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N. Ram takes dig at Malini Parthasarathy for meeting PM Modi, gets rebuked

July 24, 2021
The Commune

After the Chairperson of the Hindu Publishing Group, Malini Parthasarathy met with Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday (July 22), fissures have developed between her and N Ram, the director of the group, who has now distanced himself from the meeting.

All this started after Parthasarathy posted a tweet in which she said, “Had the privilege of calling on Prime Minister today & had an illuminating conversation in which he shared his perspective on issues of current public interest,”. This tweet evidently did not go well with N Ram who always had contempt and disdain for the current administration. 

When a Twitter user asked N Ram why Parthasarathy is squandering away the reputation of this newspaper, responding to the tweet, he said, “I have nothing to do with this. What I can assure you is that we will do our very best to prevent The Hindu’s “hard-earned” reputation and legacy of 142+ years “being squandered away”.

However, Parthasarathy responded to the former editor-in-chief of the Hindu newspaper and tweeted that,”Our 142+ years of hard-earned reputation was built by reporting that was factual & not driven by political prejudice or bias. We @the_hindu are determined to restore the honesty & credibility of our reporting & commentary. This is the only way forward to revive our great legacy,”.

It appears that the faultlines between the top executives of The Hindu started after Malini Parthasarathy called for accepting the Supreme Court verdict on the Rafale fighter deal which N Ram continues to peddle the lie which is also the view of the main opposition party, the Indian National Congress.

Perhaps what really drove the wedge between them is when Parthasarathy personally believes that the integrity of Prime Minister Narendra Modi is unimpeachable and unquestionable as regards the Rafale issue.

This is contrary to N Ram’s post-truth school of journalism where his newspaper published cropped and incomplete pictures of documents on the Rafale deal during the run-up to the 2019 general elections.

Both top honchos of the newspaper had also publicly argued over an article published by The Hindu when it criticised the Akshay Patra Foundation which provides meals for children. The issue was the absence of onion garlic in those free meals provided to school students by the foundation and the news that was published was children were not finding them delicious.

However, the article received wide criticism on social media, Malini Parthasarathy distanced herself by claiming she does not handle day-to-day news content and called the attack on Akshay Patra unwarranted and called the Akshaya Patra story as an example of shoddy journalism.

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