On September 12, Sukhdeep Kaur, a journalist in Chandigarh, posted on Facebook that she had been pressured to resign from Hindustan Times after Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh complained to the newspaper’s management about her adversarial reporting. When she resisted, Kaur claimed, she was handed a termination letter on September 7, four days before her contract was to be renewed.
Speaking to Newslaundry about the events leading up to the termination of her services, Kaur, who was senior assistant editor with HT’s Chandigarh bureau, said she was summoned for a meeting on July 26 with Soumya Bhattacharya, the managing editor, and Rakesh Gautam, head of human resources. “I was called to Delhi in the last week of July and told … Amarinder Singh was complaining about my stories to the chairperson of Hindustan Times. I was told [the editors] thought I was a good reporter until they realised my work was biased,” she said. “I was called to Delhi again on August 8 and given the transfer letter. It was followed by a mail on August 12 that in the event of me not joining the national political bureau in Delhi by September 2, it would be assumed that I was no longer interested in continuing to work for the company.”
