Punjab Kesari is a Hindi daily founded in Jalandhar in 1965 by Lala Jagat Narain, whose group already published the Urdu Hind Samachar. It reached Delhi in 198…
Punjab Kesari, Lion of Punjab, was Lala Lajpat Rai's title. His Lok Sevak Mandal ran a Lahore weekly by that name from 1929.
Partition refugee Lala Jagat Narain started the Urdu daily Hind Samachar in Jalandhar in 1948.
Jagat Narain launched Punjab Kesari in Jalandhar in 1965. Accounts of the first print run range from 1,200 to 3,000 copies.
The founder was detained. The group says power was cut, so it ran its press off a tractor for ten days.
The group added the Punjabi daily Jagbani in 1978, publishing in Urdu, Hindi and Punjabi.
He was shot dead on 9 September 1981 after condemning militants. About 80,000 attended his last rites.
Punjab Kesari Delhi launched on 1 January 1983 under Ashwini Kumar Chopra. The Shaheed Parivar Fund began the same year.
His son Romesh Chander, shot dead on 12 May 1984. Vijay Kumar Chopra then took charge. The group lost 62 people in all.
Yes. In 1986 it sold about 4.6 lakh copies a day, more than any other Hindi daily, per Press in India.
A family dispute split the group: Jalandhar and Ambala to Vijay Chopra's side, Delhi and Jaipur to Romesh Chander's heirs.
Palampur, Ludhiana, Jaipur, Panipat, Hisar, Jammu, Mohali, Chandigarh and Shimla all opened between 2004 and 2009.
The Jalandhar group's Hindi daily for Delhi-NCR, launched in 2013 because the Delhi Punjab Kesari belonged to the other branch.
After Ashwini Kumar Chopra died in 2020, his son Aditya Narayan Chopra became editor.
In a dispute with Punjab's government, the Supreme Court said newspapers cannot be stopped and ordered the press kept running.
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