Tribune Editor Harish Khare Puts in His Papers. Departure comes weeks after Aadhaar exposé that embarrassed Modi government
Harish Khare,
editor-in-chief of The Tribune, the independent, Chandigarh-based
newspaper known for punching above its weight on the national media scene, is
on his way out, The Wire has learned.
Word of his departure
comes weeks after The Tribune‘s exposé of a security flaw in the Aadhaar database
that allowed middlemen to access key personal information about all those
enrolled in the government’s ‘voluntary’ universal ID scheme database. The
story won Khare and his team plaudits from privacy advocates and the media
fraternity but also led to the filing of criminal charges against the reporter, Rachna
Khaira, as the UIDAI scrambled to limit the damage.
The FIR filed was not
the only form of offensive intervention the newspaper attracted in the
aftermath of the story. The Tribune‘s exposé, which came bang in the middle of the
Supreme Court’s hearings on the privacy and security aspects of Aadhaar, proved
deeply embarrassing to the Modi government. The Wire has
learned that the government’s unhappiness at the story – and Khare’s editorial
leadership of the newspaper – was made known to members of the trust which owns
and runs The Tribune.
The trust is currently
headed by N.N. Vohra, governor of Jammu and Kashmir. Vohra took charge after
the former head, Justice S.S. Sodhi quit in the face of a revolt within the staff at the
manner in which he forced The Tribune to publish an apology to a senior Akali politician,
Bikram Singh Majithia, for running a series of stories on his alleged
involvement in the drug trade in the state. The apology was carried, but when
Khare and the employees’ union pushed back, Sodhi resigned and was replaced by
Vohra as president of the trust.
Khare took charge of
the newspaper in June 2015 on a three-year contract but is believed to have
submitted his resignation earlier this week. Though he stated no
reasons, sources in the newspaper told The Wire that the
interventionism of the trustees in the face of growing pressure from the
government on the Aadhaar story and other issues had likely prompted Khare to
bow out.
He has reportedly
offered to serve out the rest of his three-year term so that trustees have time
to search for a replacement. The trust, however, has indicated that he leave
immediately.
A highly regarded
editor and scholar with a PhD in political science from Yale University, Khare
had been resident editor of The Hindu in Delhi and the
newspaper’s political editor for many years when he was made media adviser to
the then prime minister, Manmohan Singh, in 2009. Prior to joining The
Hindu, he had worked at the Hindustan Times and the Times
of India, where he had been resident editor of its Ahmedabad edition.
Khare resigned as
Manmohan Singh’s media adviser in 2012 to return to research and writing before
being being tapped by The Tribune trustees in 2015. Under his leadership,
the newspaper, long known for a certain middle-of-the-road stodginess, acquired
an energy and edge that was reflected in the stories it broke and the sharp
commentary it ran. Khare’s own writings
were often unsparing of the government and its political leadership, including
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, BJP president Amit Shah and national security
adviser Ajit Doval.
Rumours began
circulating from 2017 itself that the ruling establishment in Delhi was looking
for a way to effect ‘regime change’ in the newspaper. However, the structure of
the institution – the trust has no parallel businesses and does not hold events
where it lobbies for ministers to attend – made it less vulnerable to the usual
forms of pressure. Khare’s departure is
likely to fuel growing anxieties about the state of the media in India. The previous few
months have seen the resignation or ouster of several editors who ran their
newspapers or channels or television shows with a high degree of independence
and who kept their distance from the NDA-led Narendra Modi government.
The list includes
Bobby Ghosh, who quit as editor of the Hindustan Times last year, Bharat Bhushan of
Catch News, Karan Thapar, whose critically acclaimed ‘To the Point’ show on
Indian Today TV was not renewed, Paranjoy Guha Thakurta from the Economic
and Political Weekly, Krishna Prasad and (the late) Neelabh Misra
from Outlook and Outlook Hindi, and now Harish
Khare from The Tribune. R. Jagannathan quit
FirstPost soon after he was forced by the website’s owners to take down a
column he had written that was critical of Arun Jaitley. Praveen Swami, one of
India’s most respected national security editors, quit the Indian
Express in the wake of the newspaper’s reluctance to run a story on
the Kulbhushan Jadhav case. Last month, Angshukanta Chakraborty, an editor with
DailyO, the online portal run by the India Today group, was sacked for refusing to delete a tweet that was
critical of media houses that promote fake news.
