The library has become an endangered section in Indian media
houses in the age of the internet—and in a business culture
populated by philistines that frowns upon the concept of a
“newspaper of record”. But India’s original newspaper of record,
The Hindu, has just shown the invaluable role a well-maintained
archive can play in shaping (and reshaping) a country’s
discourse. A specially constituted group of ministers recently
cited “contemporary news reports” (of The Hindu‘s legendary
political correspondent, G.K. Reddy) to exonerate former prime
minister Rajiv Gandhi‘s role in release of Union Carbide chief
Warren Anderson in the aftermath of the Bhopal gas disaster. The
readers’ editor of The Hindu, S. Vishwanathan, had only the
previous day dredged up old files to reveal G.K. Reddy’s
reporting from 1984 on the story. Now, The Hindu has pulled out
its issues of December 8 and 9, 1984 to show that the GOM’s
conclusions is “either a careless misreading of the reports or,
more likely, a clumsy attempt at a cover