Life Among the Scorpions

by Jaya Jaitly

  This episode was clearly a conspiracy that cast a huge shadow on my political credentials, character and family. But at the time when all of this was happening, there was not a moment to analyse what was really going on or even if there were dots to connect. It is only in hindsight that the links begin to appear, by which time it is too late. The way by then had already been paved for the subsequent phase of the devilry that Tehelka was to unleash. The Tehelka journalists’ next hit followed a year later in March 2001, exactly two weeks before Ajay and Aditi were, in reality, to be married. Ironic timing again.

  *Non-violent forms of protest that usually involve going without food or water

  18

  ‘WHY SHOULD THE TALIBAN NOT SHOOT YOU?’

  Tehelka Sting II

  IS THE TITLE A TAD overdramatic? Not really, if this was to be compared to another question I was asked over a social media chat that took place in a ‘chat room’ organized by the newly arrived online world. The other question? ‘For how much do you sell your daughter?’ The year? 2001, soon after my role as president of the Samata Party had been ratified in a Party conference in Mysore in January 2001, and my daughter Aditi’s wedding had been fixed to be held on 28 March 2001. The occasion? I was being asked questions across every kind of media after Tehelka (of the match-fixing fame) had exploded a fresh bomb called Operation West End, in which I, among others, was shown supposedly engaging in conspiracy and corruption with arms dealers in the presence of crooks, middlemen and army officers at the residence of Defence Minister George Fernandes. I came up against a cruel mix of a gullible public, misogynists who hate women in politics, a gleeful opposition, the entire sensation-seeking-lynch-mob-oriented media, the usual scandal mongers et al. For them, what could be more ‘atrocious, anti-national, immoral’ and wonderful material for attack, than a woman heading a Party supposedly caught in an act of corruption within a story of ‘how the security of the country was being compromised by greedy politicians’. Worth being interrogated and asked to account for such deeds, if not shot rightaway I would say, had the incident presented by Tehelka, reflected an iota of truth.

  I can afford to sound flippant now. The raw edges have been smoothened, the tears hovering behind my eyelids have dried up, the fierce anger at such perfidy is under control and the utter bewilderment of how such allegations could have been made against me have been overcome by the political challenge and daily practicalities of dealing with it. But I am jumping ahead.

  ~

  It was a quiet afternoon on 15 March 2001. I was in a tiny room in a back lane of Kalkaji in South Delhi, cocooned with Jaswinder, the typesetter, who was helping me design the invitation card for Aditi’s wedding on the computer. It was a small-sized, single-colour printing job on handmade paper. Nothing ostentatious. Ashok Subramaniam, George Fernandes’s private secretary, called me saying, ‘Ma’am, there’s supposedly a huge revelation taking place at a press conference at Imperial Hotel about you and others doing defence deals. You had better come to Sahib’s office immediately.’

  It sounded so outlandish that as usual I laughed out loud, asking, ‘What great revelation? Has someone gone crazy?’

  ‘They claim to have tapes which they are showing. Please come, wherever you are.’

  I reached Raksha Bhavan to find George Fernandes sitting completely still with his forehead wrinkled. He said Parliament was apparently in an uproar because Priya Ranjan Dasmunshi had rushed in saying ‘Gaiyee! Gaiyee! Sarkar gaiyee!’ (Gone! Gone! The government is gone!)

  The tapes were being aired on the television screen in the room. George Fernandes never watched television and was not doing so now. His mind was ticking with whether any security areas were breached, who these people were, and readying for a meeting of his officials to get to the bottom of what was going on. I watched some blurry images of me at a desk talking to unseen people. The claim was I was meeting some representatives of an arms company called West End International, along with a certain General Murgai and others I had never heard of. Aniruddha Bahal’s (the one who had befriended Ajay for the cricket sting) commentary was a seedy story about how everyone in the Ministry of Defence, from the Minister to the underlings, were all corrupt to the hilt.

  ‘I am going to the prime minister to resign,’ George Sahib said.

  I could see what was happening and exploded with anger at what was being perpetrated in the name of investigative journalism—constructing sensational fiction out of innocent conversations filmed in a completely different context in which people were victims of blatant entrapment. Or else, the whole presentation was a huge mistake that would be soon clarified. I did not have to tell George Sahib that I had never engaged in a situation as was being alleged. He knew me too well to even ask. I argued that he should not resign just because people were presenting some nonsense. They are crooks. Catch them, find out how they did all this, was my advice. However, events soon spun out of control.

  Rumours were spread that they had many more tapes which compromised even the prime minister. Press and television vans were chasing us everywhere, pushing us over in the melee. The tapes were shown repeatedly, and meaningless conversations took place accompanied by ugly interpretations. In some scenes, the BJP President Bangaru Laxman was being shown accepting a hundred thousand rupees as a donation for the Party. You could see the currency notes. He indulges in a conversation with them about defence matters. He resigned from his post. For some years after that, his face became a symbol of corruption in Indian politics.

  For four days, George Fernandes insisted on resigning while L.K. Advani and Jaswant Singh advised against it. The media was all over us while George Sahib spent most of his time with his officials at Raksha Bhavan. Party colleagues had come in from across the country to express their solidarity. Sudheendra Kulkarni from the PMO, other friends like R.V. Pandit (who was, apart from being a lifelong friend of Vajpayee and L.K. Advani’s, the former publisher of Imprint and producer of the well-known film Maachis) and my children—all spent long evenings at 3, Krishna Menon Marg discussing what could be done. Pandit and I went to Ram Jethmalani who, along with his juniors, prepared a petition to the Supreme Court requesting it to stay the airing of all the tapes on various television channels till their authenticity was established. The Supreme Court merely said they would take it up later, which of course was of no use, since the tapes were aired on fourteen Zee TV channels soon after. L.K. Advani was saddened by George Fernandes’s insistence to resign. He too was accused of corruption in the Home Ministry, but strangely Tehelka withdrew that story a couple of days later. They preferred to focus entirely on the defence deal story.

  Mamata Banerjee, always self-righteous, promptly jumped off the NDA ship, which the Congress thought was sinking. It is another matter that she did this to benefit in the forthcoming Assembly elections in West Bengal where the Left parties put up posters asking the public, ‘If she could not remain loyal to the NDA, how can you trust her?’ She lost the elections, subsequently returned to the NDA and settled in again. It was however, just for a while, since her sense of secularism seemed to waver in accordance with the electoral benefits she would get.

  Pramod Mahajan and a couple of younger ministers met the prime minister pressing him to let go of the defence minister to deflect accusations against him and save the government from more resignations by other parties and diminishing the strength of the NDA. Obviously, the whole exercise was meant to destabilize the government by hitting at Fernandes, its prime pillar. The prime minister finally gave in and agreed to let George Fernandes resign although there was no intention of leaving the NDA.

  In the meanwhile, Nitish Kumar and other members of our Party approached George Sahib for my resignation as Party president. They were all in his sitting room, while George Fernandes came to me separately to convey their views and told me to address them directly. I was still vociferous that having done no wrong and having been fraudulently represented, I found no reason to resign particularly when no Party m
ember could ever accuse me of corruption. I faced a room of grim-faced, silent men like Nitish Kumar, Prabhunath Singh and Digvijay Singh. I told them that it was a time for them to show solidarity with a woman who had served the Party loyally and honestly since the very beginning without asking for anything in return. Surely it wasn’t the time to leave me by the wayside to fend for myself among the crowds baying for my blood. I argued some more. No one responded. After some minutes of silence, I got up and walked out of the room. I did not resign.

  Political opponents always ask for your resignation at the slightest opportunity. They like to convey that if you don’t resign, you are guilty. But when you do resign, it is treated as an admission of guilt, although it is dressed in a moral cloak to save the face of the so-called offender. You are treated as guilty till proven innocent, the process of which may take decades. The idea of this is to get a person out of the way somehow, irrespective of the lack of evidence, logic, reason or likelihood, irrespective of the person’s lifelong reputation of having maintained their integrity. While being president of the Party did not matter to me, I did not want to get into this tangled trap of appearing guilty irrespective of whether I was or not. I also did not believe in false moral posturing. George Fernandes felt he had to accept responsibility as the person heading the Defence Ministry, irrespective of what the truth was.

  The following day, Jaswant Singh brought the prime minister’s message to the Defence Minister, accepting his resignation. George Fernandes was only too eager to oblige. The Opposition had prevented him from speaking on behalf of his Ministry in the Parliament. This was an atrocious tactic of the opposition since they were preventing an elected person responsible for securing India’s borders from discharging his duty towards the people of India. It has been their habit to obstruct the truth rather than arrive at it through a people’s democratic platform. He was deeply troubled about how the morale of the troops would be affected by such stories about their leaders. This was what affected him the most at all times. Since he was prevented from speaking in the Parliament, he put in his resignation and headed straight for Doordarshan where he made a lengthy statement on the issue and allegations by Tehelka, assuring the country that nothing had been compromised. He was even attacked for using a government television channel for this purpose.

  Neither did George Fernandes say anything separately to me, nor did he try to defend me in public. I respected him for that. It was not his job to defend anything but the country and its borders, and the morale of the men who fought to protect the countrymen. Our friend Ajay Singh, who was Minister of State for Railways during the National Front government, would visit often over the years. He would engage George Fernandes in conversation about what was going on around us. He told me many years later that he never forgot a remark George Sahib made during one such time. He had looked sad, apparently, and said, ‘You know, Ajay, our country has a long way to go to get used to accepting an independent, intelligent woman in politics.’

  Apart from the message of the prime minister accepting George Fernandes’s resignation, Jaswant Singh conveyed that Vajpayee had also wanted me to resign from the post of president of the Samata Party since the BJP president, Bangaru Laxman, had resigned. I found it very odd that the request for my resignation should come from the leader of another Party, howsoever senior and important he may be. The actions of a Party organization and its members should be guided by the decisions of its own leadership. Moralists and others may have criticized my stance, but I firmly believed that if one is not guilty and the tapes gave no evidence of my taking money, other than grainy images and a suggestive defamatory commentary of an event that was not what it was made out to be, I should not have to bow before anyone’s accusations. Obviously, once George Fernandes, as my Party leader resigned, I could not possibly stay on. I followed the prime minister’s instructions. However, it has always rankled me that it seemed as if I was thrown to the winds by some members of my own Party perhaps working through the prime minister. They could not be the people to decide anything in my Party, but they probably knew George Fernandes would not go against the prime minister’s wishes while they ran the risk of him defending me within the Party. Anyway, my departure suited the purpose of some of my Party colleagues of removing an independent woman whom they could not manipulate from a position of authority.

  In a show of solidarity, our three other ministers, namely Nitish Kumar, Digvijay Singh and Srinivasa Prasad, resigned too. It was a pretty little charade that lasted precisely two weeks. They hung around George Fernandes coyly hinting they wanted their ministerial positions back. He told me this under his breath in irritation since he knew their ambition and need to cling to a chair, but he also knew the government felt shaky without Samata Party representation in the cabinet. He spoke to the prime minister who readily took them back and all was well in the trio’s world again. They knew George Fernandes was indispensable whether he was in government or not, and I didn’t count at all. Since then, none of our Party’s senior leaders have ever telephoned to ask how I was coping with the Commission of Inquiry and later, the courts. No one offered legal or financial help except our lone female member, Betty D’ Souza, who occasionally gave me personal cheques for 25000 rupees. She has remained a constant friend.

  All the feminists inside and outside political parties made scathing comments against me. Other than Vandana Shiva, no well-known activist or friend stood by me publicly. I realized good people remained silent while the political ones attacked. Brinda Karat of the CPI(M) met me in a television studio many years later. She apologized for not standing by me, giving discipline of ‘the Party line’ as the reason. I responded by saying that it didn’t matter as I was, by then, used to fighting my battles alone.

  I went to every television studio that invited me for a discussion. I believed I had nothing to be ashamed of and I needed a forum to give my side of the story. Soon after the story broke, CPI(M) leader and former Lok Sabha Speaker Somnath Chatterjee growled in NDTV’s ‘We the People’: ‘Seeing is believing’. I argued that firstly, the tapes weren’t showing me do anything wrong, and secondly, tapes can be doctored easily with the help of modern technology. I explained how as a public person I had to meet even unknown visitors and couldn’t just say ‘go to hell’ without hearing them out. For six months or more, the ‘go to hell’ part, said rather gently and conversationally within a long sentence, was extracted and played over and over as a ‘promo’ for the channel. I became a fallen star.

  For the record, I need to describe what seems to be the goings on in those tapes—without the intentionally damning commentary by one of the three Tehelka ‘heroes’. The problem with recounting such an event which had no significance or consequence in my work day, is that it was supposed to have happened in December 2000. Since I could not recall this visit by some peripheral characters even four months later in March 2001 (when it was aired), I have had to rely only on what the Tehelka tapes show. Also, since the matter is now sub judice, I will only recount what I presume happened from what is visible on the tapes:

  Three people have entered George Fernandes’s Parliament-allotted residence at 3, Krishna Menon Marg. It was a house with no gates or guards ever since George Sahib had them removed a few years earlier. On the tapes, there is a scene of the house taken in daylight while the other scenes are all in the dark of the evening. There is some coming and going of people, while some are seated talking among themselves. The wrapping and rustling of paper is shown on the grainy film while some whispering goes on. They enter the room where I worked as I am shown speaking on the phone to someone who wants help to become a member of the India Habitat Centre. My large room always had people coming in and out to use the common computer or photocopier, or to just sit and wait for me to speak to them. The persons engaging in conversation with me are never seen on screen in my presence. The visuals contain no surreptitious activity by me, nor any intrigue or conspiratorial double entendres. I am generally sociable with anyon
e, including complete strangers, if I do not suspect ill-intent. Perhaps it’s foolish and naive to be like that in political life but we are all taught to offer even strangers a glass of water as an expression of decent human gesture. One person is partially introduced as a manufacturer of electronics. After a bit of useless conversation it is mentioned that they want to give something for the Party. I just say ‘Oh’. Again, the conversation meanders until a voice interrupts the conversation saying, ‘Can I give it to madam?’ As a Party donation is always welcome, I ask them to ‘send it to Srinivas Prasad, our minister, who is arranging a party conference’. I neither discuss it nor receive it. The voice says ‘okay, okay, okay’ and shifts to talking about difficulties his company is facing in getting a response to some request in the Defence Ministry. What follows is a boring back and forth between them and me in which I am guiding them to follow the procedures of approaching the concerned people. He repeatedly says he has tried everything and the Ministry is actually favouring some other companies. I back off saying I don’t know how the Ministry functions and I would not interfere to help anyone but the most I would do, if he fails to get any response from the officials, is to request ‘Sahib’s office’ to pass the word on to treat everyone fairly. The conversation is paraphrased, but anyone reading the transcript or listening to the tapes would not hear anything conspiratorial, corrupt or improper in what I said.

  George Fernandes was most worried about the morale of his soldiers who gave their lives defending their country. I was most worried about how dangerous it was for democracy if visitors misused easy access to prominent people and created a feeling of mistrust towards any unknown person who may come close. I was also horrified that the perpetrators of this elaborate hoax, called it investigative journalism. At the height of the uproar, no one at the highest levels in any field asked about the methodology of how the story was developed or about the authenticity of the tapes. (This issue became a part of the mandate of the inquiry commission. Before that, we were left to defend ourselves as rumours had been spread that Tehelka had much more material on various important people so everyone may have been scared of when they could be similarly hit.) Instead, the tapes were aired across channels of the Zee TV network, having been reportedly sold to them for somewhere between five and eight million rupees. We all got defamed in the process, even though the screenings were soon taken off the air as nothing was clearly audible or visible, and boredom had set in among the viewers. It was all about TRPs.