'No qualms about the techniques'

Tarun Tejpal, chief executive and editor of Tehelka.com, spoke to Sukumar Muralidharan on the mechanics and the motivations of one of the most celebrated sting operations in Indian journalism. Excerpts:

Did you ever encounter any resistance to your overtures? Is the system completely porous, or are there points at which resistance could be encountered by somebody seeking to penetrate it?

We actually went through two or three different routes after a point, and all of them were opening up. Finally if we had had enough money - not just the Rs. 10 or 15 lakhs but say Rs. 50 lakhs or a crore - then we could have split open the system.

There were no roadblocks as such but occasionally we would lose a thread. And very often this was because we did not have enough money to throw around. But supposing there was a product and there was enough money to back it, then we could have just worke d our way through anywhere. What used to happen is that somebody used to say bring me 10 lakh or 15 lakhs or 20 lakhs, and our reporter would say okay, here is 20,000 - I will bring you the rest later. If you look at the Bangaru Laxman episode for instan ce, our chaps said they would go back with $30,000 the next day. Now where are we going to get that money? But assuming we had it, then we could have gone back and actually got him on tape accepting that money. But we thought at a point that we had prove n the case well enough.

Have you committed to hand over the entire 100 hours of recordings to the official investigation?

Somebody has to make a formal request before we start considering it. And we will consult our lawyers before doing that.

The Army has made an approach.

From the Army the signals have been terrific: they want to use our evidence to clean up things. We have said that we are willing to cooperate. So I met them and asked for a formal request and then I deposed under oath.

And some of the officers who have been implicated in the tapes were present?

Absolutely. Major-General P.S.K. Choudhary sat through my deposition and he was given a chance to cross-examine me. He had only one question to ask: was I the author of the transcripts, and I said I was not.

How have the signals from the political establishment and the bureaucracy been?

Very disappointing. These people are stonewalling. Jaya Jaitley is going around splitting hairs. And from the Defence Ministry, as far as we are concerned, we have had a deafening silence.

Your reporters were not very well clued into defence matters. Did they at any stage encounter suspicions?

What was astonishing for us was the sheer greed on display. And that is borne out by the fact that these two reporters made so many mistakes. They are both very fine reporters, but they know nothing about military hardware or defence. They made so many g affes, but these chaps were so blinded by money that they did not suspect anything. What I suspect is that for them, these deals are just an everyday occurrence - they are so quotidian that they did not suspect anything wrong.

How did this idea of floating a fictitious company and seeking to sell its wares originate?

That was really Aniruddha's (Tehelka Investigative Team head Aniruddha Bahal) idea. For him it was the Bharatpur ammunition dump fire which really started things off. There was so much of talk that it was a set-up job, that the Army was trying to get rid of bad equipment - so that is what triggered it for him. But then finally it was about defence deals. The Indian political scenario has been dominated for so long by Bofors and other deals. So this is the first time that we have got hard evidence.

But the tapes do not constitute evidence in a legal sense...

Every lawyer who has commented has said that this is primary evidence. If there is a public servant taking money to do something, that is evidence of corruption. This shows the endemic corruption that exists. That was our purpose.

How close were you to having your cover blown?

There were a few skirmishes. The tense period was when the fieldwork finished, which was in the middle of January. From then till the middle of March was a tense phase. There were 15 people working on the transcribing and editing. On March 12, I saw the final edited version and the next day we broke the story.

R.K. Jain has said that he did realise that he had been played for a dupe and had tracked your cars to your office...

That was the most serious skirmish. But then, as with crooks who are caught, they had nowhere to go. So he just sat tight, hoping that it would be a false alarm. Like Bangaru Laxman for example, he actually called Aniruddha's number a couple of times. In one conversation he said that he did not go to the airport to see off the Prime Minister who was going to Vietnam, because he was waiting for us.

Was there ever any hint that you were under surveillance?

From October onwards we had a strong sense that our telephones were being tapped. So Aniruddha and Samuel (Tehelka reporter Mathew Samuel) stopped using their numbered cell-phones and they switched to call cards. But there was no real scare till the ti me Jain's men came following our cars.

There are suggestions that the Department of Company Affairs has been asked to inquire into your sources of finance...

We were told that the Prime Minister's Office had instructed several departments to dig out dirt on us. That is why I held a press conference to release all the company papers - the shareholding, the certificate of incorporation, the board of directors, the resumes of all the directors...

You have a distinguished board of directors. What did they have to say about it?

V.S. Naipaul called from England. And he had a literary-philosophical analysis of what was happening. He spoke about cycles of corruption and civilisation and so on. And Khushwant Singh I went and saw some days ago. I apologised for not informing him, bu t then he said that it was great and we have done a good job. And Amitabh (Bachchan), I did call before I broke the story, because he is the big public figure in India. I told him that we were breaking a big story. He said: can you tell me what the story is? And I said I couldn't. So that was fine. He is too civil to really insist and I have not spoken to him since.

So you have no qualms about the techniques used?

Not at all. I think these people have to be nailed in whatever way. I think the public relations aspect of Indian journalism has to be toned down. We just have to get a little hard.

But the print media, for instance, use different standards of substantiation...

I agree. I keep saying, imagine if this story had broken in print. Even with all this audio-video evidence, they are still stonewalling. If it had been in print, nobody would have given us the time of day.