[Reader-list] FW: The rise and fall of Tehelka

[Anjali Sagar]

All the intelligence and courage it took for Tehelka to reveal the bribery
and corruption of India's right wing government has been systematically
destroyed . It is extremely sad but also very frightening.

If any of you would like to gain further insight into how Tehelka managed to
expose these crooks then Anand Patwardhan's film War and Peace will be
screened again at the NFT this month. More information will follow.

Anjali Sagar

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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