Who's behind the news?
Who's behind the news?
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Newsjunkie.net is a resource guide for journalists. We show who's behind the news, and provide tools to help navigate the modern business of information.
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Founding Editor, The Wire · Former Editor, The Hindu · Journalist and Economist
New Delhi, India
The Wire (Founding Editor)
The Hindu (Editor 2011–2013)
Times of India (former)
New York University (former Economics Faculty)
UC Berkeley Journalism (Lecturer)
Shiv Nadar University (Senior Fellow)
Poynter Media Fellow, Yale
Siddharth Varadarajan (born 1965) is an Indian-American journalist, editor, economist, and one of the central figures in independent digital journalism in India. He is the founding editor of The Wire, launched on 11 May 2015 alongside co-founders Sidharth Bhatia and M. K. Venu, and described by the International Press Institute as "an unflinching defender of independent, high-quality journalism." Before The Wire, Varadarajan served as editor of The Hindu — one of India's oldest and most respected national newspapers — becoming in 2011 the first editor in the paper's 150-year history to be drawn from outside its founding family. His career spans academic economics, war correspondence, nuclear affairs reporting, and some of the most contested journalism in contemporary India. His phone was confirmed by Amnesty International's Security Lab to have been targeted with Pegasus spyware. He is married to Nandini Sundar, a sociologist, anthropologist, and professor of sociology at the Delhi School of Economics.
Varadarajan was born to an IAS (Indian Administrative Service) officer father, Muthusamy Varadarajan, and a businesswoman mother, Usha. He attended La Martiniere in Lucknow and Mayo College in Ajmer before his family relocated to London in 1978, where his father was posted at the Indian High Commission. He studied at Brockley County secondary school and was deeply engaged in left-wing student activism during these years — an experience he has described as shaping his political and intellectual formation. He took an undergraduate degree in economics at the London School of Economics, then completed his MA and PhD in economics at Columbia University in New York. He subsequently taught economics at New York University for several years before returning to India in 1995 to begin his journalism career. He has also taught journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, been a Poynter Media Fellow at Yale University, and held a senior fellowship at the Centre for Public Affairs and Critical Theory at Shiv Nadar University in India.
Varadarajan joined the Times of India as an editorial writer in 1995, having returned to India after his academic career at NYU. He moved to The Hindu in 2004 as Strategic Affairs Editor — covering nuclear issues, India-Pakistan relations, and foreign policy — before becoming head of the National Bureau. As a reporter during this period he covered NATO intervention in the Balkans, the conflict in Kashmir, the Iraq War, the destruction of Afghanistan's pre-Islamic heritage by the Taliban, and a series of major diplomatic and strategic stories on Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency. It was his Iran reporting that earned him the Elizabeth Neuffer Memorial Prize Silver Medal in 2005. He received the Bernardo O'Higgins Order from the President of Chile in 2006 — that country's highest civilian honour for a foreign citizen — for his journalism and his contribution to promoting India's relations with Latin America. In 2010 he received the Ramnath Goenka Award for Journalist of the Year.
In May 2011, through an extraordinary general meeting called by the Board of Directors, Varadarajan was appointed editor of The Hindu — the first editor in the paper's 150 years not drawn from the Kasturi Ranga Iyengar family that had founded and owned the paper since 1878. His tenure was notable for an assertive editorial approach that took positions on issues the paper had previously treated more cautiously, including coverage of the 2002 Gujarat riots and the Modi government. On 21 October 2013, Varadarajan publicly announced his resignation, citing the owners' decision to revert to a family-edited model. The paper's subsequent editor, N. Ravi, alleged that Varadarajan's departure was partly driven by editorial differences, including what he characterized as an anti-Modi bias — a characterization Varadarajan contests.
The Wire launched on 11 May 2015, founded by Varadarajan with Sidharth Bhatia and M. K. Venu. Varadarajan has described the publication as a deliberate response to the commercial and political pressures he observed constraining mainstream Indian journalism — the dependence of legacy media on government advertising, the concentration of ownership in conglomerates with business interests in regulated sectors, and the chilling effect of a media environment in which overtly challenging government power had become materially risky. The Wire is operated by the Foundation for Independent Journalism, a non-profit, and is funded by the Independent and Public Spirited Media Foundation as well as by reader subscriptions and donations. It does not carry government advertising. Its coverage has consistently focused on politics, foreign policy, the judiciary, science, gender, culture, and civil liberties — with an emphasis on the constraints placed on democratic institutions by the BJP government since 2014. The New Yorker described The Wire in December 2019 as "one of the few small outfits and the most prominent, other than The Caravan, to have engaged in providing aggressive coverage of the current Indian government" at a time when mainstream media was largely failing to do so. The Wire won the 2021 International Press Institute Free Media Pioneer Award for being "an unflinching defender of independent, high-quality journalism."
In July 2021, The Wire participated in the Pegasus Project — a coordinated global investigation by 80 journalists from 16 international news organisations, the French media non-profit Forbidden Stories, and Amnesty International, into the use of NSO Group's Pegasus spyware to surveil journalists, activists, politicians, and human rights defenders worldwide. The Wire was the sole Indian partner in the project. Varadarajan described the operation in an article the same month: the project began when a trusted reporter brought him a secure-channel approach from Forbidden Stories in mid-March 2021, asking The Wire to partner on data analysis of a leaked list of phone numbers that had been potential targets of Pegasus surveillance. India's list included phone numbers of journalists, opposition politicians, activists, and minority group leaders. Varadarajan received the 2022 Red Ink Award in the politics category for The Wire's Pegasus reporting. In December 2023, Amnesty International's Security Lab released new forensic findings confirming that Varadarajan's own iPhone had been infected with Pegasus spyware, alongside the phone of Anand Mangnale of the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project — both targeted from the same Pegasus operator. The finding placed him among the documented victims of the very surveillance system his publication had exposed.
The Wire and Varadarajan personally have been the targets of multiple FIRs (First Information Reports) under a variety of Indian laws since 2020. In March 2020, the Uttar Pradesh police filed a case after The Wire published a report that misattributed a quote to Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath — an error The Wire acknowledged and corrected, but which UP police used to register charges of promoting enmity and creating false alarm. The Allahabad High Court later quashed that FIR. In 2021, Kashmir police filed a legal notice over a report Varadarajan had tweeted about a farmer's death during the Delhi protests. In October 2022, Delhi police crime branch raided The Wire's offices and the homes of its editors following FIRs filed by BJP IT cell head Amit Malviya over a set of reports about Meta's treatment of BJP content on Facebook — reports The Wire subsequently retracted after its own source was found to have fabricated documents, a deeply damaging episode for the publication. In May 2025, The Wire reported that its website had been blocked across India by internet service providers on orders from the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, after the publication carried a story on a Pakistan-India air skirmish — a report the publication said it would challenge in court. In August 2025, Assam police filed two separate FIRs under Section 152 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Samhita (BNS) — the successor to the colonial sedition law — against Varadarajan and consulting editor Karan Thapar. The Supreme Court granted protection from coercive action in both cases, but the pattern of legal pressure — what Varadarajan and other Indian editors describe as using "the judicial process as punishment" — continues.
Gujarat: The Making of a TragedyPenguin, 2002 · An edited volume documenting the 2002 Gujarat anti-Muslim pogroms, drawing on reportage, testimony, and analysis; one of the first comprehensive book-length accounts of the violence and its political context
Non-Alignment 2.0: A Foreign and Strategic Policy for India in the 21st CenturyPenguin, 2013 (co-authored) · A widely discussed policy document and subsequent book articulating a strategic framework for Indian foreign policy based on a modernised non-alignment concept; co-authored with former National Security Adviser Shivshankar Menon and others
Elizabeth Neuffer Memorial Prize, 2005
UN Correspondents Association · Silver Medal for Print Journalism · Iran and IAEA series
Bernardo O'Higgins Order, 2006
Government of Chile · highest civilian honour for a foreign citizen · journalism and Indo-Latin American relations
Ramnath Goenka Award, 2010
Journalist of the Year (Print)
Shorenstein Journalism Award, 2017
Outstanding reporting and significant contributions to promoting freedom of the press in the Asia-Pacific region
Deutsche Welle Freedom of Speech Award, 2020
Among 17 journalists worldwide recognised for courageous reporting during the COVID-19 pandemic
IPI Free Media Pioneer Award, 2021
International Press Institute · awarded to The Wire as "an unflinching defender of independent, high-quality journalism"
Siddharth Varadarajan
Founding Editor, The Wire
Foundation for Independent Journalism
New Delhi, India
The Wire: thewire.in | Author page: thewire.in/author/svaradarajan
Spouse: Nandini Sundar (sociologist, Delhi School of Economics)