopal Gas Tragedy. It was also during his days at Columbia, that he met his future wife - Nandini Sundar.

Career

Media

Times of India

In 1995, Vardarajan returned to India to work as a journalist, before joining The Times of India as an editorial writer in 1995.

The Hindu

In 2004, he joined The Hindu, India's second largest English-language newspaper, as Strategic Affairs editor, before going on to succeed Harish Khare as the Chief of National Bureau.
In May 2011, Varadarajan was appointed as The Hindus editor via an extraordinary general meeting called by the BoD; he was the first editor to have been not drawn from the family of primary shareholders in its 150-year history.
On 21 October 2013, Varadarajan publicly announced his resignation from The Hindu, citing a change in policy by the owners of the newspaper to go back to being a family-run-and-edited newspaper.
During Vardarajan's tenure as the editor, Bharatiya Janata Party leader Subramanian Swamy filed a case in Delhi's High Court challenging his appointment as editor on the grounds that Varadarajan was not an Indian citizen, and further complained to the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India. The petition was ultimately denied by the Delhi High Court. Varadarajan later claimed in an interview to Tehelka that Swamy had demanded more coverage in The Hindu of his statements through an intermediary, and that the court case was a mode of exacting revenge after Vardarajan rebuffed Swami.

The Wire

In 2015, Varadarajan along with Sidharth Bhatia and M. K. Venu founded the non-profit online news portal called The Wire; he continues as the Editor-in-Chief.

Academic positions

In 2007, Varadarajan was a visiting professor at the Graduate School of Journalism, University of California, Berkeley. In 2009, he was a Poynter Fellow at Yale University.

Other affiliations

Varadarajan is a member of the International Founding Committee of The Real News, and was, until 2015, a board member of the inter-governmental B.P. Koirala India-Nepal Foundation.
Until 2015, he was also a member of the Executive Council of the Maulana Abul Kalam Azad Institute of Asian Studies, and a member of the Indian Council of World Affairs. He continues as a member of the editorial board of India Quarterly: A Journal of International Affairs. and in 2019, joined the International Advisory Council of the Sydney-based Judith Neilson Institute of Journalism and Ideas.

Reception

Awards

In November 2005, the United Nations Correspondents Association awarded Varadarajan the Elizabeth Neuffer Memorial Prize Silver Medal for Print Journalism for a series of articles, Persian Puzzle on Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency. In March 2006, he was awarded the Bernardo O'Higgins Order by the President of Chile—that country's highest civilian honor for a foreign citizen—for his contributions to journalism and to the promotion of India's relations with Latin America and Chile.
In July 2010, he received the Ramnath Goenka award for Journalist of the Year. He received the 2017 Shorenstein Journalism Award for outstanding reporting and for significant contributions to promoting freedom of the press in the Asia-Pacific region.
In May 2020, he is among 17 journalists from across the world recipients for the Germany based prestigious Deutsche Welle Freedom of Speech Award. The Freedom of Speech Award 2020 is for all courageous journalists worldwide who are suffering repressions because of their reporting on the pandemic.

FIR

On 1st April 2020, Vadarajan tweeted and claimed that Uttar Pradesh CM Yogi Adityanath had insisted that Ram Navami fair will be held as usual and attributed a false quote to him amidst the coronavirus pandemic in India. Later, he had clarified that quote was not of Yogi Adityanath. Then two FIRs were lodged against him in Faizabad under sections 505 and 188 of the Indian Penal Code and under section 66D of the Information Technology Act, 2000. The founding editors of The Wire described the incident as politically motivated.

Personal life

Varadarajan is married to Nandini Sundar, a sociologist and anthropologist and Professor of Sociology at the Delhi School of Economics.

Books