Malini Parthasarathy is the former Chairperson of The Hindu Group of Publications (Pvt.Ltd). She is also the former Editor of The Hindu (2013-16). During her tenure as Editor, the Mumbai edition of The Hindu was launched on November 28, 2015, a major landmark in the 140 year-history of the newspaper. She was earlier Executive Editor of the paper from 1996 to 2004. She has been a political journalist for three decades and more, writing reports and editorials on major themes in Indian politics and on India’s foreign policy, with a major focus on relations with Pakistan and Sri Lanka.
She also founded The Hindu Centre for Politics and Public Policy, a thinktank intended to highlight and scrutinise critical public policy and institutional issues, of concern in the national arena. The Centre was launched in January 2013 under the auspices of The Hindu group. She was the Director of the Centre at its inception.
She has an M.S. in journalism from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and a PhD from the Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. After graduation from the Columbia Journalism School, she was briefly a Visiting Journalist at the Washington Post before joining The Hindu in 1983.
Highlights of her journalistic career include a series of interviews with Indian Prime Ministers, V.P Singh, Rajiv Gandhi, P.V Narasimha Rao and I.K Gujral. She has also interviewed several world leaders. One particular highlight is the first ever interview by an Indian journalist of the former Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf after he took over. She has interviewed other top Pakistani leaders such as Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif and leading political figures in Sri Lanka such as the former President, Chandrika Kumaratunga. She was the first Indian journalist to interview Condoleezza Rice, then the US National Security Advisor in the Bush administration and also was the first to interview Strobe Talbott, Deputy Secretary of State in the Clinton administration, immediately after India’s nuclear test and the subsequent US sanctions.
During her tenure as Editor, The Hindu registered a 20 percent increase in readership nationwide. A new web-based initiative is the blog called Thread which tackles the same themes as the newspaper does but in a different tenor was launched during this period and continues to be an attractive news source for younger readers.
She has won two awards for excellence in journalism, the first Bank of India Award (1997) and the Haldighati Award from the Maharana Mewar Foundation, Udaipur.
She has been a member of SAARC election observer groups during elections in Pakistan and has participated in several Track II dialogues on India and Pakistan, particularly under the auspices of BALUSA and Pugwash.
She was also a member of the Governing Board, Auroville Foundation until recently, a position held since September 2004. Earlier she has been a member of the Executive Committee and Project Approval Committee, National Literacy Mission Authority.
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