The Hindu vs Indian Express on Foreign Policy
Compare The Hindu and The Indian Express as foreign-policy signal channels — editorial lines, MEA access, bylines, and how to triangulate Indian policy intent.
Two papers, two editorial traditions
The Hindu (founded 1878, Chennai, owned by Kasturi & Sons Ltd) and The Indian Express (founded 1932, Mumbai/Delhi, owned by the Indian Express Group under Viveck Goenka) are the two English dailies most closely read by the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA), the Prime Minister's Office (PMO), and the foreign diplomatic corps in Delhi. They are not interchangeable. Each carries a distinct editorial inheritance, a different proximity to the security establishment, and a different reader within South Block.
The Hindu's foreign-policy line traces to the N. Ram era (editor-in-chief 1991–2003, 2011–2013) and reflects a tradition of strategic autonomy, sympathy for non-alignment, skepticism of US alliance structures, and warmth toward Russia, China-engagement, and the Global South. Its 2010 publication of WikiLeaks cables — done in partnership with Julian Assange — made it the Indian paper of record for adversarial disclosure. Suhasini Haidar, the paper's Diplomatic Affairs Editor since 2014, runs the most-cited MEA beat in Indian print; her Worldview interviews and the paper's editorial-page commentary (often by C. Raja Mohan when he writes there, or by former diplomats like M.K. Bhadrakumar and Shivshankar Menon) constitute one channel of policy debate.
The Indian Express, under editor Raj Kamal Jha and with Foreign Affairs Editor Shubhajit Roy, sits closer to the post-1998 strategic consensus: comfortable with the US partnership, the Quad, and the nuclear deal framework that Express columnist C. Raja Mohan helped articulate from 2003 onward. The paper's investigative tradition — the Bofors reporting of 1987–1989 by Arun Shourie's team, the Panama Papers (2016), the Pegasus Project (2021) — gives it institutional weight on accountability stories that touch foreign policy, including defence procurement (Rafale, 2018–2019) and surveillance.
What each paper signals
For a desk officer reading both papers on the same morning, the divergence is the data. When The Hindu's editorial page criticises a Quad joint statement as alliance-creep while the Express op-ed welcomes it as overdue institutionalisation, the reader is seeing the two poles of the Indian strategic community — the Nehruvian-autonomy school and the Vajpayee-Singh-Modi convergence school — argued in real time.
The Hindu typically breaks news on: Russia and Iran ties (Vladimir Putin's December 2021 Delhi summit coverage was led by Haidar), the SAARC/BIMSTEC neighbourhood, Sri Lanka and the Tamil question, Chinese border developments via sources in the External Affairs and Defence ministries, and UN/multilateral diplomacy. Its op-ed page hosts Happymon Jacob, Nirupama Subramanian, and serving/retired IFS voices on the autonomy side.
The Indian Express typically breaks on: Quad and US-India deals (the iCET initiative launched January 2023; the GE F414 engine deal of June 2023), Israel-India defence and tech ties, intelligence-community stories, and PMO-driven initiatives. Its Explained section, edited with policy researchers, is the most-translated Indian foreign-policy explainer in foreign chanceries. Pratap Bhanu Mehta's columns (until his 2021 Ashoka University departure he wrote regularly) and C. Raja Mohan's weekly piece define the Express centre of gravity.
Neither paper is a government mouthpiece — that role, when it exists, is closer to ANI's video output or to selected leaks through the Press Trust of India. But both papers are read inside the MEA Spokesperson's office (currently Randhir Jaiswal, appointed January 2024) before the daily 4pm briefing, and what they print shapes what the next-day press queries will be.