Siddharth Varadarajan

In 1995, Vardarajan returned to India to work as a journalist, before joining The Times of India as an editorial writer in 1995.[2]

In 2004, he joined The Hindu, India's second largest English-language newspaper, as Strategic Affairs editor, before going on to succeed Harish Khare as the Chief of National Bureau.

In May 2011, Varadarajan was appointed as The Hindu's editor via an extraordinary general meeting called by the BoD; he was the first editor to have been not drawn from the family of primary shareholders in its 150-year history.[4]

On 21 October 2013, Varadarajan publicly announced his resignation from The Hindu, citing a change in policy by the owners of the newspaper to go back to being a family-run-and-edited newspaper.[5]

During Vardarajan's tenure as the editor, Bharatiya Janata Party leader Subramanian Swamy filed a case in Delhi's High Court challenging his appointment as editor on the grounds that Varadarajan was not an Indian citizen, and further complained to the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India.[6][7][8] The petition was ultimately denied by the Delhi High Court.[9] Varadarajan later claimed in an interview to Tehelka that Swamy had demanded more coverage in The Hindu of his statements through an intermediary, and that the court case was a mode of exacting revenge after Vardarajan rebuffed Swami.[10]

In 2015, Varadarajan along with Sidharth Bhatia and M. K. Venu founded the non-profit online news portal called The Wire;[11] he continues as the Editor-in-Chief.

In 2007, Varadarajan was a visiting professor at the Graduate School of Journalism, University of California, Berkeley.[12] In 2009, he was a Poynter Fellow at Yale University.[13][14]

Varadarajan is a member of the International Founding Committee of The Real News,[15] and was, until 2015, a board member of the inter-governmental B.P. Koirala India-Nepal Foundation.[16]

Until 2015, he was also a member of the Executive Council of the Maulana Abul Kalam Azad Institute of Asian Studies,[17] and a member of the Indian Council of World Affairs. He continues as a member of the editorial board of India Quarterly: A Journal of International Affairs.[18] and in 2019, joined the International Advisory Council of the Sydney-based Judith Neilson Institute of Journalism and Ideas.[19]

In November 2005, the United Nations Correspondents Association awarded Varadarajan the Elizabeth Neuffer Memorial Prize Silver Medal for Print Journalism for a series of articles, Persian Puzzle on Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency.[20] In March 2006, he was awarded the Bernardo O'Higgins Order by the President of Chile—that country's highest civilian honor for a foreign citizen—for his contributions to journalism and to the promotion of India's relations with Latin America and Chile.[21]

In July 2010, he received the Ramnath Goenka award for Journalist of the Year (Print).[22] He received the 2017 Shorenstein Journalism Award for outstanding reporting and for significant contributions to promoting freedom of the press in the Asia-Pacific region.[23]

In May 2020, he is among 17 journalists from across the world recipients for the Germany based prestigious Deutsche Welle Freedom of Speech Award.[24][25] The Freedom of Speech Award 2020 is for all courageous journalists worldwide who are suffering repressions because of their reporting on the pandemic.[26]

On 1 April 2020, Vadarajan tweeted and claimed that Uttar Pradesh CM Yogi Adityanath had insisted that Ram Navami fair will be held as usual and attributed a false quote to him amidst the coronavirus pandemic in India.[27] Later, he had clarified that quote was not of Yogi Adityanath. Then two FIRs were lodged against him in Faizabad under sections 505(2) and 188 of the Indian Penal Code and under section 66D of the Information Technology Act, 2000.[28] The founding editors of The Wire described the incident as politically motivated.[29]

On 13 April 2020, a group of over 200 journalists has condemned the FIR filed against Vadarajan by the Uttar Pradesh police.[30]

• Gujarat The Making of a Tragedy. Penguin. 2003. ISBN 978-0143029014.
• Nonalignment 2.0: A Foreign and Strategic Policy for India in the 21st Century. Penguin. 2014. ISBN 978-0670086986.

• Varadarajan, Siddharth (12 January 2015). "A year of living aspirationally". 2014: The Year that Was. Outlook. 55 (1): 120–124. Retrieved 7 January 2016.
• "Global threats and India's quest for strategic space" in Great Powers and Strategic Stability in the 21st Century (Ed: Graeme Herd) ISBN 978-0-415-56054-2