HT@100 | India’s conscience keeper

The Hindustan Times turning 100, turns my memories. And thoughts, emotions.

As I set some of them down here, I urge the reader to bear with these subjective departures from the standard mode of Forewords.

In the year 1945, when HT was only twenty-one years old, among the first sounds my infant ears heard was the roar, no less, of the rotary machines that printed The Hindustan Times. These came from two floors beneath where we lived — the capacious home above newspaper’s premises in New Delhi’s Connaught Circus of its Managing Editor, Devadas Gandhi (1900-1957), my father. And when a year and a bit later, I felt a tremor under my feet’s early steps, it was not one of the many temblors that regularly rattle up the national Capital of India, but the shaking of the site on which the building stood as bales of imported newsprint were rolled down from lorries by labourers standing on them and moving them off with massive thuds accompanying each roll-down.

Today, that roar and that tremor hold, for me, metaphors for a newspaper’s strength and impact. If its ‘comments are free and its facts sacred’ (C.P. Scott’s celebrated line, and a favourite with Devadas Gandhi), its word can reverberate beyond the decibel of its original sound. And if its grounding in accuracy is firm, the seismicity of its findings can shake flawed constructs to their foundations. No newspaper can claim immunity from errors, or an unbroken run of editorial stature. But that said, it is a fact that The Hindustan Times has been among the tallest opinion-makers in ‘the street of ink’ —a phrase coined by one of HT’s ace journalists, K. Iswar Dutt.

The sitting room of this apartment was, every morning, for a brief hour, over the two decades and more that Devadas Gandhi guided the newspaper, its nerve-centre. He would meet his senior colleagues there every morning, my mother Lakshmi serving the group idlis and coffee. In the late 1940s, this group included some of the finest minds in the world of India’s English journalism, like K. Santhanam (1895-1980), M. Chalapathi Rao (1908-1983), who wrote a column for it under the enticing title ‘Off the Record’, boldly using the pseudonym ‘Magnus’, which (perhaps only he knew) meant, in Latin, ‘Great’, Durga Das (1900-1974), M. Subramaniam, who having spent many years in Lahore, wrote a column ambitiously titled ‘Inside Pakistan’, the nationalist G.V. Krupanidhi (1896-1970), all of them to be joined in the 1950s, by the nimble-minded S. Mulgaokar (1911-1993), and a very young and brainy economist, V. Balasubramanian (d.1999). As this group discussed the events of the time, settled on editorial policy, decided on who would write what and how, I would sneak a peek into the makings of the newspaper’s day.

There were, to be sure, other ‘big’ newspapers appearing at the same time, but The Hindustan Times had a certain heritage status as a nationalist newspaper which held in its columns the voltage of the freedom struggle and the propulsions of the new Republic’s constitutional ethics. This meant that it had not the faintest trace of bias as to communities, castes or vested interests. Its owner since the mid-1930s, the late Ghanshyam Das Birla’s was far too sensitive an intellect to influence the newspaper’s policy. He knew that the mature proprietor of a newspaper owns its material assets, not its intellectual resources. Those are best left to its editorial team to harness to good account.

The paper, ever since its early years under the historian K.M. Panikkar’s editorship, acquired a name for calibrated outspokenness, nowhere more trenchantly than after the infamous ‘Direct Action Day’ unleashed on August 15, 1946 by the All India Muslim League. During the course of that tragic event, Calcutta was mutilated by riots. HT, in its August 17, 1946 issue, carried a lead editorial, castigating the Bengal’s Muslim League Premier H.S. Suhrawardy and Governor Frederick Burrows. Using adjectives that newspapers today would think twice before inking, it said of Governor Burrows: “He could not have been ignorant of the League preparations for a violent demonstration which had been going on in the city for many weeks. He knew the way the mind of the neurotic Premier was working…Yet, not only did he fail to take any preventive action, he fiddled for two nights and a day while the largest city in the country burned.”

This Foreword is not about Devadas Gandhi but about the newspapaer he was privileged and excitedly happy to edit for close on two decades. And so, I will move to the post-Devadas Gandhi era.

All said and printed, a newspaper is ultimately judged by the quality of its reportage. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru died in May 1964. The then High Commissioner of Australia in Delhi, Walter Crocker writes in his biography of the great man: “A little before noon (on that day), an earthquake shook Delhi.” This little cameo intrigued me or, I may say, the cautiously superstitious in me, and years later, I looked for corroboration and found it — in The Hindustan Times’ report which gave the time of the jolt as 11.44 a.m. and said, “Screaming men, women and children rushed out of their houses for safety. Stampedes were caused at many places along the funeral route as lakhs of people who had lined the route felt the shock. The tremor was felt strongly in the Prime Minister’s House.”

That a newspaper can cause a different kind of tremor to be felt in the Prime Minister’s house was shown in 1966, by another ‘weapon’ in its arsenal, the cartoon. A front page cartoon by the gifted Rajinder Puri in The Hindustan Times of January 20, 1966, had Morarji Desai with 32% of the MP votes standing taller than all the others — five party satraps standing shiveringly one on top of the other each shorter than Morarji, with the winner — Indira — standing at the very top, but shorter by herself than the loser — Morarji. Her victory, the cartoon suggested, was a victory of sorts. Homi Bhabha’s death in an air crash on the day of Indira Gandhi’s swearing in was carried by HT as the first story. Indira Gandhi took second place. That was The Hindustan Times’ editor, S. Mulgaokar, at work. Mulgaokar had his dislikes, V.K. Krishna Menon being top among them. There was a groundswell of demand, I now believe, rather unfairly, for the then Defence Minister’s ouster post-the 1962 military losses at China’s hand. It could not have been resisted. But it was Mulgaokar’s sharp and unrelenting crusade against the minister that gave the demand its knock-out punch.

The Hindustan Times has always known it has a reputation to keep — or lose. And it has chosen to value the first knowledge. As long as it knows that speaking does not mean barking, criticising does not mean carping, that support should not become abject for when it does, the supporter becomes a very different and smaller being, it will retain its aura. As long as it knows that both government and the opposition are human formations capable of great deeds and great follies, also that society, the public, can also become impassioned to an extent that its actions ‘overflow the cup’, it will remain an exemplar. Its role, over the decades, has been to counsel, to correct and to caution. This it cannot yield. There have always been those who would want HT to bellow in criticism of the powers-that-be, just as there have been those who would want it to soften its voice to a whisper. It has, wisely, opted to do neither and keep its options to its own reflective judgment. A newspaper must reflect all views, objectively but make and state its own views on its own terms.

The Hindustan Times has known hard times and good times, challenges to its integrity and its autonomy. It has known, like all similar establishments, what it means to have to re-boot its very life-wires in the wake of the pandemic that started in 2020 and is nowhere near having disappeared. And more, what it means to shift to new technological processes that bewilder even as they overwhelm. But ‘something’ in its DNA has kept its ink flow clean, its nib write clear. This capacity it will need more and more in the imponderables of our as-yet-mysterious times of change in which the true and the false, the real and its impersonator are becoming indistinguishable. Worse, when the ‘perfect imitation’ is admired more than its original for it is said to have no flaws, no defects.

May this centenary retrospective of The Hindustan Times’ history stir its organic intelligence for the life that lies ahead in the age of Artificial Intelligence.

Gopalkrishna Gandhi is the former Governor of West Bengal and the grandson of Mahatma Gandhi