[Reader-list] Tehelka

[William Mazzarella]

In the wake of the piece on Tehelka.com/Operation West End recently posted 
by Anjali Sagar, I'm sending a short essay that I wrote recently on the 
affair. This is a work in progress, and I hope to be generating a longer 
version over the next year or so. All comments welcome.

best

William

Suitcase Men and Honey Traps: Tehelka.com and the New Economy of Information
William Mazzarella
Department of Anthropology
University of Chicago
[draft, November 2002; do not quote without permission]
1.
I wrote this paper in order to begin exploring the notion that censorship 
and practices of cultural regulation are, on one level, contests over 
different economies of information. One of the effects of the information 
technology boom in India during the last ten years or so has been to 
reposition government as ‘governance,’ specifically, as I discuss here, 
‘e-governance.’ What this means is a depoliticized mode of administration, 
facilitated by computerization, which takes its cues from corporate 
management theory, but which is at the same time able to appropriate the 
activist rhetorics of transparency and freedom of information. In effect, 
what emerges is a strange kind of censorship that comes disguised as full 
disclosure.
On March 13, 2001 a scandalous spectacle splashed across the Indian mass 
media. One commentator succinctly outlined the substance of the event as 
follows: “Two journalists, Aniruddha Bahal and Mathew Samuel, posed as 
agents from a fictitious arms company called West End. They hawked a 
non-existent product  hand-held thermal cameras  to the Defence Ministry, 
and paid money to the president of the [ruling] BJP, bureaucrats and army 
men to push the deal through. They [
] captured all transactions on a 
spycam and exhibited the footage at a press conference. They had almost 
sold a product they didn’t have to the Government of India” (N Singh 2002).
         The sting was carried out by an up and coming Indian news website 
called Tehelka.com. Tehelka, a word that denotes the kind of tumult that a 
sensation or scandal might produce, had already made waves the year before 
when it broke a story about match-fixing in that holiest of Indian holies, 
cricket. Its target this time, the defence establishment, was only 
marginally less sacred  particularly in the wake of the patriotic frenzy 
that had swept the mainstream media during the Kargil border war of 1999.
         Operation West End, the name Tehelka gave its latest project, was 
quickly dismissed in some quarters. After an initial period when it looked 
like the entire edifice of the government might collapse  the almost 
instant resignations of Defence Minister George Fernandes, BJP President 
Bangaru Laxman, and Samata Party chief Jaya Jaitley  it was quickly back to 
business as usual. Fernandes was soon reinstated (he had in fact never been 
caught on tape), and the Commission instituted to investigate the sting 
dragged on and on to diminishing public interest. The impeccably gritty 
investigative credentials of the journalists at Tehelka  who, for a while, 
received all kinds of adulatory plaudits and awards from the media 
industry  were sullied when it emerged, in August 2001, that they had used 
prostitutes  a.k.a. ‘honey traps’  to smooth their transactions with the 
‘suitcase men’ that had taken their bribes. Was it allowable to “pimp in 
the public interest,” as one commentator put it (Swamy 2001)? And aside 
from the methods, were the revelations themselves particularly stunning? 
Operation West End had brought top-level corruption into full view, to be 
sure, but was anyone really surprised?
My argument here is that Operation West End was scandalous, but not because 
it revealed what everybody in any case already knew. Although, as we shall 
see, the aesthetics of the revelation were important, the real obscenity of 
Operation West End was that it publicly disrupted the political 
dispensation that the Indian Government, in tandem with the transnational 
infotech business, had been constructing so laboriously for several years 
under rubrics like ‘the information society,’ ‘the information economy,’ 
and, most specifically ‘e-governance.’ Part consumerist technofetishism 
(known in Indian marketing circles as ‘silicone moksha’), and part 
IT-enabled social development, this dispensation had brought to prominence 
a new kind of leader, exemplified most paradigmatically by the Chief 
Minister of Andhra Pradesh, Chandrababu Naidu, self-described “laptop 
politician.” Borrowing from the business world, Naidu ostentatiously 
dismissed ‘politics’ itself as a necessary evil, as nothing but vested 
interests and blockages, imperfections in the functioning of Bill Gates’ 
frictionless economy, now reborn as the frictionless state. The aim, 
according to one commentator, was “to create an era where online decisions 
replace the file culture of babudom” (Kumar 2000).
The dream of e-governance thrived on a World Bank-approved language of 
‘grass roots democracy’ and ‘transparency.’ But in practice it also 
constructed a two-pronged recipe for depoliticization: on the one hand, a 
mechanized set of ‘citizen services’ that would function as a demonstration 
of the ability of high technology to overcome corruption and vested 
interests  driving licenses, land records, tax payments, all now to be 
computerized, down to the village level. On the other hand, a cult of 
personality powered by carefully managed (and carefully publicized) 
videoconferences between leaders and humble constituents, where the 
breath-stealing spectacle of direct access to the top drowned out any 
questions about the functioning and visibility of mediating political 
institutions.
Breaking into Hindi for added emotive effect during an August 2002 press 
conference, national IT Minister Pramod Mahajan explained that the 
government’s program of village computerization was dil se rather than 
Dilli se  from the heart rather than from Delhi.  But in the midst of all 
the excitement about so-called ‘disintermediation’  the elimination of 
systemically undesirable middlemen  the social, understood as a field of 
everyday contestation, was at risk of being swept away in the name of 
squashing corruption.
The shock of Operation West End, then, was not so much the disclosure of 
corruption per se, but rather the reminder that all the talk of a new 
information age of ‘transparency’ and ‘efficiency’ could in fact serve as a 
cover for a whole informal economy of administration right at the very core 
of the state. For this act of ideological indecency, the Tehelka 
trio  journalists Bahal and Samuel, along with editor-in-chief Tarun 
Tejpal  continues to this day to be punished. While the government has 
weathered the storm, the aftermath of the expose for Tehelka.com has moved 
from celebrity to a grim litany of death threats, intercepted assassins, 
income tax raids, and police harassment.

2.
It was precisely the government’s claim to ‘transparency’ in administration 
that Tehelka seized on to support the aims and methods of the sting. There 
were, of course, a number of ironies here. First, the very term 
‘transparency’ itself, as applied to politics, since ultimately it suggests 
invisibility. Second, the fact of a covert operation claiming to promote 
political transparency centered on the selling of a non-existent technology 
for night vision. According to Tehelka, it was in fact a matter of the 
public power of concrete images. Krishna Prasad, journalist at the portal, 
remarked: “If the corrupt and the criminal have been repeatedly voted back 
into power, it is because 60 per cent of this country is illiterate. They 
couldn’t read all the tomes we wrote. But now they can see what is being 
done to them by their leaders. That can result in a huge tectonic shift in 
perception” (quoted in N Singh 2002).
         The scandal gave rise to a fascinating series of arguments about 
the crucial importance, or alternatively the absolute irrelevance, of the 
event to the interests of the so-called ‘common man.’ I don’t have time to 
go into these here, but it does seem important, since I have raised the 
issue of the visibility of illicit transactions, briefly to address the 
aesthetics of the tapes. Certainly the sight of relatively prominent public 
figures casually trucking in bribes held a certain quasi-pornographic 
fascination when it flashed simultaneously across 14 cable channels 
operated by the Indian Zee TV network. But more shocking was, perhaps, the 
banality of the habitus of these transactions, how precisely it conformed 
to the dramaturgical requirements of Bollywood gangsterism. Some here might 
recall that in the wake of Watergate, one commentator memorably imagined 
Nixon’s conversations with his aides taking place in “the back room of a 
second-rate advertising agency in a suburb of hell” (quoted in Thompson 
2000). Now, in the grand tradition of Bollywood adaptation, Tehelka.com 
brought it all back home masala style: pot-bellied chain-smoking 
powermongers, ‘paid ladies,’ and bottles of Johnny Walker Blue Label. In 
The Guardian, Ian Buruma opined that the sight of party leaders, defence 
officials and fixers going for the cash, the scotch and the call girls was 
“hotter than any Hindi gangster picture” (Buruma 2002). But in fact it was 
not  it was the precise correspondence that was so striking and, perhaps, 
so saddening.
John Thompson, in his book Political Scandal, expands on Erving Goffman’s 
famous distinction between the ‘front’ and ‘back’ regions of social life in 
order to argue that mass mediated scandals often involve a shocking breach 
of the boundaries between the public and the private, the front and the 
back. In the case of Operation West End, however, the obscenity was not 
simply the broadcasting of that which had previously been secret; it was 
also the revelation that the most rarefied domains of national politics 
were conducted according to a surprisingly popular, indeed intimately 
familiar script. Against the common charge that Bollywood film purveys 
idle, socially regressive melodrama, Ashis Nandy (1998) has argued that it 
represents a ‘slum’s eye view of politics.’ But in the wake of Operation 
West End, one might have been forgiven for thinking that Bollywood had 
unexpectedly turned out to be a form of documentary realism.

3.
Since the mid-1980s, as I have written elsewhere, consumerism had operated 
as a metaphor for citizenship in India. But now, the actual processes of 
civic participation were being reworked according to a consumerist script. 
In 2001, IBM published a document entitled ‘Rethinking Government,’ which 
stated: “In acting on the belief that ‘the customer is king,’ the private 
sector has, in effect, set the benchmark that citizens use to evaluate 
government services. Daily, people see examples in the commercial world of 
fast, accurate, courteous service. They know that better service is 
possible, and they wonder why the government can’t seem to deliver it” 
(quoted in Kurup 2001). As an executive of Cisco Systems India put it at a 
Delhi conference later the same year, e-governance was ‘citizen-centric’ 
rather than ‘agency-centric,’ driven by ‘citizen pull’ rather than 
‘bureaucratic push,’ and motivated by ‘empowerment and accountability’ 
rather than ‘command and control.’
What the Tehelka tapes disclosed, however, was a rather different but 
nevertheless highly elaborated economy of information. This was not about 
citizen pull or bureaucratic push; rather, the tapes disclosed a highly 
concrete, but largely covert, calculus of movement, affect, mediation and 
exchange. Rigorously quantitative formulae applied: Deepak Gupta, a 
would-be arms deal fixer, can be seen giving the Tehelka team an on-the-fly 
estimate: “You see, [
] if you want political interference politicians take 
four-five percent, bureaucracy takes two percent, user takes only one 
percent. Eight percent. Maybe one or two percent expenses.” One Major 
General Ahluwalia bluntly explains the going rates of exchange: “Saala, 
[bastard], if you come to my house to meet me on Diwali, you can’t talk 
without bringing Blue Label. If you are talking of bloody making a couple 
of crores of rupees, you can’t give me bloody Black Label, isn’t it?” And 
expanding on this transactional etiquette: “If you’re going to talk about a 
couple of crores, even to say ‘good evening,’ you have to present that 
bloody ‘good evening’ properly.”
Operation West End documented a whole physics of information, one that 
implicitly mocked both the immaculate ideological space of the ‘network 
society,’ and the familiar binary of Freedom of Information versus 
Government Secrecy. Forget bitstreams and ‘flows,’ either local or global; 
bribery might rather establish more or less lasting “linkages,” across 
which files and papers might move. Files move “up” and “down,” as in “Yes, 
Mr. Jain, the file has come down.” At one point during the tapes a 
Lieutenant Colonel Sayal gestures with his hand in regular forward 
intervals to suggest how proper lubrication will ensure the reliable 
movement of files across desks. ‘Canalization fees’ open linkages, while 
payments to those with ‘nuisance value’ ensure that they are not blocked.
At the same time, this covert, highly organic network turned out to be 
driven as much by affective surges as by attentive calibration, 
particularly when it came to the tactically deployed lubricants sex, scotch 
and glamorous television programming. Both the military officers accused of 
taking sexual favours and Tehelka’s journalists were depicted as helpless 
victims of the force of desire. Later, speaking in defence of the officers, 
a cabinet minister asked: “if a woman keeps offering sexual favours to a 
man and if a man finally succumbs then who is morally superior, the woman 
or the man?” (quoted in Sanghvi 2002). Meanwhile, Tehelka’s Bahal told a 
reporter: “When the demand came from the armymen to have prostitutes, we 
were foxed. We resisted it. We were baffled. But the demand was so forceful 
we could not proceed further without catering to their demand” (quoted in 
Bhatt 2001).
The accoutrements of the new consumerism, so often used as indices of 
national progress, now also appeared as a treacherous medium of excitation 
and ethical instability. Giving testimony before the investigative 
commission that was set up in the wake of the scandal, one Brigadier Singh 
explained that “If I had any desire to enjoy the call girl, I could have 
gone ahead as a pretty and young girl had already been pre-positioned by 
Mathew Samuel as a bait and Fashion TV channel had been turned on to induce 
me” (quoted in John 2001). In one video segment, Kaun Banega Crorepati (the 
Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?) is shown revving up the 
atmosphere in the hotel room where the Tehelka team brought together the 
military men and the prostitutes. The host of this show, by the way, was 
none other than Bollywood legend Amitabh Bachchan, who also at that time 
was a board member of Tehelka’s holding company, Buffalo Networks, 
alongside literary luminaries with long experience negotiating the rapids 
of public controversy, V S Naipaul and Khushwant Singh.
The mortification of the military was a crucial element of Operation West 
End, since  despite everything  the military continues, in India, to 
function as a privileged semiotic locus for an ideal of national fortitude 
and austere resilience. This is one part nostalgic reference to a colonial 
model of wax-tipped stiff-lipped rectitude, and one part contemporary 
nuclear-era techno-masculinity. Certainly, the seedy light in which the 
tapes cast the agents of national security was embarrassing. But they also 
highlighted the complicity between the technophilia of the contemporary 
state, with its presumed rationality, and the treacherous erotics of 
consumerist desire.

4.
I have deferred any discussion of the ‘sociology,’ as it were, of the 
circulation of the scandal. But I do want to relate a story that Tarun 
Tejpal, Tehelka.com editor-in-chief, told during the aftermath. Concluding 
one in a long series of television interview, Tejpal fell into conversation 
with a cameraman who had just returned from his natal village. In the 
village, Operation West End had evidently been a source of much conjecture. 
Tejpal relates: “There in the crevices of eastern UP [Uttar Pradesh], the 
denizens had no understanding of the medium the expose had taken place in. 
They had seen it on TV; they had read it up in the papers; [
] they knew 
there was a new kind of entity that was responsible for the story. And they 
were clueless about it, clueless about the dot com 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 device in which subka 
brashtachaar nanga ho jaata hai. A kind of x-ray machine, which exposed 
naked anyone’s corruption 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” (Tejpal 
2001).
         For the moment, I want to put aside the obviously self-serving 
dimensions of this variation on the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes: its 
re-affirmation of the heroism of investigative reporting vis-à-vis the 
public interest, particularly the interest of that portion of the public 
known to political actors as ‘the common man.’ Tejpal puts forward one 
motivated version of this common man’s naïveté. The government, for its 
part, put forward another. Following the scandal, the BJP brought 
truckloads of carefully tutored villagers to rallies in Delhi where they 
obediently told the press things like: “What is a web site? I don’t know 
any web site, we are here to protect our Vajpayee from foreign forces” 
(quoted in Sengupta 2001).
Still, what I like about Tejpal’s vignette is the way, in spite of his 
agenda, it pushes the pious concept of ‘transparency’ to the point of 
parody. It also takes the Internet, this earnestly propounded (and in this 
case, dimly surmised) technology of progress and aims it, with a cackle of 
glee, at a naked premier, fleeing the nation’s television screens in fear 
of the Internet x-ray. To be sure, the assumptions of the story remain, in 
many ways, conventional: the technology itself is mechanical and automatic 
and the corruption it unveils is a state of being rather than a social 
process. The details of what the tapes showed get lost in the fascination 
with their disruptive potential. The Jaunpuri cameraman’s account operates, 
perhaps, as a kind of parodic counterpart to the self-satisfaction of 
governmental video propaganda.
         It is in the area between the earnest face of IT Minister Pramod 
Mahajan speaking dil se on national television and the imagined farce of 
Prime Minister Vajpayee’s anxious nakedness that Operation West End becomes 
important. This is the complex zone of de facto politics, of the ‘human 
factor’ that the ideology of e-governance would seek to eradicate  in the 
name of banishing corruption  as mere ‘human error.’ To repeat, then, a 
strange kind of censorship that comes disguised as full disclosure.



William Mazzarella
Assistant Professor
University of Chicago
Department of Anthropology
1126 E 59th St
Chicago, IL 60637

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