Independent Media in Modi’s India with Dr. Siddharth Varadarajan

At a time when democracies face an onslaught from authoritarianism, we wonder — where on Earth is the world’s largest? Dr. Siddharth Varadarajan has raised the alarm on the decay of democratic liberties in India before many in his time. As the former editor of The Hindu, and the founding editor of The Wire, which has become one of the few fully independent media outlets operating in the ‘new India,’ he is situated at the frontlines of the largest battlefield fought by democrats today.

In conversation with Abeer Dahiya BA/BS ‘22, he shares how to hold a government accountable in an ecosystem where conventional media fails to do so, and how Stanford students can contribute to independent media in their home countries to uphold transparency.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Siddharth Varadarajan is a Founding Editor of The Wire and senior fellow at the Centre for Public Affairs and Critical Theory, New Delhi. Previously, he was the Editor of The Hindu. An economist by training, he studied at the London School of Economics and Columbia University and taught at New York University before returning to India to work as a journalist. He has been a visiting lecturer at the journalism school at the University of California, Berkeley and a Poynter Fellow at Yale University.

This event is co-sponsored by the Center for South Asia and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law.