Awards and Accolades In November 2005, the
United Nations Correspondents Association awarded Siddharth Varadarajan the
Elizabeth Neuffer Memorial Prize Silver Medal for Print Journalism for a series of articles,
Persian Puzzle on
Iran and the
International Atomic Energy Agency. In March 2006, he was awarded the
Bernardo O'Higgins Order by the President of Chile—that country's highest civilian honor for a foreign citizen—for his contributions to journalism and to the promotion of India's relations with
Latin America and Chile. In July 2010, he received the
Ramnath Goenka award for Journalist of the Year (Print). He received the 2017 Shorenstein Journalism Award for outstanding reporting and for significant contributions to promoting freedom of the press in the Asia-Pacific region. In May 2020, he is among 17 journalists from across the world recipients for the Germany based prestigious
Deutsche Welle Freedom of Speech Award. The Freedom of Speech Award 2020 is for all courageous journalists worldwide who are suffering repressions because of their reporting on the pandemic. Varadarajan received a Red Ink Award in December 2022 in the politics category for articles on
Pegasus spyware. Nai Duniya Foundation bestowed Varadarajan with "Media for Unity Award" in 2025.
Legal cases On 31 March 2020,
The Wire had published a news report on a
Ram Navami fair being conducted amidst the
coronavirus pandemic in
Uttar Pradesh. The report had misattributed a quote to the Chief Minister
Yogi Adityanath and the paragraph containing it was tweeted by Varadarajan. On the following day, the report was corrected and Varadarajan himself issued a clarification, attributing the quote to the
Hindutva stalwart Acharya Paramhans. The
Uttar Pradesh police registered a case against Siddharth Varadarajan calling it an "objectionable article" and on a number of charges including promoting enmity, cheating by impersonation and creating false alarm leading to panic. Siddharth Varadarajan issued a statement to the police asking for a copy of the
First Information Report (FIR) and the details of the specific actions that had been grounds for the registration of the cases, the statement was endorsed by the chairman of
The Hindu Group, the editorial director of
NDTV, the editor of
Frontline magazine, the former editor of
Jansatta daily, the consulting editor of the
India Today Group and various other senior journalists. The founding editors of
The Wire described the cases as a politically motivated attack on
freedom of the press in India, and a condemnation against the cases was issued by a group of over 200 journalists from various media outlets who described it as "brazen attempt to muzzle the media". In the report, the grandfather had claimed that his grandson had been shot by the police and that one of the doctors who had performed the autopsy had told him that the injuries he had sustained were caused by a bullet but was prevented from reporting it, in contradiction to the official post mortem report. Siddharth Varadarajan described it as
malicious prosecution, stating that it has become a crime in the state of Uttar Pradesh to report statements of relatives of the deceased if they questioned the official narration of events. == Personal life ==