Who's behind the news?
Who's behind the news?
1.5.2
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Use of DataFounding Editor, The Wire · Economic and Political Journalist · Co-Founder, The India Cable
New Delhi, India
The Wire (Founding Editor)
The India Cable (Co-Founder)
The Hindu (former Executive Editor)
Economic Times (former Opinion Editor)
Financial Express (former Managing Editor)
Hindustan Times (former)
Rajya Sabha TV (State of the Economy host)
M. K. Venu — Mangalam Kesavan Venu — is an Indian economic and political journalist with more than three decades of experience at leading national publications, and one of the three co-founders of The Wire, India's largest independent digital news platform. He describes himself as "sceptic but optimist." Alongside Siddharth Varadarajan and Sidharth Bhatia, he co-founded The Wire in May 2015 under the Foundation for Independent Journalism, a non-profit company in which each of the three founding editors holds an equal one-third share. His specific contribution to The Wire has been as its leading voice on economic policy, political economy, and the relationship between business and government in India — a beat he has covered since India opened its economy in 1991. He is also a co-founder and contributor to The India Cable, a paid newsletter co-published with Galileo Ideas covering Indian politics and policy for a close-attention audience. His phone was confirmed by Amnesty International's Security Lab to have been infected with Pegasus spyware between February and June 2021, and he was among those targeted as early as 2018 and 2019.
Venu's journalism career spans the major institutions of the Indian English-language financial and general press. He worked at the Hindustan Times before becoming Opinion Editor and a regular columnist at the Economic Times — India's most widely read financial daily — where he wrote on economic policy, fiscal management, and political economy through the years of Indian economic liberalization and its aftermath. He subsequently became Managing Editor of the Financial Express, another major financial newspaper, before moving to The Hindu as Executive Editor. It was at The Hindu that he worked alongside Siddharth Varadarajan, and when Varadarajan resigned from The Hindu in October 2013 — citing the owners' decision to return to a family-edited model — Venu followed, leaving his senior position to join the project that became The Wire. Throughout his print career, Venu wrote regular political economy columns for the edit pages of the Economic Times, Financial Express, and Indian Express, building a reputation as one of India's most consistent analysts of the intersection of macroeconomics, fiscal policy, and political power.
The Wire launched on 11 May 2015. Venu's role in the founding is described in the wire's own reporting as having initially provided some of the early funding alongside M. K. Bhatia, alongside Varadarajan's editorial leadership. The Foundation for Independent Journalism, which owns and operates The Wire, holds shares equally among the three founders. Venu's journalism at The Wire has concentrated on the economic and corporate dimensions of the BJP government's India — particularly the contentious Rafale fighter jet procurement deal, fiscal transparency, the 2G spectrum scam and its legal aftermath, India's COVID-19 vaccination response, and the relationship between the Narendra Modi government and major Indian business groups. His coverage of the Rafale deal was detailed and sustained: a 2019 article reporting that the Prime Minister's Office had compromised the Defence Ministry's negotiating position during Rafale negotiations attracted significant attention and contributed to The Wire's standing as the publication most willing to scrutinise the deal in depth. In February 2018 he was named alongside a Wire colleague in a defamation suit filed by Anil Ambani's Reliance Group over Rafale-related coverage — one of multiple legal actions brought against The Wire by entities that critics characterise as close to the Modi government.
Venu was identified as a confirmed Pegasus spyware target in the July 2021 Pegasus Project — the global investigation coordinated by Forbidden Stories and Amnesty International involving 80 journalists from 16 news organizations, in which The Wire was the Indian partner. Amnesty International's Security Lab conducted a forensic analysis of his phone that confirmed infection between February and June 2021, a period during which he was primarily reporting on India's COVID-19 vaccination response. Records accessed by Forbidden Stories indicate he had also been selected as a target in 2018 and 2019 — the period when his Rafale coverage was most active. His phone and that of Siddharth Varadarajan were found to have been targeted from the same Pegasus operator. The Indian government has neither confirmed nor denied being an NSO Group client. The targeting of Wire journalists with the spyware they had themselves investigated and exposed is among the most documented instances of press surveillance in contemporary India.
Alongside his Wire journalism, Venu co-founded The India Cable, a paid newsletter produced in partnership with The Wire and Galileo Ideas. The newsletter brings together a group of senior journalists — including Seema Chishti, Sidharth Bhatia, Sushant Singh, and Siddharth Varadarajan — for daily briefings on Indian politics, policy, and media, with analysis aimed at a closely engaged readership of journalists, academics, policy professionals, and attentive citizens. Venu hosted a regular political-economy program called "State of the Economy" on Rajya Sabha Television (RSTV), the parliamentary television channel of India's upper house, reaching an audience of policy-interested viewers across India. He has also been invited by Parliamentary Committees to present his views on public policy matters — testimony that draws on his long record of writing on fiscal management, public sector lending, and the structural conditions of India's political economy.
Venu continues as a founding editor of The Wire, writing regularly on political economy, fiscal policy, macroeconomics, and the political dimensions of Indian business. He contributes to The India Cable and remains one of the most recognizable voices in Indian financial journalism. He continues to operate, in his own description, as a "sceptic but optimist" — a formulation that captures his approach to three decades of covering an Indian economy and polity that has consistently disappointed easy predictions in both directions.
M. K. Venu (Mangalam Kesavan Venu)
Founding Editor, The Wire
Foundation for Independent Journalism
New Delhi, India
The Wire: thewire.in | Author page: thewire.in/author/mkvenu
The India Cable: theindiacable.com
