MUTHALIK AND TEHELKA: THE BAD AND THE UGLY

Pramod Muthalik is in the news again. This time for allegedly demanding Rs 60 lakhs for staging riots across Karnataka. A little over a year back too he had hit the headlines after members of his Ram Sene beat up some boys and girls who were having a good time in a pub in Mangalore.

This self-proclaimed defender of the Hindu faith needs to be dealt with severely, and an example set. On this score there is little scope for disagreement. The government of Karnataka --"BJP's Karnataka" as the media likes to call it, to subtly influence minds against the party -- needs to show resolve and demonstrate to the nation that Muthalik and his goons are not sleeping with leaders of the BJP as many allege.

But, hang on. The story is not a simple one of the good guys and the bad, both easily identifiable. There is a serious twist here. The good guys, who are self-proclaimed defenders of secularism, are also not what they appear to be. They are manifestly hit men who are executing one more deadly mission for an undisclosed consideration.

The 'good' guys are from Tehelka, India's premier sting outfit that also publishes a weekly, and that bolted into prominence in 2001 with that famous hidden camera clip of the then BJP President Bangaru Laxman receiving a Rs one lakh bribe from journalists posing to be defence dealers. Till then India had not seen the likes of YSR Reddy, Madhu Koda, Shashi Tharoor etc and, above all, the Telecom Raja who, as per a tweet, steals not in rupees but in percentage of GDP! That is why all hell broke loose in the media then. Laxman lost his job within a day and the BJP power in the election that followed. A job well done.

In 2007, Tehelka came up with what the Congress thought was another winner in Gujarat. Its sting operation showed various BJP leaders talking about and instigating the 2002 riots that followed the burning of a railway coach carrying Kar Sevaks at Godhra. Unfortunately, it could find nothing whatsoever to nail Narendra Modi. Even more importantly, the sting inadvertently put to death the canard that was being spread by some political parties that the Godhra incident was an accident and that the riots that followed were pre-planned by Modi. The outcome, naturally, was exactly the opposite of what Tehelka was tasked to ensure: Modi won.

In 2009, a few months before the general elections, Tehelka was in action again though not through a sting. This time it was its journalist Nisha Susan who started the Pink Chaddi Campaign to collect and send panties to Muthalik for the above mentioned Mangalore pub incident. Needless to add, the entire media went ballistic and for many days it appeared as if the biggest challenge that India was facing was not from terrorism that had claimed many lives but from Muthalik who was against girls going to and drinking in pubs. How many votes it cost the BJP will never be known, but the party's performance in the elections was disastrous.

Now it is Muthalik again, caught asking for Rs 60 lakhs by Tehelka's camera.

The Congress has been in power since 2004. During this period, many a scandal has surfaced, rivetted the nation's attention and then mysteriously disappeared, without any proof having been found to nail anyone. Many opposition leaders have also been hounded on some serious corruption charges. All kinds of allegations have been made against them but the CBI, after snapping at them like a ferocious Rottweiler, has invariably turned into a docile Labrador at politically critical moments. No wonder BJP President Nitin Gadkari could find no better 'muhavra' to describe the condition of some opposition leaders, leading to, as the Times of India put it so well, howls of protest!

Corruption is now a reality on an unprecedented scale at the highest echelons of the government. But do we hear even a whimper? On the contrary, Barkha Dutt says she has become shock-proof to it. What that means and what that says about the integrity levels of journalists is not difficult to figure. What is of even greater significance, shocking in fact, is that Tehelka has not done a single sting on any Congress minister or senior party leader, much less on a scale and at the level that it did against the NDA government. In six long years. Even during these years, it has focused primarily on the BJP and outfits whose deeds can spoil the image of that party.

Can this be a mere coincidence? Or is there something more to it? Tarun Tejpal is the editor of Tehelka. As a journalist, he should have learnt how to at least pretend to be politically neutral. He did that too for a long time. But the victory of the Congress party in 2009 apparently gave him so much of personal joy, for reasons not yet known, that he could not control himself from writing a demeaning open letter in praise of Sonia Gandhi. I had written a post on it then itself. The same is reproduced below. Read it and them decide what Tehelka is and what kind of media rot it represents.

Muthalik is bad, no doubt. But, as you will soon find, Tehelka is ugly.
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Last year, some of us were surprised when someone who once wanted to become the Secretary General of the United Nations wrote in glowing praise of Sonia Gandhi. No one was in any doubt then that Shashi Tharoor was using Time magazine to bend over in such a manner only because he saw in it a fail-safe ticket to get into the Congress party and then into the government. And that is precisely what has happened with his appointment as a junior minister in India's Foreign Office.

While Tharoor's objective was clearly visible and somewhat justifiable too, considering the culture of the Congress party, how does one explain the unbelievably despicable level to which a journalist famous for passing off his sordid and politically motivated sting operations as exercises in public morality, has sunk to in his lowly endeavour to endear himself to, yes, Sonia Gandhi? In perhaps a first for Indian journalists - and that is saying a lot considering the lot we have - Tarun J Tejpal, editor of Tehelka, has crossed every possible red line that separates journalism and political sycophancy.

In an open letter “to the unlikely woman whose tenacity in staying the course changed the contours of Indian politics”, this paragon of secularism not only belittles India's many gods but lays obscene praise at her feet, including her famous 'renunciation' of the PM's post, by - hold your breath - crediting it to Tenth Commandment (Though shall not covet) of the "extra god" that he says she has brought along with her from Italy! Quoting Mathew's exhortation in 10:7, he lays bare his deeply ingrained religious and political hatred for the "devils", "the bigots who divide us" and the ones "who have taken a fourth of our dominions".

He does not stop here. Craftily, he even roots for dynastic rule and Rahul Gandhi: "No doubt with the help of your extra god, you have done a fine job of bringing up your son. He has humility, decorum, diligence, and he takes the long and inclusive view. We do not like the idea of dynasty, but we abhor the idea of divisiveness more". And then he drops the inevitable big bombshell, not wanting to take even the slightest risk of being found wanting along any dimension: "And yes, as I bid you speed and strength, with the extra god by your side, may I make a final plea. You have given us of yourself, and of your son. Now will you kindly also give unto us your luminous daughter"!

Now you know why this angel of morality and ethics and values and integrity lay silent for the five years that the Congress was in power. Now you know why no sting operation that could taint the government in any manner was done by Tehelka. Tejpal was not alone in this deceit. You would have noticed that it was only after the elections that the media suddenly started openly talking about "wet/ATM" ministries where big money had been made by ministers; DMK was also openly called "Delhi Money for Karunanidhi" and roundly criticised for becoming a family business, conveniently forgetting that the Congress was exactly that in Delhi. Why was everyone quiet for five years while DMK ministers were allegedly looting their ministries openly? Why the noise after the elections? It does not take great imagination to understand that the media brought all the muck into public glare only to embarrass the DMK and pressure it to give up its demands for all these lucrative ministries again! Poor Congressmen couldn't be made to suffer for another five years in "dry" ministries, could they?

Make any amount of money, loot the nation, do anything, but don't do anything that annoys or harms mommy. That is the credo that seems to be guiding the likes of Tejpal. Saving Sonia is more important than saving India. Cut that bullshit of the devil that you want India to see elsewhere, Tejpal; we can see him in you.

Remember how Tehelka did the original sting when the BJP was in power and crowed about its dishonest party President who was filmed receiving Rs 1 lakh in cash? Remember how Defence Minister George Fernandes, an absolutely honest man, was hounded by the Congress for corruption without even a shred of evidence except that some money was paid by Tejpal's flunkies to Jaya Jaitley in his residence? Remember how just before the Assembly elections in Gujarat, Tehelka did another sting on Narendra Modi solely to ensure that the Congress party won? Who can forget the recent Pink Chaddi campaign launched by one of Tejpal's reporters to bring the Congress back on track in Karnataka? I will not be surprised if that sting on Varun Gandhi was also done by Tejpal, to literally force Muslims into the arms of the Congress in UP. As is well known now, that did happen. Of course credit for that has, expectedly, been given to the genius of Rahul Gandhi.

Doing sting operations is a costly and time consuming affair, particularly if they are aimed at getting stunning political rewards for your political masters. Many, many stings have to be done before you get the kind of dramatic result that you are looking for in just one of them. One can only imagine the kind of effort that Tejpal's Tehelka hounds must have put in over the years to bring windfall gains for the Congress party, while pretending to be on a great unbiased and selfless national mission. No prizes for guessing where the huge funding and possibly more could have come from, for long years.

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal has exposed the rampant corruption that is prevalent in India's media. Apparently nothing comes for free. If you want coverage, you have to pay for it. And in the many cases where the media are closely aligned to a particular party, if you have a contrary view, you may not be covered even if you pay. The problem must be really serious if the WSJ sees "reporters, editors and newspaper owners holding the democratic process to ransom." That is why Paul Beckett is compelled to observe that a "corrupt press is both symptom and perpetrator of a rotten democracy".

Tarun Tejpal manifestly represents all that is rotten and stinking in India's media. Unfortunately he is not alone. There are many smug faces you can see out there, some hiding behind beards like him, who appear to be using the same route to riches and power. Recently in a TV discussion about Indian money in Swiss banks, Kapil Sibal, if my memory serves me right, told off a clever TV anchor that there were people even from the media who had parked ill-gotten money there. The problem is clearly far more serious than the glimpse that has been given in the WSJ.

When Shashi Tharoor sucks up to Sonia, everyone knows that like a seasoned bureaucrat, he is using that powerful, even if demeaning, tool to get rehabilitated respectably in India. But when a hardcore journalist like Tejpal crosses every single boundary of self-respect and honesty to do so, you have to question his motive.

Has this lick ass article been written out of gratitude for an overdose of Swiss fragrance received for a job well done or is it another you-pay-I-write job? Whatever it be, there is little doubt that it is a very loud signal that India's media and its democracy are far more rotten than ordinary Indians suspect.
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ND TIWARI: MUCH MORE THAN A SEX SCANDAL

Narayan Dutt Tiwari, one of the old war horses of the Congress, has finally been sent to the stables, horseshoes removed. At the ripe old age of 86, he has revealed a streak that tells the world that the land of Kamasutra has not lost its vigour and more behind closed doors. But, more than that, he has reopened the debate on whether private lives of politicians should be open to scrutiny.

For decades there has been an unspoken understanding between the media and politicians that their private lives will not be hung out in the open for all to see. The standard argument is that what they do in their bedrooms is nobody's business. No one can fault this line about privacy. Indians are largely indifferent to this aspect of the demeanour of India's politicians since nothing really damaging about them has ever been revealed by mainstream media. But all that may change now, thanks to a Telugu TV channel, ABN Andhra Jyothi.

ND Tiwari's romps with prostitutes - a thrice a day routine, according to some - in the Raj Bhavan has graphically highlighted that the media has failed to perform an important national duty. A man who has been a cabinet minister in the Central government, Chief Minister thrice and now Governor, has been doing this and more for decades. Why did the media not expose him for so long? Why did his colleagues in the Congress, as well as politicians from other parties, overlook this streak in him?

Do our law makers not have an obligation to abide by the laws they frame and expect all Indians to follow or face punishment? If Raj Bhavans and other government bungalows are being openly used by politicians to entertain themselves and their friends with call girls and social birds, then why should the media carry out sting operations to round up the latter up only when they are plying the same trade with ordinary Indians elsewhere? How can the real breaking news remain no news and the insignificant news be routinely treated as breaking?

Let us take the case of Tiwari. Firstly, it is impossible that he would have paid for his daily 'exercises' from his own pocket. All expenses would have been 'adjusted' under some head or the other of the tax payer's money. Second, it is a given that as CM and Union Finance Minister, he must have been provided with - even demanded - top-quality call girls by business houses, contractors etc to get undue favours out of him. Third, it is very likely that on more than one occasion in life, he would even have been blackmailed into taking important decisions against his better judgment and the interest of the state. In short, probity was an immediate casualty. And remained so for many decades.

I am not willing to believe that the media is innocently unaware of these and even more far-reaching ramifications of private lives of political leaders. Yet, it chooses to look the other way. Why? Is it because they are all naked in the same hamam? Is it because the media wants to, in the case of politicians alone, go by a value system that some leading media stars personally live by? Why is it that, along this dimension, they do not blindly ape standards set by the US?

Permissive Americans are surprisingly moral when it comes to their leaders. The reason, as we all know, is straightforward. They expect those who lead their nation to possess the strength of character that they believe is required for the job. A man who breaks the trust of his wife cannot be trusted to not break that of America. It is not about sex. That is one reason why the brilliant Bill Clinton nearly got impeached. That is why so many Presidential candidates have withdrawn from the race in the past when a girl friend or mistress has been discovered. We are not even talking prostitutes.

ND Tiwari is not the only politician who has been breaking the trust of India's people. There are many others. The fact that India's media has continued to shield them while conning the nation with the fodder of stings in dance bars and other seedy places, is something that is equally, if not more, disturbing than than the acts of politicians.

The speed with which Tiwari has resigned and the manner in which the Congress has quickly taken the high moral ground, after a half-century of being in his bed, should leave no one in any doubt about the kind of behaviour that is expected by India from its leaders. Had it been otherwise, everyone would have claimed that Tiwari's sleeping with three girls is not India's business!

But, despite Tiwari quitting swiftly, is anything likely to change? Barkha Dutt sees ND Tiwari only as 'a sick sexual deviant'. Rajdeep Sardesai is actually thrilled that Tiwari has proved that 'life begins at 85!' More importantly, Dutt continues to see this as only a sex scandal, questioning still whether mainstream media should cover it. Sardesai admits that Tiwari's predilections were known for long but claims that 'so long as it didn't affect his public duties, it wasn't an issue'!

Who are we kidding? Is it ever possible to so surgically separate the public from the private? Is history not replete with instances of sex being used as an extremely powerful strategic, political and business weapon, often to settle near-intractable issues coercively? Given how corrupt India's political leaders are - Shekhar Gupta calls them plunderers - are we to swallow the manifestly dishonest line that they have kept their sexual escapades away from their public duties and decision-making? Are we to shut ourselves to the clear and present danger of such behaviour carrying within it the seed of disaster along any number of dimensions?

God knows what price India has already paid because of this indulgent looking away. There will undoubtedly be much more to pay if things continue this way. It is time for the media to wake up, shed its blinkers and start looking at the private lives of netas from, among other things, a national interest and security perspective. This is not something that can be frivolously dismissed as just a sex scandal or a personal matter. The private faces of politicians need to be scrutinised in great detail and compared with their public ones. Unless that is done, it will not be possible to ensure that a mismatch between the two does not lead to serious consequences for the nation.

CAPITAL PUNISHMENT, NOT GAIN, FOR THE CORRUPT

India, thanks to the unshackling of the long suppressed dynamism and competitiveness shown by India Inc, is now looking to achieve what China has done, thanks to the pride and vision displayed by its political leadership.

The Chinese leadership is completely focused on taking the country forward to the top of the global heap. In the pursuit of this objective, it has recognized that corruption is the one retardant that can not only sour its dream but also stain national character in a manner that can cause unacceptable damage in the long term.

In China, the nation be proud, corruption is frowned upon and deterred by capital punishment.

In India, on the other hand, in the face of ever increasing scandals involving our politicians and bureaucrats, governments continue to endorse provisions that only embolden them to continue blatantly with their corrupt practices with little fear of being held accountable.

In India, the nation be damned, corruption is looked upon with respect and rewarded with capital gain.

As per Section 19 of the Prevention of Corruption Act (PCA), prior sanction of an appropriate authority is required for prosecuting a public servant. This provision was meant to prevent malicious prosecution of public figures and public servants but has been used by both the Central and State governments to withhold sanctions for prosecuting in thousands of cases involving corruption. The latest and most ignominious case is that of the Governor of UP refusing to sanction prosecution of Mayawati in the famous Taj corridor case, despite the views of the Supreme Court. Getting Mayawati’s support for its Presidential candidate was more important to the Congress party than fair execution of the rule of law.

Astonishingly, this protection covers corrupt public servants for life! Permission of the government is required to prosecute even retired government servants accused of corruption while they were in service. The Netas and babus, the combo that occupies almost the complete space that constitutes the state, have quite unashamedly made corruption their unquestionable right. Can you find a precedent in any other nation except small, insignificant and rotten banana fiefdoms pretending to be countries?

Of course, considering how far this country has traveled on the road of corruption, there is some merit in the government not shedding this power. It fears, and quite rightly, that then the investigating agencies, even the judiciary, will start demanding their piece of the often huge pie! Corruption will not reduce; only the beneficiaries will change and the government’s power will reduce!

Why do you think the much touted police reforms are not being implemented despite the directions of the Supreme Court? First, the proposal to insulate police from politicians and have fixed tenure for police officers will take away the only weapon that politicians have with them to control police officers and bureaucrats: the power to give or deny financially lucrative appointments.

By dexterous cadre management which has made the hierarchical structure a completely laughable and dysfunctional joke, high speed and virtually guaranteed career progression has already been assured. Don’t be surprised if you find an officer of DGP rank and equivalent in the IAS, being appointed to look after something as insignificant as staff quarters of about a dozen people! That is the kind of ridiculous rank structure which this greedy and mindless race has spawned and will do so in future too. That is also where the catch is: you may get the rank, but the real moolah is limited to some appointments only! And the power to post them to such mouth wateringly lucrative appointments is the only lever which allows politicians to keep police officers and bureaucrats under control!

Why do you think these guys feel no shame in prostrating before politicians physically in full public view? Money matters infinitely more than self respect based on rank and authorized salary!

If this power is taken away from politicians will things improve, as many knowledgeable insiders and innocent outsiders will have you believe? Not at all; only the power brokers will change. The politicians might become more vulnerable but policemen and bureaucrats will have almost absolute power, and therefore absolute corruption, in their hands. That is a situation which the nation can ill afford to find itself in. Fortunately, that is a risk politicians will also never take, though for all the wrong reasons!

There has been an almost never-ending debate about the correlation between corruption and salaries. The innocent and the crooked both seem to agree that an increase in the poor salaries that government servants get will reduce corruption! Little do they know or want you to know, respectively, that for the corrupt in the government, salary is not even small change! The will ask for more always, but will never become honest.

How can a police constable who has to pay a huge sum of money to get the job be honest? He has paid upfront in the full knowledge that he will ‘recover’ many times that amount in his career. Almost a decade back, the unofficial going rate to get into the Provincial Civil Service (PCS) in a state was about Rs 25 lakhs! Extrapolate that into the ‘earnings’ that are available to a PCS officer, and it will take little arithmetic to realize that these guys are actually earning much more than many top executives slogging their backsides off in the corporate world! Still, our government servants, never ones to miss out on any opportunity to increase their wealth without any attendant risk or effort, are now demanding salaries at par with them!

A couple of recent incidents may give you a vague idea of the stakes involved in this murky business and the extent of the rot. Yesterday itself, a few Delhi policemen led by a low ranked ASI were arrested for taking a bribe of Rs 20 lakh from 'kidney king' Dr Amit, to let go his accomplice Upender Aggarwal whom they had picked up with the precise motive of extracting a ransom! Every one knows that the shocking kidney transplant racket that has been going for years could not have flourished without greasing the ever-stretched palms of politicians and senior police officers and bureaucrats. Now if an ASI can extort Rs 20 lakhs, take a guess on how much those at the top of the heap would have demanded and got! Again in Delhi, a sting done on cops taking bribes from Blueline bus operators whose buses kill one citizen daily, has resulted in the Delhi High Court asking the Central Vigilance Commission to take action in 89 cases caught on tape. There are also reports that many of these killer buses are owned by policemen!

Remember the famous Tehelka sting operation on corruption in Defence deals? What happened after all those sensational revelations? Military officers who were caught on camera were punished, even imprisoned, after speedy trials. What about the bureaucrats who were similarly caught? You guessed it. They are still going strong in service, pursuing their business with undiminished vigour!

You can bet your unmentionable that even if our policemen and bureaucrats, from bottom to top, were given a token salary of only Rs 1 per annum, the rush to get the jobs will remain as strong as it is now. Those dropping out will primarily be the few who do not yet know about the pot of dirty gold that awaits them, a pot that will make most corporate executives look like very poor cousins.

In a live show on a television channel some months back, a former Cabinet Secretary, the senior most bureaucrat of the country, had no qualms in saying almost with pride that corruption had become totally pervasive, almost a right, and that nothing would come out of any investigation done on any high ranking officer in the government. This the real face of the famed "steel frame" that is now the unabashedly corrupt "steal frame" of an India that wants to reclaim its place as one of the great nations of the world, a face that should shame us and our civilization.

No matter what our outstanding leaders of industry achieve for the country, no matter what our military leaders do to protect their much sidelined institution from this spreading rot, India simply cannot become a great nation unless this scum that has risen to the top is removed before it corrupts its core completely.

Capital punishment may well be the only way to deter the corrupt who are in the government for capital gain.

1984 ANTI SIKH RIOTS: THE REAL TEHELKA

It was on October 29 that I had written about the Tehelka expose on the riots in Gujarat, which showed a number of people on hidden cameras boasting and saying many horrific things about what they had done during the riots which had engulfed Gujarat in 2002. These riots had taken place in reaction to a railway coach full of Hindu pilgrims being burnt, allegedly by Muslim fundamentalists, at Godhra, killing all of them.

I had then asked the question which had been begging to be asked but had been ignored by the politicians and the media: Were the Gujarat riots of 2002 any different from the anti Sikh riots that had engulfed Delhi in 1984 after Indira Gandhi was assassinated, when thousands of Sikhs were lynched, burnt and mercilessly butchered?

Everyone seemed to have conveniently forgotten the shame of 1984, particularly the Congress party, which with the help of its sponsored media friends, was gleefully all set to politically destroy Narendra Modi for his involvement in the riots of Gujarat. The party had also thought that through Tehelka it had got a golden opportunity to prove its ‘secular’ credentials to the minorities by exposing the ugly face of Hindu communalists.

I had expressed my reservations about the success of this strategy and had even gone to the extent of saying that the flame lit by Tehelka, instead of burning Modi, had made him almost invincible in Gujarat, something which was clear to all except perhaps those cocooned in Delhi. I had also felt that Tehelka, ironically, also had possibly provided the BJP with an almost unbeatable Prime Ministerial candidate for the forthcoming general elections.

The full post may be read here.

I had no way of knowing then that within a couple of days, 1984 riots would be back on centre stage with a bang to haunt the Congress and turn the Tehelka table on them decisively.

On November 1, 2007, the 23^rd anniversary of the anti Sikh carnage in Delhi, CNN-IBN disclosed to the world that a new book, When a Tree Shook Delhi, which leveled serious charges against top Congress leaders for their involvement and participation in the riots, was going to be released later this week.

In their program ‘Face the Nation’, the host, Sagarika Ghose had this to say:”November 1, 1984, a massacre began. Over 3,000 Sikhs were hacked to death. But the police and the Government looked the other way. Commission after Commission whitewashes the guilt of the accused. Now 23 years later a new book nails the guilty in chilling detail.”

Then she asked almost the same question that I had in my post:” Is the Congress as guilty over the 1984 riots as the BJP in Gujarat?”

Ghose spoke to the authors, journalist Manoj Mitta and lawyer HS Phoolka, and the Congress spokesman Abhishek Manu Singhvi and raised very disturbing questions which had Singhvi virtually groping for answers, which were clearly not there.

The lively, disturbing and revealing debate can be viewed and read here.

The mass reaction in Gujarat to the killing of innocent pilgrims was, as I had stated in my earlier post, no different from the mass madness that had gripped Delhi after the assassination of Indira Gandhi. Tehelka had also unwittingly established beyond any doubt that the Hindus of Gujarat truly believed that the railway coach full of Hindu pilgrims was set ablaze by Muslim fundamentalists, killing all those who were inside. There was no pre planned Hindutva conspiracy behind the riots.

The disconnected leaders and their SWOT analysts who had planned the Tehelka sting had, not surprisingly, not factored in the ordinary man on the street, while planning and executing the expose, which they thought would bring to them great political advantages.

I had said then itself that to the ordinary Indian, you can’t say, “Genocide is fine if my mom is killed; it is heinous if faceless Indians are!”

That answer was given just as I had sensed by citizens to CNN-IBN. In the SMS poll conducted by the channel to the question,” Is the Congress as guilty over the 1984 riots as the BJP in Gujarat?”, 93 percent said ‘Yes’ while only 7 percent said ‘No’.

It may now be the turn of Narendra Modi to laugh at the Congress for a victory it has handed over to him so foolishly. For the ordinary citizen, however, there is no reason to celebrate. No matter who wins, the disturbing fact which has emerged yet again is that our leaders will stop at almost nothing in their desperation to win the next election.

The common man is only an expendable pawn.

TEHELKA UNEARTHS A PRIME MINISTER

In olden days, when kings and emperors ruled India, varying and intricate structures and channels were used to receive regular feedback about the health of the subjects, officials and enemies of the state. Yet, the one method which was invariably employed by all kings was that of direct feedback. Frequently, kings would travel incognito to various parts of their kingdom to get the real, authentic, unfiltered and unfettered pulse of the people in the course of their normal lives. Needless to add that these visits were often critical in ensuring the well being, even survival of their kingdoms.

In the India of today, most of our rulers and leaders have almost forgotten the value of such direct contact with ordinary people. Some have even lost the ability to communicate and mingle with the masses and touch their hearts and minds. The focus seems to be on often a grotesquely vulgar display of ‘leadership’ through pompous motorcades and heavy posses of gun totting guards, designed to generate ‘shock and awe’, rather than fond respect and love among ordinary citizens.

Because of this disconnect with the people, our leaders have become critically dependent on even more disconnected advisors and pliant organs of state, to decide on political strategies to win the next election at any cost. After the opening up of the media, some media moghuls have also become an inseparable part of this phenomenon, adding their bit of motivated advice and analysis from the comfort of their homes, which are even farther away from the dust and dirt of the real India which votes.

Can anyone recall the last time a national leader traveled by train to a distant corner of India or lived among ordinary people?

In this battleground of increasingly and often destructively competitive politics, people seem to have been forgotten. The focus is now almost completely on attracting votes by trying to expose political opponents in the hope that a small but critically decisive number of voters will be compelled to vote for you out of the timely disenchantment that has been created against the opponents.

The recent Tehelka expose on the riots in Gujarat in 2002, just before the impending elections there, has all the elements of a politically initiated program of winning the next elections by using such a disruptive strategy. Many believe that the timing and content of the expose, and its foreknowledge by many Congress leaders, suggests that this sting was a party job to defeat the BJP, perceived as the principal political threat.

Some great SWOT analysis has gone into preparing this strategy in the rarified comfort of Delhi. Where this SWOT analysis has gone horribly wrong is that the real target of this analysis, the Indian on the street has been kept firmly out of the loop. The main reason, as has been stated above, is that our leaders are just ordinary politicians who want to rule but have forgotten to be leaders, or are not capable of becoming real leaders.

The Tehelka tapes have shown some disturbing footage of people boasting and saying many horrific things, not knowing that they were speaking to a hidden camera. This is causing a great deal of outrage in the media, and in some NGOs always on the lookout for an issue to remain in the limelight. A number of columns are being written by famously sponsored writers, asking for Narendra Modi’s head, by calling him a criminal, a butcher of Muslims etc. The Congress leadership in Delhi is also perhaps gloating that finally they have ‘got him’.

What do the people on the street think? Is what has been shown on Tehelka any less horrifying than what happened during the anti Sikh riots, particularly in Delhi, after the assassination of Indira Gandhi, when thousands of Sikhs were, burnt, lynched and mercilessly butchered by ordinary citizens, right in the capital of India? Weren’t then many Congress leaders, instigated by the top leadership of the party, at the forefront of the mass massacres?

The then Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi, whose mother had fallen to bullets, had even publicly defended what had happened saying,” When a big tree falls, the earth is bound to shake”.

What he would have felt, expected and said privately at the death of his mother in the heat of those tragic moments would perhaps have been even more inflammatory than what Modi has been quoted as saying by some people after the Godhra incident. Does it require anything except dishonesty to also know that had those involved in the 1984 riots been caught on hidden cameras, they would have sounded equally, if not more, belligerent, boastful and unrepentant of what they had done during those few days of mass frenzy?

The nation as a whole, including the Sikhs, over time has shown great wisdom by realizing that what had turned sane, ordinary men into killers then were circumstances, and an irrational and emotive mass response, beyond which the nation had to move on. Of course, every one knows that Congress leaders who led the massacres have been shielded and rewarded till now, to the extent that Dr Manmohan Singh even inducted one of the publicly known prime accused as a minister in his cabinet. Of course, he was symbolically asked to resign subsequently because an inquiry finally blamed him after more than two decades.

Assuming that Godhra was orchestrated by fundamentalists, what is it that they would have been saying to each other while planning and executing that horrific mass burning, which sparked off the equally condemnable reaction? What do you think terrorists are being told by their tutors, or what their supporters and sympathizers, including unexposed mainstream politicians, are saying privately among themselves?

The public knows all this better than politicians, who sometimes, even when they know, pretend not to. People, like in 1984, also always knew what the tapes have shown. They are not outraged, as the laptop analysts had thought they would be.

On the contrary, the expose has effectively nailed a couple of theories which were being propagated by some dim wits pretending to be clever. The Hindutva brigade of Gujarat had clearly not pre-planned any riots before the Godhra incident took place. Godhra was not orchestrated by Hindus to incite riots.

Tehelka has unwittingly established beyond any doubt that the Hindus of Gujarat truly believed that the railway coach full of Hindu pilgrims was set ablaze by Muslim fundamentalists, killing all those who were inside.

The mass reaction in Gujarat to the killing of innocent pilgrims was, thus, no different from the mass reaction that gripped Delhi after the assassination of Indira Gandhi. To the ordinary Indian, you can’t say, “Genocide is fine if my mom is killed; it is heinous if faceless Indians are!”

Tehelka has, tragically for those who conceived and executed the sting, achieved the exact opposite of what it wanted to. It has effectively killed the strong rebellion that was building up against Modi within the BJP in Gujarat, and taken the wind out of the sails of the Congress party there, now more afraid than ever to criticize him for fear of facing a disastrous electoral defeat.

How did the SWOT analysts of the Congress and their media friends completely forget that Rajiv Gandhi had won a mammoth majority in Parliament immediately after the riots in Delhi? Did not almost the whole of India feel then that the insanity, encouraged by the Prime Minister, which led to the killing of more than a thousand Sikhs, was to them an expression of a fair instant mass justice demanded by circumstance?

Rajiv Gandhi, despite that massive mandate, lost in the next elections, primarily because he could not provide the kind of governance that people expected from him. Similarly, the BJP, after the high of the Ram Janambhoomi Babri Masjid issue, was not able to make further headway, because its claim of being a party with a difference took a knock with a poor record of governance, which enabled regional parties to emerge stronger than ever before.

Narendra Modi, on the other hand, has not been shaken from power simply because he is personally honest and has ceaselessly worked for the economic development of Gujarat and its people. It is in fact one of the wonders of the political landscape of India that not even his worst detractors, minutely dissecting his every twitch, have been able to lay a finger on his performance, when almost everywhere else, all sorts of muck is surfacing with disturbing regularity.

By raking up the riots in Gujarat now, all that the think tank behind Tehelka has achieved is refreshing the memories of the hurt, the anger, the divide, the fear and the insanity which had gripped Gujarat in 2002.

The need of the hour, a national responsibility, is the repair and healing of communal relations, not reopening of old wounds. Will, for example, any useful purpose be served by doing a similar sting operation on the 1984 riots? But, to some of our politicians, no cost seems to be too great for the satiation of their lust for power. The ordinary, forgotten Indian understands these sordid games.

That the flame lit by Tehelka, instead of burning Modi, has made him almost invincible in Gujarat is clear to all except perhaps those cocooned in Delhi. What it may well have done nationally for the BJP has perhaps not yet been fully comprehended.

Tehelka, ironically, may also have provided the party with an almost unbeatable Prime Ministerial candidate for the forthcoming general elections.

SINK STING OPERATIONS THAT STINK

On more sting operation looking like a stink operation: facts distorted, lies peddled, reputation decimated, all to settle personal scores. http://hindustantimes.com/storypage/storypage.aspx?id=20d41cb0-46ba-4361-a220-2f8ec2f9d566&&Headline=Sting+backfires%3a+girl+held+for+cheating

The ‘Live India’ channel ‘expose’ about a Delhi school teacher running a prostitution racket of girls of her school has itself got exposed in turn. The girl posing as the victimized schoolgirl has turned out to be an aspiring journalist! Apparently, the accused lady teacher has been made to pay a very heavy price for owing some money to someone who found this unpardonable way of taking personal revenge.

A few months back, there was an expose on NDTV, of prominent lawyers, in the famous BMW hit and run case. Everyone was shocked at what was shown, ordinary citizens genuinely because they simply have no idea of the extent of the rot. Shock was expressed by ‘insiders’ too, though they have known for decades what has been going on, perhaps have been involved themselves similarly without getting caught. When the likes of Kapil Sibal, Manu Singhvi etc, displayed their ‘outrage’ and called for strict action and reforms, one was amazed. These guys have flourishing legal practice, are senior members and spokesmen of a leading political party, and yet can say with a straight face that the whole system badly needs to be overhauled, only when quizzed on TV. What have they done on their own so far, despite having reasonable political power, to initiate any steps to clean up the mess? Can they do anything? Why not?

NDTV’s three major exposes have been the Jessica Lall, Nitish Katara and the BMW cases. Notice the similarities? All three are conveniently from Delhi, put middle level politicians in the dock and involve studio-friendly English speaking people. While the first two concern murder and may have been justifiably exposed, the BMW case certainly does not fall in that category meriting a sting operation suo moto by a news channel, followed by hours and hours of airtime on it, even when Rajasthan was burning due to the agitation by Gujjars wanting to become STs. NDTV also did a sting operation on a selected few, yes, Delhi schools which were demanding capitation fees. On what basis were the schools chosen, when everyone knows how widely prevalent this practice is almost everywhere? Was it also done to settle some personal scores, as in the latest case mentioned above? In any case, had it been a fair operation, the first schools on the list should have the Junior and Senior Modern schools, about whom Barkha Dutt knows first hand!

Then there was an expose on Aaj Tak involving the DG Police of Maharashtra in a land scam. A former Cabinet Secretary, no less, openly admitted on the channel that no action would probably be taken, as the whole system had, over the years, come to accept corruption at the highest bureaucratic and political levels as an integral part of public life, almost as if it was a right. When the senior most civil servant of the country so candidly expresses his helplessness at stemming the rot in the system, it should jolt all concerned citizens. When the rot is so pervasive at the very top, what do you expect to find elsewhere? But what happens? There is just no reaction from the media, in the know of this sad state of affairs more than all of us. And, as expected, there is no follow up of the case by the media and the DGP will get away quietly.

Muck will surface in any sting operation conducted in 99.9% matters involving politicians, government officials, defence officers, businessmen, you name them. Is it a mere coincidence that such operations never ever focus on the fountainheads? Has any channel tried exposing top guns like the Gandhis, Mulayam, Advani, Mayawati, Paswan, Badal, Chautala, Ambani etc? Why go for political minnows and petty officials alone? Is it because the channels need to protect and further their business interests and ensure the personal safety of their stars that they cannot simply afford to annoy the real bigwigs?

Who decides the subject to be chosen for an expose by the media? Are their any objective guidelines to ensure, as far as possible, that there is no unnecessary violation of privacy and defamation of individuals whose reputations get decimated instantly? And that the matter merits exposure on national media in such manner for the larger good of the society/probity in public life etc? Is there any mechanism to check the unbridled race to get higher TRPs/sales?

So far, it appears that, exceptions apart, the media has far exceeded its brief and gone overboard in trying to be become a super judiciary beyond scrutiny of any authority in the country. Some media luminaries also are clearly on a huge power trip to hound craftily selected middle-level politicians and place themselves on pedestals beyond their reach, but safely below those who can retaliate with greater force, to whom they obsequiously bow. The hidden agenda of some sections of the media seems to be to virtually terrorize others into accepting the fourth pillar as the real master, the final arbiter of modern India. The mature media of the West, so often misquoted at convenience, does not appear to have inspired our media to follow their high moral, ethical and apolitical standards.

I wish our media shows greater maturity, sincerity and sensitivity in attempting to cleanse the country of the myriad putrid veins that are hurting its body and soul. Sensational and subjective sting operations and exposes may get eyeballs and destroy a few individuals, but little will happen to effect real change. Those not caught will simply continue as before, as any honest and thorough follow-up of previous operations will easily reveal. But then, as the cliché goes, it’s not just the politicians, we have also got the media we deserve.