New Delhi, March 13

In comparison, Fallen Heroes was a cakewalk. In May of last year, when we finished our infamous sting into match-fixing in cricket, and tediously crafted a 92-minute investigation from two months of reporting and more than 40 hours of tape, we thought

we had seen the worst kind of complicated story. We had waded through corruption, sleaze, senseless greed and dirty heroes. But in no time at all, in August 2000, just months after breaking the match-fixing story, we found ourselves embarked on a story that was a grim reminder that reality is always uglier than a game.

In the final count, Fallen Heroes was only about being cheated of some entertainment; Operation West End is about being cheated of your nationalism. In the cricket story, there was the betrayal by a group of men who excited and inspired a hundred million; in Operation West End there is the betrayal by a group of people who lead a hundred million. At its worst Fallen Heroes was about losing games; at its worst Operation West End is about losing lives.

Operation West End is the frightening story of the death of India’s last sacred cow: the defence establishment. It is the story of the suitcase people. The story of nakedly greedy middlemen, nakedly greedy army officers, and nakedly greedy politicians. It shows how the cancer of corruption reaches everywhere and touches everyone. It shows that the poor innocent soldiers who die for paltry salaries and gaudy medallions are but fodder for the men who make hundreds of crores cranking the machinery of Indian defence. Operation West End is enough reason to lose all hope in the idea of India.

When Aniruddha Bahal began work on Operation West End I did not give the story a chance in hell. After the success of the cricket story, Bahal had just come off the disappointment of a major scoop that had fallen through at the very last minute. With his nose for the great story, for smelling the rot, he had begun to dig around in defence deals, which had been the legendary stuff of innuendo, rumour, charge and counter-charge for years without anyone ever nailing anyone. Over the years, middlemen had been banned, and as far as the law of the land was concerned all defence deals were brokered cleanly over the table, sans payoffs or kickbacks. (Of course, all of Delhi knows that an entire subculture of staggering affluence, farmhouses and baroque parties survives on the defence kickback.)

When we first discussed the story, it was the devastating and dubious fire at the Bharatpur ammunition depot and the continuing wrangling over the Kargil fiasco that were the uppermost drivers in our mind. The idea was to plunge into the murky depths and see if we could spot anything telling that could be dragged into the light. Sympathetic to the armyman, we were irked by the idea of the defence dealer.

The Tehelka Investigation Team (saucily acronymed TIT) or, more accurately, Bahal and his Falstaffian deputy Mathew Samuel, began their undercover operation into defence purchases sometime in the August of 2000. Their gameplan was simple and logical. Enter at the lowest level of the food chain - the section officer in defence procurement - and work your way up the ladder of graft. Eight months into the investigation we are still astonished at how incredibly high the ladder goes, and how at every rung there were avaricious men waiting to pull us up as long as there was money to be had for it. Eight months later, as we look at the footage of the sting, we are still astonished at how blinding the greed was that two rank amateurs with close to no knowledge of defence hardware, hawking a patently absurd product, could go so far as to slice open an entire industry of high corruption..

Bahal and Samuel set out to hawk fictitious hand-held thermal cameras, under the brand name of a fake company West End. Using spycams, over a period of seven months, they shot more than hundred hours of footage. After a point the web of contacts, posturing and cross-referencing became so intricate and messy that both of them lived in the constant fear of having their covers blown. Their stress levels mounted with every passing week as the tightrope became ever thinner. I waited every day for them to come and tell me that it was over, they’d been caught out, seen through. But miraculously greed had dulled every other sense of those who trafficked in the defence gravy train..

The cast of characters nailed by Operation West End is stellar. At the very apex, the BJP President Bangaru Laxman, who took a one lakh token bribe to facilitate West End’s prospects. In a revealing meeting, he waited expectantly for another $30,000, which never came, because we never had them..

Then Jaya Jaitly, President of the Samata Party, close aide of Defence Minister George Fernandes, who accepted a bribe of Rs. 2 lakh. In fact, the tehelka investigation leaves the Samata Party with not a leg to stand on, as its treasurer too airs all the sleazy deals of his party with great pride and glee.

Tragically, the army too covered itself in disgrace as a slew of generals were caught grubbing for payoffs. Among those nailed are Lt. Gen. Manjit Singh Ahluwalia, Director-General Ordnance Supply; Maj. Gen. P.S.K Choudary of Weapon and Equipment; and Maj. Gen. Murgai, Director Quality Assurance, who has now retired.

Other senior officers who took bribes include Brig. Iqbal Singh, Prospective Procurement Officer, through whom all import purchases pass. Then Brig. Anil Sehgal, deputy director in the DGOS, when first contacted. And then there was additional secretary L.M. Mehta, IAS, the number two bureaucrat in the Defence Ministry.

But the men who cast the most light on defence corruptions is a breed that the law says just does not exist: the middlemen. The most prominent of these, who sang like proud canaries on tehelka’s tapes, are:

Key RSS trustee R.K. Gupta and his son Deepak Gupta one of the middlemen in the recently concluded Sukhoi deal worth a staggering Rs. 36,000 crore. He has his fingers in many pies, boasts of his proximity to the prime minister and claims to pay Rs 3-4 crore of commission money to the BJP every month.

R.K. Jain, sole treasurer of the Samata Party, who admitted to having already made over Rs 50 crore for the Samata Party through defence deals, and about Rs 10 crore for himself.

Major S.J. Singh, veteran defence middleman, who was involved with Bofors when they first came to India.

Mohinder Singh Sahni, another veteran dealer, and the honorary consul general of Belize and his son who is the consul general of Eritrea (Major Singh was earlier the consul general of Somalia: it seems to be way to go for defence dealers in India).

In the course of the investigations, the rogues’ gallery also ended up providing insights into dozens of shady arms transactions, as well as the modus operandi of deals. The Mumbai police has made out a case against Bharat Shah with just a nebulous Chhota Shakeel audiotape. The Operation West End tapes are in comparison a literal goldmine for any law enforcement agency with intent. It took a large team of excellent professionals several weeks to shape the story into a four-and-half-hour documentary. If that sounds long, it may help to know that the first script drafted by Bahal ran to seven hours. Our rational was clear: Operation West End’s purpose was not to entertain or engross, it was to bare open the truth. If it could not be done in two hours, then it just could not.

That the tehelka investigation went so far is a miracle, but the truth is that it could have gone even further had we had the money to throw. Six months into the sting, a point arrived where all the parties contacted, the suitcase people, were getting tired and suspicious of being given just a small fraction of the amounts that had been promised. Amazingly, we did ultimately manage to get a trial evaluation letter issued. We could have gone no further for it would have meant getting in the product to India and submitting them for trial.

Operation West End is the ultimate indictment of Indian governance and ethics. It is the ugly fable of a poor country that has been completely sold off by its rich and powerful. We spent eleven lakhs on the story. If we had a little more money we could have ripped open the entire system end to end. We were just a group of amateurs, a leanly funded media organization with limited resources.

Suppose we had been the ISI.