NEW DELHI: In an interesting move Sonia Gandhi has reconstituted almost the entire Board of Directors of the National Herald daily and entrusted its editorial supervision to two experienced hands known to be close to the Gandhi family. She is also looking for a professional editor to head the paper.
The feeling is that these moves are aimed at allowing Sonia Gandhi to keep her political options open.
H.Y.Sharada Prasad who had for long served Indira Gandhi and then Rajiv as Information Adviser and Suman Dubey a close friend of the family have been inducted on the new Board with Shubhabratia Bhattacharya having quit the editorship to allow the new team to revamp the paper as it sees fit the stage is set for the National Herald to acquire a new editor. Bhattacharya himself is joining a Chandigarh-based paper ‘as its political editor.
Sources in Herald House said that negotiations with Sumer Kaul former Deputy Editor of Indian Express and an editor in the Business and Political Observer for a brief while we’re at an advanced stage. They said the new bosses of the Herald were very keen that it haves a “professional” at the helm of affairs.
But it is not this aspect which has caused ripples of excitement in the paper founded by Jawanarlal Nehru and controlled by a scion of the family ever since. There have been professionals in the top post in the past. In his initial days in office Bhattacharya too had improved the paper helped by the fact that the National Front was then at the Center.
If expectations in Herald House have soared it is largely because of the new political scenario in the country where for the first time the Gandhi “family” is identified with neither the party nor the Government. There are also murmurs of “funds being no problem” and hopes that the paper will at least be run on professional lines.
Of the members of the earlier Board of Directors only two have been retained in the new body. They are Jitendra Prasad the Political Secretary to the Congress President and Sibte Razi often referred to as the “Urdu Director of the publication.”
Sources in the new Board said that Sonia Gandhi was very keen that the National Herald and its Hindi counterpart distance themselves from their current image of being mouthpieces of the Congress which has stymied their growth so far. They say that Sonia Gandhi is eager that the whole set-up at the two papers be restructured to make them professional and financially viable.
The building up of credibility is a theme which is understood to have been emphasized repeatedly by Sonia Gandhi in her meetings with her confidants on the Subject Sources said that although Priyanka Gandhi had not shown any direct involvement with the project there were signs that she too was taking a keen interest in it.
Sonia Gandhi’s camp-followers maintain that there is no political motive in the unusual interest she is taking in the paper but political speculation goes on nonetheless. The feeling is that the professionalization of the paper will enable her to distance herself from the present establishment in the party as well as the Government and keep her options open for the future.
Few political observers now believe that Sonia Gandhi will herself make any serious bid to enter politics at least in the near future. But even if she wishes to keep options open for her children she will need organizations like the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation and the other trusts associated with the family to keep them in the public eye and a credible organ to project them. The changes in Herald House are being interpreted as the beginning of these long-term plans.
Article extracted from this publication >> June 12, 1992
