Shobhana Bhartia’s Hindustan Times
The Caravan
December 01, 2018
Atul Dev
{ONE} SHOBHANA BHARTIA CULTIVATES an
image of herself in the mould of Katharine Graham. She has brought up her
connection to Graham in multiple interviews and public appearances—at an event
in 2015, she spoke of “a very deep engagement and a personal bond with Mrs
Graham”—and reporters inclined towards stenography have played up the parallels
between the two.
Bhartia, as the chairperson and editorial
director of HT Media, is the publisher of the Hindustan Times—the third
most-read English-language newspaper in India, and the most-read one in the
country’s capital. Graham was the publisher of the Washington Post, in the
US capital, in the 1960s and 1970s. Both inherited control of their newspapers
from their families—Graham from her husband; Bhartia from her father, the
industrialist KK Birla. As women in positions of power, both count as pioneers
in societies and media industries dominated by men, and both had to struggle
hard to establish themselves. Graham was a stellar networker, on close terms
with much of the political elite of the United States in her day. Bhartia,
similarly skilled, is deeply embedded in the parallel constituency in
present-day India.
Graham took decisions to publish stories that are
now monuments of journalism, including the Washington Post’s exposés on
the Pentagon Papers, which detailed official lies about the United States’
involvement in the Vietnam War, and the paper’s revelations about the Watergate
investigation, which cut short the presidency of Richard Nixon. Both stories
came at great cost to Graham’s personal relationships with her country’s
political elite. The Hindustan Times has published nothing remotely
comparable under Bhartia.
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