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| BEYOND BELIEF | |
| By:
Shoma Chaudhury Hindustan Times Yet again, the verdict is out. The Tehelka tapes are genuine. They are not doctored. They are not overdubbed. The maddening thing is, the exact same things were officially declared more than three years ago. Not once, but twice. Very forcefully by Justice Venkatswami, first on October 12, 2001, and then again in January 2002. But that was not enough. It is a measure of the Kafakesque world Tehelka has inhabited that after it had spent more than 100,000 man hours defending the tapes and co-operating in the Commission of Inquiry, when Justice Venkatswami resigned in November 2002, the new judge passed a new order exactly reversing the old one. Two years of the inquiry process were laid to waste. The Tehelka tapes were sent for forensic examination. Justice was delayed for one more year. So for us at Tehelka - who have always known the tapes to be inviolably true - along with relief, this new announcement brings a sense of immense fatigue, exasperation and a list of very, very urgent questions. We have paid the price for telling the truth. When is someone going to pay for all the lies? Who will atone for the waste of tax payers’ money? Pay for all the damage done to Tehelka and its investor, First Global; pay for the loss of life, livelihood, reputation and time? How is the Government of India going to be made accountable to us? When will attention shift to the guilty? Now that the final smokescreen has been blown – will justice finally be done? What shape will it take? What is the real role of the media in a democracy? And most importantly, if something as incontrovertible as visual evidence is not enough proof of crime, what hope is there for this country? These questions need answers because they don’t just pertain to us, they pertain to the very fundamentals of public life and justice in India; they pertain to the nature of civil society itself. Everybody should have some hard questions. The story of Tehelka is not extraordinary. It could happen to anyone who stands by his conscience. So first, the question about the Government and its accountability. Since the day the Tehelka tapes were made public, the Government has behaved in a monstrously immoral fashion. Instead of probing the guilty, it manufactured an evil delirium of dishonesty and systematically went about destroying Tehelka and First Global. The sordid tale of false propaganda, arrests, raids, lies on sworn affidavits and obfuscation is too well known and does not bear another telling. It was conducted in full public eye. What is less well known are these disturbing facts: the forensic report itself was ready by April 8, 2004, and was scheduled to be made public on the 22nd of April. When the NDA Government realised the report had cleared the Tehelka tapes – what a dangerous ticking bomb a month before elections! - it decided to suppress the information till after the Lok Sabha election results. First citing missing seals and then the unavailability of the foreign expert, Justice Phukan postponed the announcement of the report to May 18, 2004, and then again, to June 21. The NDA lost the election anyway. But what if it hadn’t? Would the forensic report have ever seen the light of day? Or would the seals and the expert have remained permanently unavailable? Truth and justice have become a sad, sleazy political game. It seems their cause can only be served by a pendulum of governments. Nail the UPA, pray for the NDA. Nail the NDA, pray for the UPA. Five-year plans for fair play. The official seal of the Democratic Sovereign State of India has no sanctity of its own. No principle of continuity. No morality. You cannot trust its documents, or its stands, or its probes. Indians, it seems, are not entitled to a moral core. We have repeatedly been declared genuine and innocent – by the JPC, by the Inquiry Commission, by public opinion. Yet, First Global has still not been able to restart some of its businesses, and the government created such a virus of fear around Tehelka, no investor would touch it for three years. Should the Government – regardless of which party is in power - be allowed to get away with such witch-hunts? We demand not. We want a precedent set: we want material recompense. The saga of the Tehelka tapes has become a powerful parable about how a system subverts and destroys any inquiry into itself. Besides the government’s raids and lies, there are two bogeys that have hounded Tehelka for four years that need to be permanently defanged: the allegation of ‘motives’ and ‘doctored’ tapes. First, ‘motives’. When the tehelka story broke, the NDA Government leapt about like a flock of turkeys squawking out theories of motives: Tehelka was a Congress conspiracy, a stock market scam, a Hinduja ploy, an ISI plot, a tribal insurrection, an alien take over, anything. Since then, the aspersion of ‘motives’ have also been deployed against the Judeo tapes, the Jogi tapes, and the tapes that caught some Ministers in Rajasthan. Then, and now, one asks: how does the presence or absence of a ‘motive’ affect the corruption caught on tape? Does it in anyway falsify the deeply embarrassing image of political leaders and army officers stashing wads of money into their vests, pant pockets and desk drawers? Why can’t we just concentrate on the issue at hand? Next, ‘doctoring’. This is a much more germane point. But in the case of the Tehelka tapes, a ludicrous one. Since the day Tehelka broke its story, there has been an almost comic pantomime of denials. At first everyone from Bangaru Laxman to the lowliest army officers claimed that the image of them on the tapes was not really them. When they found that was not getting them anywhere, they said, okay, that’s me, but that’s not my voice; and then, yes, that’s my voice, but those are not my words; and then, yes, those are my words, but those are not my deeds; and then, yes, those are my deeds, but I was drugged; and then okay, I wasn’t drugged but they had motives. On and on, a sad platoon of acrobats, flipping, flopping, contorting. Crucially though, none of them denied their actual presence or action of taking bribes within the Commission. All the quibbling has been over transcribing errors. Given that there was close to 100 hours of footage, minor transcribing errors were inevitable. The Commission and government separately transcribed the tapes – there were discrepancies even in those. The key point though is that as Justice Venkatswami himself said in his order of October 12, 2001, even if one were to grant these discrepancies, they do not in any way affect the main visuals on the tapes. In fact, even if one were to concede the specific instances being quibbled over by the dramatis persona on the tapes, the story of their corruption would not change. Which brings one to the role of the media. When things are flagrantly wrong, isn’t it important for the media to take stands? To a large extent, ever since Tehelka broke its story, much of the media has restricted itself to a sort of charade of playing a fair referee – merely reporting rather than uncovering or ascertaining. Even now that the forensic report has been declared, many TV channels and papers have been reporting that the tapes are not “doctored” but were “edited” – leaving a kind of ambiguity about what that editing entailed. Given that the version of the story made public was four hours in length, and the original tapes run for hundred hours, it would seem commonplace that the Tehelka tapes were “edited”! All news reports are edited. But were they “maliciously” edited? Frankly, Jaya Jaitly and her ilk deserve no response. What can one say about a woman who says she accepted a packet of money from arms dealers because she thought it was a box of sweets? Suffice it to say that the only way they can even allege any malicious editing is by comparing Tehelka’s four-hour tape with Tehelka’s own hundred hour tapes, submitted by Tehelka itself to the Commission! If we had “maliciously” edited or concocted a story, would we provide evidence against ourselves? Often, a journalist’s job is to go beyond reporting. It is to nail wrong-doing. In the case of the Tehelka tapes and they way they have been subverted, there is a public paper trail the length of the Grand Trunk Road. In case anyone’s interested. |
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