TWO years ago, writing in the year-end issue of Seminar, I discussed the influence of the Tehelka scandal on the Indian media. My conclusions then were that while few investigative stories could have had the impact of Tehelka’s Operation West End, it did not follow that the rest of the media would also adopt Tehelka’s methods.

In fact, I said, many – if not most – journalists were uneasy about Tehelka’s methods and uncomfortable with the very concept of sting operations. It may well be accurate to say that the problem of corruption has now reached such endemic levels that only by using the techniques of entrapment can investigators catch the guilty, but journalists had two basic problems with this approach.

First, there is the classic ethical problem that haunts all sting operations: can you hold somebody responsible for a crime that he would not have committed if you hadn’t encouraged him? The essence of all entrapment is that you promise a man a reward for breaking the law and then, apprehend him when he takes the bait.

Journalists were undecided about the ethics of such operations, I suggested. We all accept that some level of entrapment is a part of all law enforcement. For instance, the police always send a dummy customer to a brothel and then arrest the prostitutes only when money has changed hands. The prostitutes could claim, in their defence, that no crime had taken place or even, that it wouldn’t ever have taken place but for the blandishments of the police. On the other hand, the police could retort that the brothel was open for business anyway and only by dispatching a dummy customer could they establish that sexual favours could be purchased.

But while different police forces have different standards for entrapment operations – in India, they are relatively rare, while in the US, the FBI likes to use them – most journalists have always reckoned that it is not the business of journalism to encourage people to take bribes or to break the law, even if all this is sought to be justified as a part of a lofty moral objective. The line that Indian editors have always taken is: once you allow your journalists to encourage people to break the law, you leave your paper open to all kinds of undesirable consequences.

Journalists also have a second objection to sting operations. Most of us are simply not cut out for them. By far the most astonishing thing about Operation West End, at least from my perspective, was the ease with which Tehelka’s journalists wore wigs, pasted on false moustaches and affected strange accents. To be able to do all this requires skills that most of us simply do not possess.

To be sure, there are exceptions. In the UK, The News of the World (a sensationalist newspaper often referred to as The Screws of the World) has a Pakistani investigative reporter whose speciality requires him to dress up as an Arab and fool important Brits into believing that he will give them lots of money if they are indiscreet or unethical. Once notable victim of such a sting operations has been Sophie Wessex, the wife of Prince Edward.

But no senior British newspaper would go as far as The News of The World. Most journalists take the line that acting and all that it implies – lying, dressing-up, making-up stories, fabricating identities – involve non-journalistic activities and therefore will have nothing to do with stings.

So that’s the first of the Tehelka paradoxes. Everybody accepts that it was the most influential investigative story of our times and yet, nobody will touch its methods.

 

 

The second paradox is more obvious and has often been commented on. When the scandal broke, Tarun Tejpal was a hero and Bangaru Laxman, George Fernandes and Jaya Jaitly were in disgrace. At the time, the NDA government seemed fatally wounded while Tehelka seemed set to become a commercial goldmine: the biggest name on the internet, the medium of the future.

In fact, the opposite has happened. Tejpal may still be a hero (judging by the manner in which ordinary, middle class citizens react to him) but he is a hero who is deeply in debt. Of his targets, George Fernandes is back as Defence Minister and acts as though Tehelka never happened. Bangaru Laxman has yet to get back his party post but seems rehabilitated in all other respects. He appears regularly on TV as a legitimate political spokesman to remind us that he believes he was set-up. (Well, of course he was, that’s the point of a sting.)

Most bizarre of all is the case of Jaya Jaitly who, despite being a former President of the Samata Party, came within a hair’s breadth of being nominated to the Rajya Sabha by the President in the category normally reserved for distinguished private citizens (artists, musicians, scientists) who would not normally stand for Parliament. Far from feeling disgraced, she acts as though she was the victim of a dirty trick.

The NDA government was not fatally wounded even though most of us wrote it off in the immediate aftermath of Tehelka. It goes from strength to strength and the smart money is on A.B. Vajpayee winning another term.

 

 

On the other hand, Tehelka itself has closed down. After the government targeted two of its investors and destroyed their lives, nobody with money would touch Tehelka. Its offices were raided and its journalists arrested. The Commission set up to investigate the revelations that emerged from Operation West End was also charged with investigating Tehelka’s antecedents (an act that is unprecedented in the history of investigative journalism anywhere in the world). Such were the demands of the Commission that Tehelka spent more time on finding files and writing legal responses than it did on journalism.

For a while, Tejpal kept it going by borrowing money from friends. Eventually, he called his staff and said that he simply couldn’t borrow any more. The web-site closed down. So, that’s the second paradox. Everybody in politics (though not the service officers who have been court-martialled) indicted by Tehelka has flourished, but Tehelka and its backers have been finished.

There’s a third paradox. While journalists have remained unwilling to touch Tehelka’s methods, there’s one class that has adopted these methods with alacrity: politicians.

In November, The Indian Express said that it had been given a video-disc containing footage of Dilip Singh Judeo, a central minister, accepting cash. The Express printed stills from that footage but it was the TV channels, which could show the video, that really finished Judeo off. Though he tried, at first, to suggest that the footage was faked, Judeo later changed his story to claim that the money had been given for a good cause and that anyway, even Mahatma Gandhi took money for politics. He was asked to resign from the Central government, regardless.

The Express would not reveal how it acquired the footage – nor was it under any moral obligation to do so – but there was also a disappointing lack of detail surrounding the expose. Who was paying Judeo off? What was the quid pro quo? None of this was made clear.

 

 

It was suggested that the money was in return for mining rights. Pramod Mahajan later disputed this version and said that Judeo had been told that the money was a donation towards his crusade to convert tribals to Hinduism.

When nobody came forward to confirm either version, it seemed clear that the whole thing had been a sting. A room had been booked at Delhi’s Taj Mahal Hotel under an assumed name, video equipment installed in this room and Judeo set up. The minister’s own unwillingness to name the people who had given him the money tended to strengthen the suspicion that he had been the victim of a sting.

But who had planned the sting? The BJP claimed that it was Judeo’s opponent in state politics, the then Congress Chief Minister of Chhattisgarh, Ajit Jogi. Preliminary investigations by the CBI tend to support this hypothesis and certainly, among politicians in Chhattisgarh, it is regarded as certain that Jogi and his son were behind the video-disc.

But Jogi was soon to be the victim of another sting – this one directed against him.

After it was clear that the Congress had lost the assembly election in Chhattisgarh, Jogi tried to split the BJP. He approached BJP MLAs who appeared to agree to his blandishments.

 

 

In actual fact, they reported the matter to their party leadership. According to Deputy Prime Minister L.K. Advani, he approved a sting operation and asked Law Minister Arun Jaitley to take it forward.

The Chhattisgarh MLAs asked Jogi for money and then secretly tape-recorded the negotiations. Eventually, Jogi and his son drove up with Rs 45 lakh in cash. The MLAs took the money but rushed back to Jaitley.

The Law Minister then held a press conference at which he played the tapes and displayed the money handed over by Jogi. The same night, Sonia Gandhi suspended Jogi from primary membership of the Congress party.

Both the Judeo operation and the Jogi episode were clearly sting operations. While the Judeo video-disc appears to have been produced by politicians, there is certainly no doubt that the Jogi tapes were recorded with the connivance of the BJP leadership.

In both cases politicians conducted sting operations that involved lying, acting, pretending and secret recorders – all things that journalists are still reluctant to do in the aftermath of Tehelka.

That is the third Tehelka paradox – a method available to journalists to trap politicians has been rejected by journalists but eagerly adopted by politicians to trap each other.

Which brings us to the fourth paradox: the BJP’s moral about-turn on the issue of sting operations.

 

 

In its more reasoned responses to Operation West End (as distinct from the hysterical responses when the whole thing was dismissed as an ISI operation), the BJP-NDA establishment made several points. These included the following.

1) All sting operations involve making people commit crimes that they would not otherwise have committed and are therefore immoral. When the Judeo video was released, the BJP dismissed it as ‘a Tehelka-tape sting operation’, using Tehelka as a term of abuse.

2) There are serious privacy issues in taping people without their knowledge.

3) All tapes can be doctored so there should be no rush to judgment till the tapes have been authenticated.

4) In any sting operation, the motives of those who conduct the operation are as important as (or even more important) than the results of the sting. Thus the Commission investigating Operation West End was told to devote equal attention to Tehelka’s motives and the sources of its funding. In the Judeo case, the video-disc was held to be meaningless because it was the work of Jogi and son who, clearly, had an axe to grind.

All four positions now stand invalidated. Either that or the BJP is guilty of immorality in the Jogi case.

According to the BJP, all stings are immoral. And yet, no less a person than L.K. Advani okayed the Jogi sting. All of the BJPs rhetoric about hidden cameras and secret tape recorders being violations of privacy has now been overturned by the tapes made without Jogi’s knowledge.

Even the caution about doctored tapes has been abandoned. L.K. Advani was quick to dismiss the Jogi episode as ‘the most shameful episode in the history of our democracy’ (and all this time we thought that the destruction of the Babri Masjid deserved that distinction!) The CBI quickly registered a case against Jogi (there is still no FIR against Bangaru Laxman, forgot about Judeo).

 

 

And finally, all the self-righteous guff about motives being the key has now been forgotten. The old argument that it didn’t matter what the Tehelka tapes told us about Bangaru or Jaya Jaitly because Tehelka was functioning as an agent of the Hindujas/Subhash Chandra/stock market operators/arms dealers (strike out as applicable) has been dumped. So has the claim that the Judeo video lacked credibility because it had been made by Jogi who had an axe to grind.

In this case, everybody in the BJP who was involved in the Jogi tapes had, almost by definition, an axe to grind: they were out to trap a political opponent.

Using the BJP’s own standards, this should make the Jogi tapes meaningless or morally invalid. But, of course, those standards have now been reversed.

So those are the four paradoxes of Tehelka. Everybody accepts that this was the greatest investigative story of our times and yet few journalists will attempt to adopt its methods; that the targets of Tehelka flourish while Tehelka itself has closed down; that while journalists have steered clear of stinging politicians, the politicians themselves are happy to sting each other; and that the BJP which once told us how immoral Tehelka’s methods were has used exactly the same techniques to trap Ajit Jogi.

It’s a funny old world we live in, isn’t it?