NATIONAL HERALD REVIVAL ON THE CARDS
The Congress party is all set to announce the revival of the National Herald and two other newspapers that went out of print eight years ago due to financial crunch. A public statement on the proposed relaunch could be made as early as next week
The Congress party is all set to announce this month the revival of the National Herald and two other newspapers that went out of print eight years ago due to financial crunch.
A public statement on the proposed relaunch could be made as early as next week after a final meeting of the board of directors for the publications clears the name of the editor of National Herald, sources said. The newspaper, which was founded at Lucknow in 1938 by Jawaharlal Nehru, was banned by the British during the 1942 Quit India movement. It faced brief shutdowns in the 1940s and 70s.
Today, the publication is on a comeback trail. “We intend to revive all three papers – National Herald, Qaumi Awaaz (Urdu) and Navjeewan (Hindi),” Congress party treasurer Motilal Vora, who is CMD of the Associated Journals Limited (AJL) that published the three papers, told HT.
“The decision was taken in January this year. We are now close to finalising the editor’s name for the operations to start. We will make a formal announcement within a few days,” he added.
AJL owns a number of properties across the country. These include the Herald House in New Delhi from where the papers were last published in 2008. While two floors of the multi-storey building on Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg have been leased out to the Regional Passport Office, the rest of it houses AJL and Young Indian Private Limited (YIL) that have functional offices. Of late, the place has been readied for publishing the papers again and applications have been sought for filling the vacancies.
The relaunch of the papers will weaken the premise for a case against Congress president Sonia Gandhi, party vice-president Rahul and some of its senior leaders among others. The ongoing litigation was filed by BJP leader Subramanian Swamy in 2012, alleging income-tax violations.
AJL, along with its assets and liabilities that included a Rs 90-crore loan from the Congress, was taken over in 2010 by YIL – a Section 25 company (which is akin to a trust) in which the party president and her son hold 38% equity each. Vora is among the rest of the stakeholders; the prominent others being party leader Oscar Fernandes, technocrat Sam Pitroda and Suman Dubey, a schoolmate of late PM Rajiv Gandhi, Sonia’s husband. Sources associated closely with the decision said the revival plan has been on the cards since 2010. “Things got delayed; it is still a work in progress,” said a person associated with the relaunch of the newspapers. Once re-launched, a Congress leader said, the party will “use these publications to their full advantage” amid next year’s assembly elections in its one-time bastion Uttar Pradesh. The party has been struggling hard in the country’s most populous state to regain its political glory after being voted out of power in 1989. The National Herald, in its farewell editorial on April 1, 2008, announced temporary suspension of the publications which were running into losses for several years due to over-staffing and dearth of advertisements. The board had then approved a voluntary retirement scheme payment for the 265 employees, including 40 journalists.