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We also said we did not set out to get any individuals, the story
led us there: it led the reporters to Bangaru Laxman and Jaya Jaitley,
characters who didn’t exist in our mindspace when the story began.
We also said that we had nothing against the BJP or the Samata Party.
We were sure had this investigation been carried out in any other
regime - a Congress or Third Front government - the chances were very
high the results would have been the same. You could change the entire
cast of characters and the story most likely would remain the same.
The problems we’d unearthed were endemic, and a wake-up call to everyone.
We have repeated our independent stance ad nauseum since, but everyone had stopped listening from day one itself. The Congress and other opposition parties were with predictable cynicism trying to extract any kind of mileage from it (and doing poorly as ever), but it was the BJP’s strangely cussed, almost immoral reaction that was the most disappointing. The party and the prime minister - a man many of us admire - felt no compulsion to display a moral core. The moral high-ground of governance was abandoned to indulge in some inter-party bickering. Ill-conceived attempts were made to paint it as a ruling party versus opposition game. Precisely what it was not. First and last it was a story about corruption and decay. This was not like Bofors or dozens of other similar controversies. This was not one political party casting allegations at another. This was a purely journalistic story, with no trace of politics in it. There was also no web of confusing arguments and gray areas you had to steer yourself through. Operation West End was not about accusations. It was about evidence. People had heard it. And seen it. And by any reckoning what had been seen and heard was distressing. The picture was so perverse it demanded a modicum of contrition: at one end of the frame were very poor soldiers serving out the prime of their lives in the most inhospitable conditions for a few thousand rupees a month; and at the other, sleazy fatcats cutting dubious deals worth hundreds of crores in Delhi. To then deny it all, to try and oilily slither past a people waiting for some answers, was, in my opinion, a grave mistake. The naked must be honest: there is some grace, explanation and redemption in that. In the long run, I don’t think the Tehelka expose will do the ruling party as much damage as will the party’s handling of the entire affair, its rather abject response to the tapes. The spectacle of a much-loved prime minister evading and then denying vivid proof of corruption was a deeply diminishing one. It was a wounding reminder that we must never expect too much of our leaders, a reminder once again that there is no higher conscience we can appeal to. In the pond of Indian politics and power, the conscience is an eel forever wriggling out of grasp. Had the prime minister simply admitted that yes, something was gravely wrong. Yes, the guilty would be brought to book. Yes, they remained committed to weeding out corruption, it would have buoyed the national mood. Even if he had then gone on to do nothing. When we don’t get actions, we at least still need words. When we get neither, we are left with nothing. YET, UNEXPECTEDLY, WE MAY be left with something. By the time we had begun to fend the accusations (the detective in the dock, even as the thief posted queries)…. - motives? - none; it was a purely journalistic story - affiliations? - none; not political, not business - ownership? - owned and managed by media professionals - funding? - venture capital - methodology? - legitimate; time-tested; reporters and spycams - ethics? - above board; did not pry into anyone’s private life; only exposed the abuse of public money and public office …. ...by the time we had finished with our explanations, the story had become much larger than anything we had done. We watched it acquire its own life with as much awe as anybody else. When I went to speak at JNU - in an electric atmosphere, where agitated, highly informed students were unwilling to listen to K.R. Malkani’s facile excuses - I said if the story was the size of the pencil I was holding, then the energies that had been sparked off were bigger than the JNU campus (it sprawls over park and ravine, to those who don’t know). We believe that. All we did was a story. The staggering goodwill we have received in the last year and a half, the tsunami of reactions that have followed have constituted easily the most humbling experience of our lives. To be stopped on the road, in restaurants, airports and be thanked by unknown people is way more than any journalist expects for anything he does. Making sense of this scale of response is difficult. I have applied the pop psychology that is every mass media person’s stock-in-trade. Is it that we, as a people, have become so desperately cynical that even a pinprick of light seems like a big ray of hope? Or is the outrage due to the fact that Operation West End holds up a mirror to ourselves, and the image of ourselves we see is really ugly? Or is it that personal and public degeneration have finally hit a critical mass and the ready-to-burst dam has felt the first jackhammer rattle its concrete? More qualified people will make better sense of the phenomenon, but I have some sense of the residual impact of Operation West End. The most astonishing in my opinion is the fact that corruption has once again become an issue in India. For the last decade - since V.P. Singh fought the 1989 election on the Bofors issue - corruption has been a non-issue. It seemed as if we’d given up on it. But suddenly it is the one thing that is dominating private and public discourse - through petrol pump scams and land scams. At least we see corruption once again - even if fleetingly - for the aberration it is. The second perhaps important impact has a more incestuous air. The story will hopefully serve as a reminder to all of us of the continuing power of journalism. It is a reminder that good stories can make a difference, a lesson most of us had forgotten in the last ten years (including this writer who has occupied several senior editorial positions in this period). It’s a nice thought that if Indian journalism broke five major stories like this every year, people in public life would be forced to clean up their acts. In a way it is also a reminder that in a poor democracy like ours the press has a quintessentially scrappy, adversarial role that should never be diluted. The last two years have in fact convinced me that in democracies like in India in the coming decades the core function of journalism will be to keep a leash on power, to fight power’s excesses and abuses. All other fucntions, including dissemination of information (the net makes it simple and cheap), and entertainment (television and cinema do the needful) will become less and less important. (Curiously, in the weeks following the story any number of white journalists who came to see me would ask me why India never had any sexual scandals. For me the answer was simple: we are a very poor country, and in the hierarchy of scandals, the only really important scandals are the financial ones. Money misused, money siphoned off, money wasted - these are the things that hurt us. The sex scandal comes way down in the hierarchy. It means nothing, concerns no one, does not exist in the public domain. It is basically a first world indulgence, a means to group voyeurism and artificial excitement). We, the media, tend to make oracles of anyone in the news. Fashion designers and beauty queens are asked to comment on everything, from food to politics, and they do, with grace and authority. So, my fellow-journalists inevitably deliver the coup de grace and ask me, what can be done? That the rot runs so deep, how can it be reversed? I have no idea. Or at least no better than the next guy. I can only think of the same clichés. Claw back the credibility of the key institutions: the police, the judiciary, the media. In other words, don’t expect self-restraint to solve the problem, build in enough deterrence. Then the next cliché: start with yourself, and try and call a halt to corruptions at a personal level. I confess I do amuse myself sometimes with fanciful ideas: if in a hundred years of the last century we could go from being a feudal people to a colonial state to an independent democracy, can we not in the next fifty years go from degradation and corruption to some state of grace? When we launched Tehelka last year we made some immodest claims. We said we wanted to rediscover the distinction between journalism, public relations, and entertainment. A distinction that had been blurred in the nineties by a combination of satellite television, colour pages in the newspapers, and the first giddiness of liberal consumerism. Also by the co-options of politics and business. By the end of the nineties, every senior journalist, every publication, could be identified with a political party or a business house. We said we too loved trivia, we too had friends among politicians and businessmen, but we believed that the core of journalism was a very serious one. It was built on the bedrock of uncomfortable questions, not comfortable alignments, nor pretty sentences or pretty pictures. Since I in particular was a journalist of the early eighties, I made some loud claims about trying to bring back the hard journalism of the eighties. A decade when all the major issues of the day were centered in the public domain by print journalists. Not just centered, but scrapped and fought over. BUT OUR EXPERIENCE HAS at best been a mixed one. Not one that yields up easy guidelines. Today Tehelka has impossible fame and goodwill, but no money and very few staffers. When we broke Operation West End, we were an office of 115 people; now we are less than five, and these too are unpaid loyalists. With utter dishonesty and brazenness the government has targeted and victimized us. We have been accused of being ISI agents, Hinduja stooges, a Congress set-up, Dawood Ibrahim’s play, and manipulators of the stock market. Our phones have been tapped, every agency of the government from the enforcement directorate to the CBI has been put on our tail. The debt crawls up past our ears. Wild theories are being forever concocted; our journalists have been arrested. What we exposed has been set aside; we have become the story. Easily the most shameful act of the government has been the unconscionable destruction of Shankar Sharma and Devina Mehra of First Global, the angel investors in Tehelka. The brilliant young couple - globally recognized analysts and brokers - have had their lives and businesses wrecked by a vengeful establishment for no other reason than that they invested in Tehelka at the height of the dotcom boom, and happen to own 14.50 per cent shares in the company. Their businesses have been shut down, their properties attached, their travel barred, and their bank accounts seized. Shankar Sharma has also been arrested twice on the flimsiest of charges, spending as much as two-and-a-half months in jail the second time around. Apart from trying to teach the innocent a lesson, a venal government has also tried to ensure that no other investor casts a prospective eye on Tehelka. For Tehelka itself the most insidious trap has been the Venkatswami Commission of Inquiry, instituted I suppose primarily to defuse the crisis. By making Tehelka an integral part of the commission’s probe, we have steadily drained of all our time and resources. At the time of formation of the commission, A.G. Noorani presciently wrote that including Tehelka in the terms of reference of the commission was a disastrous precedent. It would now allow governments, each time they were criticized or exposed, to go for the messenger rather than to heed the message. In our case Noorani’s presentiment has proven ominously well-founded. The government’s track record at the commission is one of unmitigated shamefulness, replete with lies, lies, and more lies. Without a jot of conscience, the seniormost legal functionaries of the magnificent Indian democracy - the attorney-generals and the advocate-generals - have appeared at the commission to parley falsehoods. The government - the ostensible keeper of probity and governance - has adopted an astonishingly mala fide position in the commission. It has chosen to openly protect the corrupt, while attacking the whistle-blowers. The government has filed hundreds of pages of malicious and false affidavits against Tehelka, and not a line against any of the 30 odd people found guilty of corruption. Its splendid legal luminaries spend days cross-examining Tehelka, and not an accusatory word is cast in the direction of all those caught in the act of corruption! And of course there has been, for us, the continual attrition. For eighteen months, the commission took over our lives, till it was finally derailed in November in strange circumstances. Fourteen lawyers have represented Tehelka at the commission, and our journalists have put in more than 35,000 man hours doing commission related work. Big media organizations would have been stretched; we have been decimated. And as I write this - in December 2002 - the government is casting around to kickstart a new commissions. Operation West End began in August 2000; broke in March 2001; is still playing itself out in December 2002. if a new commission is set up, we could enter another two year loop. Calculate the torque therein, and wonder how many media organizations will dare take on high-level corruption. It has been a long, arduous and exhilarating two years at Tehelka. There are things we’ve managed to pull off, and others that have just bested us. We have done some things well and some not so well. Yes there may be glitches in Operation West End, errors of omission and exactitude, but these have to be viewed in perspective: keeping in mind the scale and dangers of the story. No investigative story, I think, in recent times has risked more and taken on more. Operation West End has no cautiously strapped on life-jacket - of secret lobbies, finances, or strategies. It has to depend only on itself and its innate strength to swim all the way to the shore. There have been vested interests that have tried to distract our story by focusing on the issue of female companions arranged by the reporters for some army officers. I have said that it was a kind of ethical transgression on our parts, but in our defence I can say there are several mitigating factors. The reporters took the decision to arrange companions in the heat of the story, convinced that if they ceased to behave like arms dealers - who routinely provide money, booze and women - they would derail the story. Before trashing their judgment call, everyone must give pause, and keep perspective - and not forget that what the story eventually unveiled was monumental. It would also be useful to remember that Operation West End consists of more than 100 tapes, whereas the scurrilous ones are less than two. It might also help to flip the coin to see what else it reveals: it shows that army officers are willing to cut deals in exchange for a few hours with an unknown woman. Most importantly everyone would do well to remember where the tapes came from. Tehelka gave them, both to the army court of inquiry and to the Venkatswami Commission of Inquiry. If our intentions were mala fide, we could have easily thrown away those two tapes and no one would have known a thing. The fact is having shot the tapes Tehelka behaved most honorably: it neither exploited them nor suppressed them. We saw their relevance in the judicial process and accordingly handed them over. There is one other great red herring the guilty keep throwing up: of the tapes being doctored. Let me say for the nth time that not a frame has been doctored; and both experts and judges have given it the clean chit several times over the last year. In fact in the cross-examinations in the commission each of the accused has by now confirmed their presence on the tapes, and their taking of the money. Given the scale of assault on it, there are many who wonder if Tehelka will survive. There are others who wonder if individually each of us will. At the moment Tihar jail houses five undertrials ostensibly contracted to kill me and Bahal. The government has unilaterally given us extensive security cover, and wherever we go carbine-toting policemen accompany us. Samuel too must inevitably live under as great a threat. We do not know the truth of these dangers. The only way we deal with it is to not think about it. We think about the stuff that is harder still: how to make both journalism and the business of journalism work? One we have some sense of, the other we are perilously discovering. The odds against a group of journalists like us are long. But we are determined to give it our all. If goodwill were resources, we would have more than we ever needed. I believe Tehelka has a place and a future. Operation West End got over on March 13, 2001. It is December 2002, and Operation Hang-In-There is still grimly on. Of course like the residents of Jaunpur, there is nothing in our experience or imagination that can tell us how it will all finally unfold. TARUN J TEJPAL Editor-in-Chief, Tehelka.com |
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