JEDDAH, 12 October 2004 — Tehelka tapes, which exposed corruption at the highest political level in the BJP-led NDA government three-and-a-half years ago, continue to be in the news. What has happened since then is now widely known. Instead of acting on the expose contained in the tapes, the previous BJP-led NDA government relentlessly harassed Tehelka for exposing corruption. Tehelka’s nearly 100 hours of investigative tapes, shot under the most trying circumstances, was subjected to a legal scrutiny.
Tehelka’s story is about one and only one thing; rampant and endemic corruption in governance and that seems to have been forgotten or ignored by those in power then, says the Tehelka brain, Tarun Jeet Tejpal, who by his own account has lived three lifetimes in three-and-a-half years. Last Monday (Oct. 4), Indian Law Minister H.R. Bharadwaj announced the decision of the ruling Congress-led UPA government not to extend the term for the Justice S.N. Phukan Inquiry Commission looking into the Tehelka tapes, but that the CBI would investigate the Tehelka tapes as they revealed the involvement of “personalities” in the defense deals where bribes had allegedly been given.
In the three-and-a-half years that the Tehelka investigation has dragged on, the commission, first under Justice Venkataswami and then under Justice Phukan, has examined every conceivable issue except the central one that was revealed by Tehelka’s video camera, says Tejpal in an exclusive interview with Arab News. Tejpal, who was in Jeddah to attend a function organized at hotel Holiday Inn by the Aligarh Muslim University Old Boys’ Association (AMUOBA) to mark Sir Syed Day, is confident that he will finally win the battle and continue his campaign against bribery and corruption through the Tehelka weekly tabloid and online newspaper that he edits.
Excerpts from the interview:
Question: What are the new developments in the case of Tehelka tapes?
Answer: I wrote a letter to the prime minister just before I came here which must have reached him today (Thursday). We have made our position clear in that. We have said that we don’t feel elated about the decision (of handing over the case to the CBI) but are glad that the government is making a move on the Tehelka (tapes) issue. All along we have said that we want a fair and just inquiry and fair and just action.
Unfortunately, in the past three-and-a-half years there have been none. There has only been action against us, victimization of us. Even now our stand has been the same. Please have fair and just action. I have written three points for the PM to act on, that he must ensure that all the people who were party to the victimization of Tehelka and First Global must also be brought to book.
Otherwise, they will do this to somebody else tomorrow. So it must go along its logical course. Secondly, we said we don’t want a bailout from the government. We have already been exonerated, as in the past three-and-a-half-years we have been endlessly investigated by the vindictive (NDA) government and in spite of that nothing has been found. We have had an honorable exoneration and the government must declare it as an honorable exoneration after all inquiries instead of bailing us out.
Our motives are clear and nothing has been found. All the government officers who colluded in the witch-hunt against the Tehelka and First Global must all be made accountable. What happens every time is that the government guys always get away with it. We have told them to make sure it does not happen again otherwise they will do this to somebody else.
Thirdly, we have said that we must be compensated for the state abuse we have suffered. The state is mandated to protect the lives and liberty of its citizens. In our case, the state actively and maliciously destroyed our life and liberty. Once the state has admitted that it did that then they must make a proactive gesture of reparation, of compensating us for that.
Q. Do you think the sting operation served its purpose?
A. I have a very simple way of understanding journalistic actions. As journalists, all you can do is to expose and inform. You are not the legislature, you are not the police, you are not the executive, and you are not the judiciary. We should be focused in our role of doing what we have to do. Then other institutions have to kick in. I think Tehelka did what it could do. There was nothing more that we could do. To that extent we are happy.
We stood by our story for nearly four years every day. Whether other institutions kick in is always a question mark. We don’t control them. We have to hope that we have to do our job and others will do their job. The very fact that the Tehelka story after nearly four years still catches the imagination of the Indian people says something for its true potency and power when we tend to forget everything after two days. The Tehelka story after four years shows it has potency and true power. You set in process the deterrence bit by bit. It’s a mistake to be complacent but it is also a mistake to be too impatient.
Change comes gradually. Sometimes it comes cataclysmically, but sometimes it comes bit by bit. We became independent in 1947 not because we started the struggle in 1946. We got it after 50 years struggling for it. So there is a process. There is a process of accretion that goes on. Things like what we did and many others do is part of that process.
Q. In what way were you victimized?
A. It was incredibly a malicious action. The first thing they did was to start an endless propaganda campaign against us...that we were ISI people, that we belonged to the Hindujas, that we belonged to the Congress, that we were crashing the stock market, that we were Dawood Ibrahim’s men.
There was nothing that we were not accused of. There was a constant false propaganda campaign that was going on that the state was carrying out. Then the agencies got into action. The income tax, the Enforcement Directorate, the Intelligence Bureau...every single agency of the government got into the act.
We are basically a media company and we must be the only company in India that has three CBI cases going on against us even now. So there has been constant harassment. The result of the harassment was very, very clear. First thing they did was to ensure that no investor would come anywhere near us. Eventually our offices were shut down and we were dragged into the commission of inquiry. In the commission of inquiry the government took the most immoral stand possible.
Aniruddha (Bahal), (Mathew) Samuel and I deposed before the commission for weeks. For weeks we were cross-examined. Whereas not a single person found guilty of corruption was cross-examined by the government’s law officers. So it was incredibly an immoral stand.
Q. So you had to close down everything?
A. Absolutely. Everything closed down. We had a staff of 120 people and finally we had only four people left. The offices closed down. Then I borrowed a room from a friend of mine and then borrowed another for five months. We built the paper back bit by bit and today we are back with 190 people.
Q. What did you learn from this?
A. Oh, my learning has been endless. I have lived three lifetimes in three-and-a-half years. And I am no longer the journalist or the person I was before we broke the story. You only live through an experience and are not altered fundamentally. I have been fundamentally altered by my experience.
Q. What kind of support did you get from the common man?
A. Incredible. The good will and love was incredible. Wherever I go in India, it is humbling the kind of good will and love we get. We are attributed much more than what we actually did. This tells me that as a society, as a people, we are really desperate for hope. So even if you pinpoint a small ray of hope, people see it as a big floodlight of hope. And we really went through the experience of people giving us immense affection and love.
Q. What did you do after the website was closed down?
A. I was determined. I said I’m not going to lose this. Curiously by then Bollywood producers started coming forward to picturize the Tehelka story. I told them Tehelka story will become a film when my first (newspaper) issue hits the newsstand. I told them I don’t know anything about the Tehelka film but I know the last scene and that is the first issue of Tehelka paper coming out. Because I don’t want these good guys losing a good story. So what I did was to travel up and down India and began to talk to groups of people and asked them to buy advance subscriptions to the paper. I told them we are going to create a weekly paper called Tehelka. I told them you have seen what has happened to us in the pubic domain. I told them we ask you to be part of a small act of citizenship.
In 10 months, by the end of 2003, we had collected enough money to launch the paper. It is not enough to run the paper but we created the paper without any investment, without any funding and there is no parallel in the world where a mass media publication has been created without any investment. Tehelka is (just) that.
The lesson I learned is that if you go forward with some idealism and you touch others’ idealism they will respond. If you have clarity of vision, if you have purity of intent people will come forward and back you. In our case, people did back us. 13,000 to 14,000 people sent us (checks).
Q. What about the tapes being sent to the labs? What has come out of it?
A. For three years they kept attacking us saying the tapes had been doctored.
Every single expert they managed to bring said the tapes are fine. Finally what they did was, two-and-a-half-years later, they sent the tapes to a British forensic expert. They did not tell us who the expert was and which was the lab.
It was sent by the NDA government. Finally, the British expert said the tapes are totally clean. Our story was clean. I told them the tapes were clean and now you have to act on them. If you did not choose to act then that was everybody’s problem. Like I said in my deposition in the court. I told the judge if you look at the tape and find everything is fine and nothing is wrong then let everyone see the tape — the lawyers, media, and the public.
Q. Let us talk from the moralistic point of view. As you know, bribery and corruption is widespread and what you have done is to expose only a few people.
A. It’s a nihilistic argument. But at the end of the day you can do only what you can do. Tehelka exposed what it could. Some others should do what they can.
On March 13, 2001, in my first press conference, I said this story is not about one political party or individual cast or character. In my opinion even if any other political party had been in power (regardless of) the cast, the character, we would still get the same story.
The story is about endemic corruption. And you need to address the system. I imagined (the then Prime Minister) Atal Behari Vajpayee would cover himself in glory by acting on the tapes.
He would then have been the real hero, not I. They could have sent a great message about corruption to government, business, and ordinary citizens.
Instead, it seemed (the policy was) the corrupt are OK but those who expose them are the ones they’ll target. All agencies were after us. Even if there was one single bone (leave alone a skeleton) in our cupboard, they would have cleaned us out.
Q. What happened to you, I am sure must have happened to a lot of people.
A. I don’t want that to be the story. The story is we came back and we succeeded. If we don’t, if we die then nobody will undertake a story like this again. Which is the reason we need to succeed. We have to make sure we don’t die.
Q. What plans do you have now?
A. We are still doing what the Tehelka tapes did. The weekly newspaper is breaking stories. It broke 20 stories in six months. Our website is also on. And there are more (stories) in the pipeline.
In a country like India the website can never be a tool for battle. Only a paper or a TV channel can be a tool. I was using other people’s platforms to wage a battle. The paper is critical. It makes it possible to wage a war.
