A few years after independence, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru offered a journalist the post of ambassador to Moscow. He politely declined because he preferred his profession to a government job.

He was Devadas Gandhi, the renowned Managing Editor of the Hindustan Times. He was a freedom fighter, a public intellectual, one who participated in some of the defining debates of his era. And he also remains the newspaper’s longest-serving editor. Sixty-nine years after his death in August 1957, the man and his life continue to pose questions to journalists.     

An editor goes to jail with his reporter

Not to reveal one’s source is a touchstone of journalism. Devadas chose a jail term to uphold the principle.

In 1941, the newspaper published a comment following a report by its correspondent named R. L. Singhal. The comment was critical of the Chief Justice of the Allahabad High Court, Sir Iqbal Ahmad. Soon a contempt writ was served on the editor, the reporter and the publisher. During the trial that ran in the Allahabad High Court from August to November 1941, the Chief Justice was perturbed that not only the editor had failed to verify the reporter’s story, but that the comment had also stretched beyond the reporter’s dispatch.

Devadas firmly stated that he had no reason to disbelieve his trusted reporter’s version. It soon emerged, however, that the comment was indeed vulnerable.

“I have been an unwitting instrument of showing disrespect (to the office of Chief Justice) for which I am extremely sorry,” admitted Devadas before the court.

He nevertheless refused to blame the reporter. When the Chief Justice remarked that “the cause of the whole trouble is Mr Singhal”, the editor replied that “I will strive to establish his innocence to the end of my existence”.

The court now wanted to know who had authored the comment. Devadas’ counsel Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru replied that no responsible editor would disclose the name.

Devadas stated that “unless compelled under the law, I shall not disclose any further names of members of my staff”, and “I invite on my head the cumulative punishment that this court may wish to inflict on members of my staff”.

The court sentenced the reporter to two months’ imprisonment, and the editor to one month’s simple imprisonment with the option to pay a fine of Rs 1000. 

Devadas again objected that since his reporter was not given the option of paying a fine, he too would choose imprisonment. Devadas was jailed. His children were kept out of school for a term.

When his father, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, himself a journalist, learnt about the episode, he upbraided his editor-son for publishing a comment before verifying the facts, but also admired his decision to choose imprisonment and stand with his reporter.

The case is instructive for editors who conveniently lay the blame on the reporter or the contributor for anything erroneous or contentious published under their watch. Devadas embodied the principle that the responsibility begins and ends with the editor. 

The making of an editor

In 1918, Gandhi sent his youngest son to Madras to learn Tamil and teach Hindi.  “If you succeed, you will have joined Madras with other parts of India,” Gandhi wrote to him, who came to be known as ‘pratham Hindi pracharak’ in Madras.

It was here he became acquainted with C Rajagopalachari – another elder, who besides his father, played a defining role in his education. 

In the space of three days in January 1920, two on the 12th and the third on the 15th, Rajagopalachari dispatched three letters to him. The second letter included a parcel carrying twenty-three iconic books, including Edward Thompson’s Indian History, a primer on Greek and Roman history, the Geography of Asia and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Tanglewood Tales.

The third letter, dated January 15, confirmed Rajagopalachari’s intention to guide the young man into becoming a prose master. “The style of Congress speeches and newspaper leaders may mislead you into a heavy pedantic style,” CR wrote, underlining that he sent the books so that Devadas “obtain an idea of modern, simple, English style”.

And then Rajagopalachari came to the most pressing issue – handwriting. “If you remember that the last one or two letters in a word have the same right to be legible as the rest, and may be of the same size, the beauty of appearance will come in by constant writing,” he wrote.

Devadas was not yet twenty, and had only recently begun correspondence with the fifty-two-year-old man who had taken it upon himself to guide him. Neither of them knew that, years later, in 1933, he would marry Rajagopalachari’s daughter Lakshmi.

Devadas started his journalistic career at 21 by helping his father edit the journals Young India and Navjeevan. The same year, 1921, he formed a team with Mahadev Desai and Pyarelal Nayar for another journalistic venture. When Motilal Nehru and his son Jawaharlal were arrested during the non-cooperation movement, the trio ensured the continued publication of The Independent, which Motilal had founded.

Having been a major voice in the freedom struggle, Devadas joined Hindustan Times as Working Editor in 1934 and became Managing Editor three years later – a post he held till his death. 

When Devadas passed away, his eldest son Rajmohan Gandhi was in the US. A few hours before he telephoned India and learnt of his father’s death, he had seen a photograph of Devadas in the office of Ralph McGill, the great editor of the newspaper Atlanta Constitution – a small reminder of how far his father’s standing as an editor had travelled.

A son editing his father

Throughout his journalistic career, Devadas performed an unusual task: he examined, vetted, and edited news related to the most influential newsmaker of his era – his own father. A large proportion of copies that arrived at his desk had his father in them.

His position was not different from that of CR Krishnaswami, who, as the first News Editor of The Hindu, too had edited copies about his own father – C Rajagopalachari.

Devadas had disagreed with his father on crucial counts. He objected to Gandhi’s experiments with Manu Gandhi, as well as when Gandhi, in a December 1940 letter to Hitler, admired his “devotion to fatherland”, and wrote that the Fuhrer was not “the monster described by opponents.”

It was Devadas under whose editorship his mother Kasturba published an open letter to her son Harilal after he had adopted Islam.

And yet, when Harilal passed away, Devadas published a deeply moving obituary of the kind only a younger brother who worshipped his elder sibling could have written. For all the rift that existed between Gandhi and his eldest son, it had not diminished the reverence Devadas had for his elder brother. 

I have looked up the newspaper archives – though not entirely – to look for any possible slant that crept into his coverage of his father. I have yet to find any.

Devadas, after all, was the son of a journalist. He was offered an ambassadorial post. He preferred the newsroom. 

(Ashutosh Bhardwaj is an independent writer and journalist. He’s grateful to Gopalkrishna Gandhi, whose scholarship made this piece possible.)

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