Guardian: Website pays price for Indian bribery expose

[Bala Pillai <bala@apic.net>]

The Guardian, London


Website pays price for Indian bribery expose

Luke Harding in New Delhi
Monday January 6, 2003
The Guardian

Tarun Tejpal is sitting amid the ruins of his office. There is
not much left - a few dusty chairs, three computers and a forlorn
air-conditioning unit. "We have sold virtually everything. I've
even flogged the airconditioner," he says dolefully.

Twenty months ago Tejpal, editor in chief of tehelka.com
 , an investigative website, was the
most feted journalist in India. He had just broken one of the
biggest stories in the country's history - an exposÀ of
corruption at the highest levels of government.

His reporters, posing as arms salesmen, had bribed their way into
the home of the defence minister, George Fernandes, and handed
over £3,000 to one of the minister's colleagues. The journalists
found many other people prepared to take money - senior army
officers, bureaucrats, even the president of the ruling Bharatiya
Janata party, who was filmed shovelling the cash into his desk.

The scandal was deeply embarrassing for the BJP prime minister,
Atal Bihari Vajpayee. Mr Vajpayee sacked Mr Fernandes and ordered
a commission of inquiry. The scandal promoted a mood of national
catharsis, and congratulations poured in from ordinary Indians
tired of official corruption. Tehelka, which had only been
launched in June 2000, was receiving 30 million hits a week. But
the glory did not last.

"I had expected a battle. But we had not anticipated its scale,"
Tejpal said yesterday. "The propaganda war started the next day."

Nearly two years later, he has been forced to lay off all but
four of his 120 staff. He has got deeply into debt, sold the
office furniture and scrounged money from friends. "They drop by
for dinner and leave a cheque behind."

The website, which once boasted sites on news, literature, sport
and erotica, is "virtually defunct". George Fernandes, meanwhile,
is again the defence minister.

The saga is a depressing example of how the Kafkaesque weight of
government can be used to crush those who challenge its methods.

In the aftermath of the scandal, the Hindu nationalist-led
government "unleashed" the inland revenue, the enforcement
directorate and the intelligence bureau, India's answer to MI5,
on Tehelka's office in suburban south Delhi.

They did not find anything. Frustrated, the officials started
tearing apart the website's investors. Tehelka's financial
backer, Shanker Sharma, was thrown in jail without charge.

Detectives also held Aniruddha Bahal, the reporter who carried
out the exposÀ, and a colleague, Kumar Badal. Badal is still in
prison.

"It got to the stage that I used to count the number of booze
bottles in my house to make sure there wasn't one more than the
legal quota," Tejpal recalls.

The government commission set up to investigate Operation
West-End, Tehelka's sting, meanwhile, started behaving very
strangely. "The commission didn't cross-examine a single person
found guilty of corruption. It was astonishing," said Tejpal.
Instead, it spent its days rubbishing Tehelka's journalistic
methods.

The official campaign of vilification against the website has
attracted protests from a few of India's prominent liberal
commentators, such as the veteran diplomat Kuldip Nayar and the
respected columnist Tavleen Singh. Tehelka's literary supporters,
who include Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh and VS Naipaul, have
also expressed their outrage. But in general, India's civil
society has reacted with awkwardness and embarrassment to the
website's plight.

"I read all of Franz Kafka when I was 19 and 20, but I only
understand him now," Tejpal wrote in a recent essay in the
magazine Seminar. "He accurately intuited that all power is
essentially implacable and malign."

The treatment of the website's investors has scared away anybody
else from pumping money into Tehelka. The company owes £620,000.
Mr Vajpayee's rightwing government has bounced back from the
scandal and is expected to win the next general election in 2004.
Last month, it won a landslide victory in elections in the
riot-hit western state of Gujarat after campaigning on a
virtually fascist anti-Muslim platform.

The murky world of arms dealing goes on. Tony Blair and his
ministers are still trying to persuade the Indian government to
buy 66 Britishmade Hawk jet trainers, but the billion-pound deal
remains mysteriously stuck over the price.

Tehelka's exposÀ was not about "individuals", but about "systemic
corruption", Tejpal insists. He admits that his sting operation
would have gone down badly with any government, but says that the
BJP's response was venomous. "The degree of pettiness has been
extraordinary. They have a crude understanding of power and a lot
of that stems from the fact they are in power for the first time.
Our struggle is emblematic of a wider issue: can media
organisations be killed off when they criticise governments?".

The gloomy answer appears to be yes. Last night Balbir Punj, a
leading BJP member of parliament, claimed the government had
nothing to do with the website's collapse. "Just because you do a
story exposing the government doesn't mean the gods make you
immortal," he said. "Many other [internet] portals have closed
down. The boom is over."

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