Infighting within ‘The Hindu’ resurfaces with its two distinguished journalists, Malini Parthasarathy and Narasimhan Ram coming face to face yet again, this time over Rafale. Parthasarathy, who heads the content and editorial strategy at the Hindu took to twitter to welcome the apex court’s decision dismissing the review petitions.
https://twitter.com/MaliniP/status/1194928690452238337?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
She hailed PM Modi and said the integrity of the Prime Minister is unimpeachable and unquestionable as regards the Rafale issue. Malini in her tweet said that the controversy surrounding the Rafale deal, which the Congress and its chattels had devised to target the government, be put to rest after today’s judgement gave a clean chit to Modi.
This is in stark contrast to her colleague N Ram, former managing director and editor-in-chief, who claims exclusive rights to lofty ideals of professional journalism.
During the run-up to 2019 general elections, he had shared cropped and incomplete pictures of documents in the Hindu to allege government wrongdoing in the Rafale deal. Narasimhan Ram, a prominent member of the Kasturi family that owns The Hindu group, wrote a shoddy article in The Hindu about the Rafale deal which the Congress had been trying and failing, to discredit. In that article, he had shamelessly taken the work of a defence journalist called Manu Pubby and not only passed it off as his own but also presented a skewed version of his reportage.
Nevertheless, by now, readers are quite familiar with this emulous passive-aggressive stance, taken by the two senior folks at the Hindu. Similar discord amongst the two was witnessed over an Akshaya Patra article in the month of June this year. That time too, Malini had reiterated her commitment as director, editorial strategy, at The Hindu, to promote fact-based, value-driven and agenda-free journalism. She added in her response to N Ram’s tweet that The Hindu’s article on APF was an example of shoddy, one-sided journalism.