Dubious defence deals have time and again been at the centre of a political storm. However, it was Tehelka sting, ‘Operation Westend’ that exposed murky defence deals in January 2001 and rocked the nation. Now nearly 20 years after the sensational sting operation by Tehelka, the former Samata Party president Jaya Jaitly and two others have been convicted by a CBI court. This is all you need to know about this sting operation.
The genesis of this case lies in the sting operation “Operation West End”, conducted by news website Tehelka in 2000-2001 to show corruption in defence procurement, and made public in mid-March 2001. Now on July 21, 2020, in a nearly 20-year-old graft case related to a purported defence deal that stemmed from a sensational sting operation by Tehelka, the Special CBI judge Virender Bhat has held the former President of Samata Party, Jaya Jaitly, her former party colleague Gopal Pacherwal and Major General (retired) SP Murgai guilty of corruption and criminal conspiracy. The court is scheduled to hear arguments on quantum of sentence later.
Jaya Jaitly was a close aide of former Union Defence Minister, George Fernandes and had to resign as President of Samata Party after the Tehelka expose. Tehelka’s Operation West End came in public domain when its CDs were made public. Top functionaries of the Defence Ministry and Defence Officers were seen accepting gifts and cash from the reporters of Tehelka who posed as representatives of a fictitious firm West End International based at London. The reporters posing as representatives of defence firm were pitching for orders from the Army for some products.
According to the CBI charge- sheet, Jaya Jaitly entered into a criminal conspiracy with Murgai, Surekha and Pacherwal in 2000-01 and obtained 2 lakh as gratification for herself or for any other person from Mathew Samuel, representative of fictitious firm M/s Westend International, London. In its July 21 order, the CBI Court observed that Jaya Jaitly accepted 2 lakh from journalist, Mathew Samuel, who posted as a representative of the fictitious company Westend International. On his part, Murgai received 20,000. The court observed that she (Jaya Jaitly) did it with the “motive to exercise influence upon public servants in the matter to get supply orders from the Ministry of Defence for equipment for the firm”.Jaitly, Pacherwal and Murgai — were convicted of the offence of conspiracy (Section 120-B IPC) read with Section 9 (Taking gratification, for exercise of personal influence with public servant) of Prevention of Corruption (PC) Act. It is alleged that a number of payments were made to Murgai for his service in this regard and a sum of 1 lakh was paid to Surekha for his assistance in the matter.
The CBI Court held that “from the evidence lead by the prosecution it is proved beyond doubt that in the meeting in the hotel room on December 25, 2000, Surekha and Murgai assured their assistance to Samuel in procuring letter of evaluation for the product of his company from the Ministry of Defence and also to arrange a meeting between him and accused Jaya Jaitly who would provide political cover to them in this regard.” The CBI Court order says, “Thus there had been an agreement between them to obtain the evaluation letter for the concerned product by illegal means i.e. by resorting to corruption and personal influence upon the concerned officials. Such kind of agreement was clearly tantamount to offence of conspiracy”.
In that meeting, which took place in the official residence of the then Union Minister for Defence, George Fernandes, Samuel was introduced to Jaitly as a businessman whose company intends to enter the market of defence procurement.
The judge observed, “Samuel offered the sum of 2 lakh to Jaitly who instructed him to handover the money to Pacherwal and accordingly, the money was received by accused Pacherwal knowing that it was bribe money. In lieu thereof, Jaitly assured Samuel that in case the product of his company is not considered, she would intervene by making a request to ‘Sahib’ (purportedly Fernandes) to send a word to the concerned officer in this regard.”
The Court observed that both the accused Pacherwal and Jaitley, having joined the conspiracy at a later point of time with the knowledge about the object and having agreed to perform the task assigned to them towards its fulfillment, are also guilty of the offence of conspiracy. It said. “Jaitly received a sum of 2 lakhs through Pacherwal from Samuel as a motive/reward for agreeing to accomplish the task given to her to exert personal influence upon the concerned Ministers/Officers in pushing the product of the company of Samuel into the Indian Army.” Similarly, Murgai received a sum of 20,000 from Samuel on January 4, 2000, for the assistance rendered by him in arranging a meeting with Jaitly and securing letter of evaluation for the product of the company by exercise of personal influence upon the concerned officers, the court noted. “Therefore, both of them have committed offence envisaged under Section 9 of the PC Act,” it said.
Operation West End
Launched in 2000, Tehelka created sensation when it released video footage of its first major sting operation, “Operation West End.” The videos showed several defense officials and politicians accepting cash and gifts and being entertained in five star hotels. Tehelka had two reporters pose as arms dealers peddling “fourth generation thermal hand held cameras” on behalf of a British company. This scandal pushed the government into an immediate crisis after the Tehelka undercover operation.
Tehelka created a fictitious London based arms manufacturing company- West End International. The Sting journalists from Tehelka began their operation first approaching in the Defence Ministry, Senior Section Officer P. Sashi who was bribed to take the team to Brigadier Anil Sehgal who was then the Deputy Director in Directorate General of Ordnance and Supply (DGOS). After the meeting, Brigadier Sehgal allegedly demanded 200,000 to give documents related to the procurement of hand-held thermal cameras and other equipment that the company was interested in supplying to the Indian Army. After accepting the money, Brigadier Sehgal said on spy camera that the company would have to pay to everyone including the then defence minister. On December 23, 2000, the Tehelka team held its first meeting with the then BJP chief Bangaru Laxman. On March 13, 2001. Tehelka released CDs of the sting operation and Bangaru Laxman had to resign. The defence minister George Fernandes and his party president Jaya Jaitly also resigned.
A transcript of the Sting video
The sting begins with the then Senior Section Officer in Ministry of Defence, P Sashi Menon.
◆ TEHELKA: Now you have to find a way out of this…. What are you giving me today? You are giving me something just now?
◆ SASHI: I can take out that other directory, you know…binoculars and specifications and catalogue and colour this thing…resolution.
◆ TEHELKA: You have not brought anything now?
◆ SASHI: That guy is doing like that…I told him I’ll return it. There are his notes in it also. The note that the DG…the General has written.
◆ SASHI: Process. And what has our General written? “Why we should process?” Something like that. It is still kept there. I want to replace it. I told the boss, and he asked me, “If he will replace it, but will he do it so soon? All right, as you wish. If you want to take it, you take it. If something comes out of it, good…”
◆ TEHELKA: Achha, there are some scales too.
◆ TEHELKA: That is the quantity?
◆ SASHI: One battalion; 300 quantity. We have 360 battalions. One battalion; 36 quantity…36 piece for one battalion. So we have 360 battalion. 360 into 3.
◆ Shashi Menon after accepting money takes Tehelka team to Brigadier Anil Sehgal, then then Deputy Director in DGOS.
Reclaiming investigative journalism in India
By Tarun J Tejpal
THE MOST UNUSUAL story I heard during the four most unusual weeks of my life came to me from a cameraman, an Indian who visited my office in March 2001 with an American journalistic crew to talk to us about our defence exposé, “Operation West End.” After the last question had been asked and answered and the interviewer was switching to a loose and chatty mode, the cameraman, winding up his wires, said tentatively, “Sir, I want to tell you a story before we go. It’ll only take a couple of minutes.” The cameraman had just come back from the backwaters of eastern Uttar Pradesh, after visiting his village in Jaunpur. There, as in the cities, the chaupal conversations had revolved around the Tehelka exposé that had grabbed the imagination of India. But there was an interesting difference. The villagers had no understanding of the medium the exposé had taken place in. They had seen it on television; they’d read it up in the papers; but they knew there was a new kind of entity that was responsible for the story. And they were clueless about it, clueless about dot coms and the world wide web. There was absolutely nothing in their experience or their imagination that could help them make any sense of a website or the internet. So they had conjured up a construct. Tehelka, for them, was a kind of x-ray machine which exposed naked anyone’s corruptions the moment they came in front of it. The talk there, said the cameraman from Jaunpur, was that this, the threat of the corruption-exposing machine, was the reason the prime minister had not appeared in public for the first few days after the scam broke. Nothing had prepared us for the avalanche triggered by Operation West End. For months we had known that we had chanced upon a story of great gravity and impact. For months our dread had grown steadily as it became increasingly clear that this was not a story that stopped at a given point and offered itself up for analysis, criticism and policing. It was a story that went all the way to the top, and left little scope for face-saving manoeuvres. We couldn’t get one part of the governmental hierarchy to police another, inferior, part of it: by indicting everyone we were risking taking on everyone, the entire system, all of government. My standard line to Aniruddha Bahal, who masterminded the investigation used to be, “We’ll blow the whistle, but who’s going to police this?”
Faced with this spectre, we decided to keep our eyes close to the ground: maintain a narrow frame of reference, purely journalistic; not worry about consequences; stay with the story,
just the story, and deliver it the moment it was done. So there were two reasons we were not prepared for the scale of the fallout. One, we deliberately kept ourselves from thinking about it. And, two, like the residents of Jaunpur, there was nothing in our experience that could have helped us anticipate it.
OPERATION WEST End began in a quiet, humble way. In August 2000, Aniruddha Bahal, coming off the disappointment of a major scoop he had been working on for the last three months (it had seen him disappear for weeks in pursuit of the story), floated the idea of an investigation into the dubious nature of defence purchases, and the general porousness of even a ministry as sensitive as defence. Bahal has the two traits that distinguish outstanding reporters: great moral and physical courage, and a preternatural nose for the rot. When Indian journalists were writing florid accounts of the wondrous deeds of our cricketers, it was Bahal who first smelt the stench of match-fixing. When the establishment was trying to cordon off defence as a holy cow, it was Bahal who intuited that it was no more sacred than the average Indian shrine where the pandas, the keepers of the idol, rip the devotees of their few rupees, converting devotional piety into personal profit. The idea of Operation West End emerged in the context of several events. The most recent provocation had been the fire at the Bharatpur ammunition depot that had trashed crores worth of equipment. Rumour suggested it was a setup to destroy inferior purchases. The other things on our mind were the nagging questions that continued to trail the end of the Kargil war. Both Bahal and I had been at Outlook during the Kargil war, and as the magazine’s managing editor I’d had some role to play in editorial policy on the conflict. Our position had been very clear. During the course of the war we kept our nationalism within the journalistic frame: we were careful to avoid stories and pictures that could demoralise our troops or the war effort. But the moment the conflict was over, we switched to the critical, questioning stance we construed as good journalism and began to ask all the uncomfortable questions that were jumping out at all of us. For us the sum total of the picture was: the troops did a great job, but the leadership, military and civilian, tripped up seriously. Of course, in no time at all, the establishment’s storm troopers were in action trying to obfuscate the questions in a web of denials, countercharges and so on. Yet the questions stuck, and most people were left with the lingering feeling that all was not well with our defence establishment.
The third factor prompting the story was an old one, the fifteen-year old Bofors-fuelled controversy about kickbacks in defence deals. This was a controversy that had ravaged Indian public life for years, and had led in 1989 to a ban on defence middlemen. Since then, different defence ministers, including George Fernandes, had asserted that their inquiries revealed there were no more defence middlemen operating in India. But the truth that everyone of the chattering power elite of Delhi knows is that the city crawls with defence middlemen; that the best farmhouses that gird the city are owned by defence middlemen; the most expensive cars are driven by defence middlemen; the most lavish parties thrown by them. They may work under different guises and label themselves other things, but then no crook nails a plaque on his wall saying “crook.”
IT WAS against the backdrop of all this—Kargil, Bharatpur, the middlemen controversy—that Bahal and his Falstaffian sidekick, Samuel Mathew, an investigative reporter of extraordinary grit and resourcefulness, began their story. Over the course of the first few weeks they did some background sleuthing and chanced upon a defence product that was in queue for purchase. It was something called a hand held thermal camera.
Neither of them knew anything about the product. They downloaded information on it from the net, and with the help of Tehelka’s design department created a brochure for it. They also formed a dummy company and named it West End International. This phase of the operation was full of literary allusions, which nobody picked up. The thermal camera was christened Lepak by Bahal, a reference to the Lepak gun which can glue together formations of fighter planes in the sky that Yossarian waxes about in Catch-22. The logo of West End International was taken from a book-jacket that the design department had made as a dummy presentation for one of VS Naipaul’s books. Armed with this rudimentary paraphernalia, Bahal and Mathew sailed into one of the most audacious journalistic stings ever contrived.
They started at the bottom of the food chain, their first contact being a section officer who earned 2000 Rupees from them. And then before they knew it they were sucked into a web of graft and deal-makers. Over the next few months the soul of the system bared itself open to them. It was an ugly sight, based only on the principle of greed. Everyone — army officers, bureaucrats, defence dealers, politicians — were willing to help push anything as long as there was a kickback in the offing. The avarice was completely transparent: percentages and commissions were openly discussed; help of all kinds in circumventing the system was generously offered; in a spirit of camaraderie, secrets of other dubious deals were served up; credentials were established by flaunting rosters of personal corruption. There was no trace of shame, no intrusions of conscience.
Tyros in matters of defence hardware, totally ignorant of the subtleties of financial skulduggery, Bahal and Mathew — particularly Mathew — made enough gaffes to provide moments of pure slapstick. In one meeting, asked about West End’s bank, Mathew replied Thomas Cook. On another occasion he described the head office of the company as based in Manchester United. My own favourite is his answer to a question about the range of the thermal binocular. “Unlimited,” said Mathew cheerily. “Unlimited?” goggled the interlocutor. “Well, it blurs after a point,” admitted Mathew. Arundhati Roy’s favourite moment is Mathew’s description of the product range of his company — which, he said, was involved in “making typical type of bombs.” To my mind, there are only two explanations for this incredible lack of discernment on the part of those who manned the defence gravy train. The first is that the greed was so blinding that they could see nothing else. The second is that deals of this kind were so quotidian, so everyday, that there was no reason for anyone to suspect anything. Nevertheless, this was no vaudeville affair, starring a couple of bumbling reporters.
The truth is that Bahal and Mathew planned each sting with meticulous care (neither took a single day off for six months). Bahal would give thorough briefings to Mathew, who carried out most of the stings. The devices would be checked and re-checked (in the knowledge that they could land one set of confessions, or capture the transaction of a deal, only once). The venues would be recceed in advance. They would tick off detailed checklists (which grew more elaborate as the cast of characters increased and with it the possibilities of an unintentional gaffe). And having done all that, both of them would turn to God. Before every operation, Mathew would visit the church, and Bahal would nip into a temple. Even with God on their side, Bahal and Mathew had to display exceptional courage. People keep asking me about the cameras the team used. But it was hardly rocket science. The cameras were just low-end devices which can be purchased or put together at any electronics outlet. The key was the gumption of those who used them. Had they been discovered at any point the consequences would have been very serious. You only have to imagine what might have happened if Mathew had been caught out at the defence minister’s house, all wired up.
THERE WAS continual tension, and it mounted with every passing month as the final contours of the story began to reveal itself. By the time Bahal and Mathew had nailed Bangaru Laxman and walked out of his room with a demand for $30,000 (US) ringing in their ears, it was January 2000, and the story had pretty much played itself out. To proceed any further we needed two things: more money, and the actual product — the thermal hand held camera. And since we had neither, the curtains were pulled down on the fieldwork by the middle of January, and the tedious task of transcribing, scripting and editing the evidence began.
Two large rooms in our office were cordoned off, their windows blacked out with opaque cardboard. Till now a mere half dozen of us in the office had known of the investigation; now fifteen staffers were handpicked from different departments — television, investigations team, and Tehelka — and conscripted for transcribing the almost ninety hours of tape. This entire team worked around the clock, in shifts, in total secrecy with Bahal administering the omerta every day. No sooner did the thick bound transcripts begin to emerge than Bahal began to script the story. When edited, the first cut clocked in at over seven hours. Bahal then took another go at it, and ruthlessly hacked it down to a little over four hours. The general consensus was that even this was too long for anyone to sit through. With song, dance, hero, heroine, villain, a Hindi film could become tedious at under three hours. Our earlier investigation, Fallen Heroes, into matchfixing in cricket, had been just an hour-and-a-half long and had the attraction of starring famous players, and a subject everyone was crazy about. In the case of Operation West End, the dramatis personae consisted largely of unknowns, and the subject matter was far less accessible and exciting. Faced by this we took a decision that strengthened our belief and resolve in what we were doing. We decided the story was far too serious and went beyond the normal issues of mass media: viewer interest, accessibility, attention spans, and so on. We decided we would give the story the space it needed to establish itself. If it needed more than four hours to play out and prove its findings, then so be it. (That decision was to prove critical. It freed us up. Over the coming weeks as the odds against us mounted, as pressures of funding, friends, foes, ethics, motives, legal notices, threats, phone tapping, surveillance grew, we took refuge in the calm certainty of the story. We were journalists and had done a journalistic investigation and that, in sum, was it. All the other shrapnel flying around couldn’t damage that core truth.)
The final tape was ready by the afternoon of 12 March. In less than 24 hours, on the afternoon of 13th March, we broke the story, screening it in the ballroom of the Imperial Hotel in Connaught Place. The screening was scheduled for 1.30pm. The editors at Tehelka arrived at nine at the Tehelka office and began to punch the phones. I made a couple of mandatory calls, one each to Amitabh Bachchan and Shankar Sharma of First Global, our first round investors. Neither was told the details of the story; just that we were breaking a very important story in the afternoon. We had gotten so far, but we were still worried. In a display of amazing commitment the twenty odd people who had worked on preparing the tapes had maintained the omerta, but there was always the fear of the last minute slip. The same morning I also went and personally met half a dozen important people — none of them politicians. We may have been naive but we were not so foolish as to be unaware of the sheer gravity of what we were doing. We were also not unaware of the entrenched and vested interests our story would end up hurting. I felt the need to make sure that nothing — no envy or doubt — muddied the story once it broke. I also felt the need to rally the good behind us.
We were on tenterhooks till the screening actually began. About 300 people, among them retired generals, bureaucrats, media people, and then as word spread, politicians — showed up for the screening, not quite sure what to expect. And then as the tapes began to roll, as the story of Operation West End began to seep into the public domain, the tension began to flow out of us. Now nothing could pre-empt us, nothing could trip up the story. For better or worse, it would soon cease to be our sole and onerous responsibility. Our work was over. The story was out there, and was now everyone’s duty and responsibility.
IT DIDN’T quite turn out like that. True, the story did dominate the public domain, and ended up being claimed by everybody — politicians, public, media. But, sadly, it did not get quite as detached from us as we had imagined. At the press conference, after screening the investigation, we had made it clear that as far as we were concerned our role was over. We had followed a story, it had turned out to be a good story, we had broken it, and we were now out of it — the politics of it did not concern us. We also said we did not set out to get any politician, the story led us there: it led the reporters to Bangaru Laxman and Jaya Jaitly, characters who didn’t exist for us when the story began. We also said that we had nothing against the BJP or the Samata Party. We were sure that, 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. The problems we’d unearthed were endemic, and a wake-up call to everyone.
We repeated our independent stance ad nauseam over the next many weeks, but nobody listened. 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 admired — 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. Above all, it was a story about corruption and decay. This was not like the Bofors controversy, or dozens of other similar ones. 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 no web of confusing arguments and grey 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, there 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 fat cats cutting dubious deals worth hundreds of crores in Delhi. Then to deny it all, to try and slither past a people waiting for some answers, was, in my opinion, a grave mistake. The naked must be honest: there is some explanation and redemption in that.
In the long run, I don’t think the Tehelka exposé did the then ruling party — the BJP — as much damage as its handling of the entire affair, its rather sad response to the tapes. The spectacle of a much-loved prime minister evading and then denying vivid proof of corruption was a diminishing one. It was a wounding reminder that we must never expect too much of our leaders. 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 action, we at least still need words. When we get neither, we are left with nothing.
YET, UNEXPECTEDLY, we may be left with something. We gave our own explanations — What were our motives? Purely journalistic. Our affiliations? Neither political nor commercial. Our ownership? Owned and managed by media professionals. Our funding? Venture capital. Our methodology? Legitimate, time-tested; reporters and spycams. Our ethics? We did not pry into anyone’s private life; we only exposed the abuse of public money and public office. But, 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 KR 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. We believe that. All we did was a story. The staggering goodwill we received, the tsunami of reactions that followed, have constituted the most humbling experience of our lives. To be stopped on the road, in restaurants, airports and be thanked by unknown people is 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 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 ugly? Or is it that personal and public degeneration have finally hit a critical mass?
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 VP Singh fought the 1989 election on the Bofors controversy — corruption has been a non-issue. It seemed as if we’d given up on it. But suddenly it has come to dominate private and public discourse. Touring the breadth of the country in the run-up to the general elections, Sonia Gandhi relentlessly evoked the story of Tehelka in her public speeches. It played its part in the Congress victory. At least we see corruption once again — even if fleetingly — for the aberration it is. The second 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 occupied several senior editorial positions in this period). It’s a nice thought that if Indian journalism broke four 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 an essentially scrappy, adversarial role that should not be diluted. (Curiously, in the weeks following the story any number of white journalists who came to see me would ask why India never had any sexual scandals. For me the answer is simple: we are a very poor country, and in the hierarchy of scandals, the only really important ones are financial. 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. Similarly, my fellow-journalists inevitably deliver the coup de grace and ask me, what can be done? How can the rot 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 in 2000 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 1990s by a combination of satellite television, colour pages in the newspapers, and the first giddiness of liberal consumerism. And also by the co-options of politics and business: by the end of the 90s, 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 was a journalist of the early 1980s, I made some loud claims about trying to bring back the hard journalism of that time — a decade when all the major issues of the day were centred in the public domain by print journalists. Not just centred, but scrapped and fought over. It has been a long, arduous and exhilarating five years at Tehelka. There are things we’ve managed to pull off, and others that have bested us. And then there have been things we could have never bargained for. In the last five years Tehelka has fought the grimmest of battles to survive a relentless onslaught from the state; and daily legal and money problems. While Indians of all hues supported us, not one showed the courage to come forward and invest a rupee in us. We begged, borrowed, stood our ground and soldiered on. Our offices were finally shut down in December 2003; and Tehelka was reduced from a high of 125 employees to no more than six. The few of us remaining carried out a nationwide campaign for a full year to raise money through advance subscriptions to create the Tehelka weekly paper, a paper committed to wearing the glasses of public interest journalism; of being aligned to the founding principles of India — of liberalism, secularism, and democracy. Nearly 15,000 Indians wrote up advance subscription cheques to fund the creation of the paper. Today the paper is already 72 issues old; it has a staff of 150 people again; some of the finest journalists work for it; and it continues to practise aggressive public interest journalism, including sting operations. In the meantime, some of us continue to live under security cover; and the main jail at Delhi harbours six contract criminals commissioned to kill us. But this is not what we think about. We are still obsessed with 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. Operation West End is over; Operation Hang-In-There is also over; Operation Succeed-and-Keep-Doing-More-of-the-Same is now on. Like the residents of Jaunpur, there is nothing in our experience or imagination that can tell us how it will all finally unfold.
letters@tehelka.com
