Punjab Kesari History: From a 1965 Jalandhar Daily to a North India News Network

The trouble began inside the family company after the killings. By 1994 Vijay Kumar Chopra’s branch and the family of his late brother Romesh Chander were in dispute. Agreements in 1995, 1996 and 1997 gave each side 49.1% of the shares and four board seats each. It did not hold: after 1998 no board meeting was held for six years, accounts went unadopted, and the Company Law Board noted allegations from both sides of company funds being misused.

The settlement divided the business by geography. The 2005 consent order gave Lot 1, the Jalandhar and Ambala units and the company itself, to Vijay Chopra’s side, and Lot 2, Delhi and Jaipur, to Romesh Chander’s heirs, with Rs 2.4 crore in compensation. The details took until 2022 to settle. The result is the arrangement readers see today: Punjab Kesari Delhi at punjabkesari.com, the Jalandhar group’s editions at punjabkesari.in, and a Jalandhar-owned Hindi daily in Delhi, Navodaya Times, under a different name.

Punjab Kesari’s own account of itself is one of courage under fire, and the killings are a matter of record. Historians of Punjab add a harder strand. Jagat Narain, an Arya Samaj leader, opposed the Punjabi Suba movement for a Punjabi-speaking state and urged Punjabi Hindus to declare Hindi, not Punjabi, as their mother tongue. Scholars cited on his Wikipedia entry argue that his papers, and the Jalandhar Hindi press generally, helped deepen Hindu-Sikh mistrust in the 1960s and 1970s. Bhindranwale accused his papers of insulting the Sikh gurus.

The journalist Kulbir Natt, writing in Index on Censorship in 1991, called Narain ‘a politician first and journalist second’, and also noted that he urged Hindus and Sikhs to act together, not on sectarian lines, for Punjab’s interests. Both things can be true. Neither justifies the killings of Narain, Romesh Chander and the paper’s staff.

The 2026 dispute is also contested. The group says the Punjab government cut its advertising and used pollution and building law to punish critical reporting. The state says it enforced the law against a hotel that broke its consent and building conditions. The Supreme Court protected the newspaper press without ruling on the merits, and the High Court did find that the hotel’s front setback was below its approved plan.

Punjab Kesari really was India’s top-selling Hindi daily in the mid-1980s, according to the government’s own Press in India report. It is not today: national Hindi readership has long been led by Dainik Jagran and Dainik Bhaskar. The last public audited figure we found, 1,159,489 copies a day in late 2015, still places it among India’s larger Hindi papers. Since 2005, figures for ‘Punjab Kesari’ may cover editions from two separate companies, so read them with care.

Punjab Kesari’s first fight was for readers in a state where Hindi papers were the minority. Its hardest was for survival, when militants killed its editors and hawkers. Its longest was inside the family. Its newest, in 2026, is with a state government, settled for now by a court order that the press keep running. Through each one the paper kept printing.

What has changed is how much of the reader’s day it holds. The Jalandhar group now runs dozens of district e-paper editions, Hindi, Punjabi and English websites, and YouTube channels. The test for a 61-year-old masthead, or two of them, is whether its local reporting from Ludhiana, Shimla or Jammu still gives readers something a feed does not.

Punjab Kesari began in Jalandhar in 1965 as the Hindi sister of an Urdu daily, borrowing Lala Lajpat Rai’s title. It came through the Emergency with a bigger readership, lost its founder and his successor to militants, reached Delhi in 1983 and led Hindi newspaper sales in 1986. A family split then turned one masthead into two businesses, and most of its printing centres came only after 2004. In 2026 it is a North Indian print and digital network, and it needed the Supreme Court to keep its press running.