By: Tavleen Singh
The Indian Express
Sunday, 01, 2002

If anything fully reveals the squalid morality of the Vajpayee government it is the Tehelka story and yet, despite Justice K Venkata-swami’s resignation in disgrace last week, the Indian public remains largely ignorant of what was going on in the commission he headed.

The media’s peculiar indifference to the Venkataswami Commission is to blame for this but nobody escapes blameless for ignoring an investigation that has implications that go beyond the future of the Vajpayee government.

If the Prime Minister looked bad when his handpicked party president was caught on camera accepting a lakh of rupees, the performance of his government since the Tehelka expose makes him look even worse. How many of you know, for instance, that the government did not file a single affidavit in the Commission against those caught with their hands in the till on the Tehelka tapes?

How many of you know that the government concentrated its efforts on filing affidavits against the Tehelka team instead? How many of you know that had Justice Venkataswami not accepted a government job while still heading the commission we might in the next few months have had a report that showed serious irregularities in at least half the 15 defence deals the Commission investigated?

Since these investigations were conducted in camera for reasons of national security (ha! ha! ha!) nobody knows exactly what these irregularities are but rumour has it that more than half these deals reveal misuse of taxpayers’ money. Rumour also has it that the reason why Saint George of the Defence Ministry was so desperate to get his job back was because the ministry’s officials were cooperating too eagerly with the Commission in his absence.

And, for someone who was Mr Morality till Tehelka it would have looked really bad had skeletons started to tumble out of his ministry’s cupboards. Coffins already have and it’s bad enough that his party president was videotaped graciously receiving party funds from shady armsdealers in his drawing room.

The official residence of the Defence Minister should be inaccessible to arms dealers so at the very least, Jaya Jaitly committed a serious impropriety. But furious that her image (Miss Ethics in an ethnic sari) had been besmirched she has behaved with a vindictiveness that is even more contemptible than receiving party funds from shady arms dealers.

Clearly still under the illusion that she remains Miss Ethics she has spent the past 20 months trying to prove that the Tehelka investigation was a subversive lot to destabilize India. First, she spent months on a campaign to prove that the Tehelka tapes were ‘‘doctored’’. When she failed to convince the Commission of this, she went to the High Court to try and prove her case and failed again.

Last week, came more hysterical allegations. It was ‘‘unethical’’, she said, that Tehelka.com and the Venkataswami Commission should have hired lawyers from the same law firm. ‘‘Tehelka’s subversive activities had extended their tentacles to the Justice Venkataswami Commission itself’’, she said. Who is she to talk about ethics when she should know that George Fernandes’s lawyer, Raju Ram Chandran, has just been appointed Additional Solicitor General of India?

Much more serious, though, is the manner in which the Prime Minister has allowed government machinery to be misused to suppress the Tehelka investigation and to destroy those who dared expose corruption in high places. First Global, the company that financed Tehelka.com, has been virtually closed down.

Shankar Sharma and Devina Mehra have been hounded by the departments of Income Tax and Enforcement even though not a single rupee of undisclosed wealth was found after 25 raids on their homes and offices. Their bank accounts have been frozen, their property seized and Shankar was jailed for three months on a charge whose maximum punishment is a Rs 5,000 fine.

Without wanting to cast aspersions on the judiciary may I say that I find it very strange that a young Tehelka reporter, Kumar Badal, has spent the past six months in jail because he telephoned some poachers while investigating a story on trafficking in wildlife.

Meanwhile, the government has got away with including the sinister ‘‘clause D’’ in the Venkata-swami Commission’s terms of reference which allows the investigation of the motives of a journalistic expose. It is a highly dangerous clause that makes investigative journalism impossible but we in the media have remained strangely silent.

Just as we have remained strangely silent about the Vajpayee government’s open efforts to transform a corruption investigation into a witch hunt against those who blew the whistle. The litigation resulting from ‘‘clause D’’ has meant that Tehelka.com has spent the past 20 months on litigation instead of on journalism.

Strange also is the fact that the opposition parties, so ready to walk out of Parliament for the smallest reason, have barely brought up Tehelka in the past 20 months.

Why is there no full debate in the Lok Sabha into the affidavits the government filed before the Venkata-swami Commission? Why is there no demand that Justice Venkataswami produce his report into the defence deals he has investigated so far?

Why is nobody demanding that the PM explain why his government is investigating those who exposed corruption instead of those whose corruption was so clearly evident on the Tehelka tapes?