Hindustan Times

• 1. Introduction

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  Hindustan Times was born in Delhi not as a commercial venture, but as a weapon. Its founder, Sunder Singh Lyallpuri, was the driving force behind the Akali movement and the Shiromani Akali Dal, and he intended the paper to serve the cause of Indian independence. The first issue rolled off the presses in Naya Bazar, Delhi, on a street that now carries the name Swami Sharda Nand Marg. C. F. Andrews and Cattamanchi Ramalinga Reddy were among the writers whose words filled those earliest pages. Mahatma Gandhi himself performed the opening ceremony on the 26th of September 1924.

  What followed was nearly a century of financial crises, ownership battles, and editorial controversies that shaped one of India's largest daily newspapers. How a paper born of Sikh nationalist politics passed through the hands of some of the subcontinent's most famous families is a story that reveals as much about modern India as about journalism itself.

• 2. Founding and Early Struggles

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  Madan Mohan Malaviya sat on the paper's Managing Committee from the very beginning, alongside Tara Singh. S Mangal Singh Gill and S. Chanchal Singh of Jandiala in Jalandhar were placed in charge of operations, with Master Sunder Singh Lyallpuri serving as Managing Chairman and Chief Patron.

  Funding the paper proved immediately difficult. According to Prem Shankar Jha, who wrote an official history of the newspaper in 1999, much of the early money came from Sikhs living in Canada. When those funds ran thin, the Akalis turned to two figures from the broader nationalist movement: Motilal Nehru and Madan Mohan Malaviya. It was Malaviya who ultimately stepped in to buy the paper, and doing so required him to take out a loan of Rs. 40,000, which he secured with the help of Lala Lajpat Rai.

  K. M. Panikkar, known also as Sardar Panikkar, took the editor's chair under Malaviya's stewardship. Panikkar was an Oxonian, a historian, and a literary figure who set out to make Hindustan Times something broader than a vehicle for Akali politics. Despite his efforts, the print order never climbed above 3,000 copies in his two years at the helm. The Akali movement was losing momentum, and money dried up again. G. D. Birla stepped in to underwrite expenses and eventually assumed full ownership of the paper.

• 3. Gandhi's Editors

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  In 1928, Gandhi personally chose K. M. Panikkar as editor. That decision signalled how closely the Mahatma's circle remained tied to the paper's direction. Later, his son Devdas Gandhi was brought onto the editors' panel and eventually appointed editor in his own right.

  The paper faced serious legal jeopardy during the independence struggle, including the Hindustan Times Contempt Case, which ran from August to November 1941 at the Allahabad High Court. The episode underscored the political heat the paper was willing to endure. Sri Mulgaonkar, B. G. Verghese, and Khushwant Singh all held editorial positions at different points across the paper's history, giving it a roster of editors whose names are woven through Indian public life.

• 4. The Birla Family's Control

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  Shobhana Bhartia is the daughter of industrialist Krishna Kumar Birla and the granddaughter of Ghanshyam Das Birla. When she joined Hindustan Times in 1986, she became the first female chief executive of a national newspaper in India. She has since been nominated to the Rajya Sabha as a member of the Congress Party.

  HT Media Limited sits inside a layered corporate structure: it is a subsidiary of The Hindustan Times Limited, which is itself a subsidiary of Earthstone Holding (Two) Limited. The KK Birla Group holds a 69 percent stake in HT Media, a holding valued at 834 crore rupees. Along with the flagship newspaper, the media group controls Mint, an English business daily; Hindustan, a Hindi daily; Nandan, a monthly children's magazine; and Kadambani, a monthly literary magazine. The group also owns Fever 104.0 FM radio, the education company Studymate, Desimartini, and Hindustan Times Telugu.

• 5. Scale and Reach

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  With a circulation of 993,645 copies according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, Hindustan Times sits among the largest newspapers in India by raw print numbers. The Indian Readership Survey of 2014 placed it as the second-most widely read English newspaper in the country, behind only The Times of India.

  The paper's strength is concentrated in North India, with simultaneous editions published from New Delhi, Mumbai, Lucknow, Patna, Chandigarh, and Ranchi. The Mumbai edition launched on the 14th of July 2005, and a Kolkata edition appeared in early 2000. The paper also tried footprints in Nagpur and Jaipur: Nagpur was discontinued in September 1997, and Jaipur followed in June 2006. In 2004, the group launched HT Next, a youth-focused daily. The annual Luxury Conference the group organises has featured designer Diane von Furstenberg, shoemaker Christian Louboutin, Gucci CEO Robert Polet, and Cartier MD Patrick Normand.

• 6. Editorial Independence Under Pressure

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  Sanjoy Narayan served as editor in chief from 2008 to 2016. After the Line of Control strike in September 2016, pressure on the paper became visible in public. Shobhana Bhartia reportedly received calls from the Prime Minister's office and from Amit Shah at that time.

  Editor Bobby Ghosh had launched the Hate Tracker, a crowd-sourced database on the Hindustan Times website that recorded hate crimes in India. Ghosh left the paper abruptly shortly afterward. The Wire reported that he was asked to leave after Bhartia met Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The paper's general counsel Dinesh Mittal rejected that account and stated that Ghosh departed for personal reasons.

  In 2017, Frontline magazine published a report alleging that Hindustan Times editor Shishir Gupta had colluded with the government after releasing emails to Amit Shah. Hindustan Times rejected the collusion claim, saying the emails were a request for comment. That same year, The Indian Express reported that Hindustan Times Limited was linked to an offshore entity called Go4i.com, on whose director list both Bhartia and her son Priyavat appeared. Measured against its Brand Trust Report rankings, which moved from 2971st in 2012 to 434th in 2013 to 360th in 2014, the paper's public standing had risen steadily even as these controversies gathered.