by Jaya Jaitly
It would have been wonderful to clear the air on this before going in for the early general elections called by the prime minister a month later. Inexplicably, this did not happen. The report lay in cold storage.
By now it was June 2004, and the UPA government had come to power. We did not think it would change things at the Commission since Justice Phukan was powering along at a regular pace.
The tapes had been examined and the expert, Matthew J. Cass, who had done so was brought by the government to depose, as is legally required. When Cass took the stand to speak on 23 June 2004, Justice Phukan announced something we had not expected. It was a communication (of which we were given copies), received from the forensic agency to which Cass belonged in the UK which said:
[W]e have been contacted by Tehelka.com by email requesting an interview with Mr Cass, we have not responded to this. We were also contacted by the India correspondent of the Guardian Newspaper yesterday again asking questions[, t]o which we again provided no comment answers. However, from what they said it would appear that a Min[i]ster has pre-empted Mr. Cass’ evidence to the Commission and we have found reference to this on at least one news website. Obviously we felt we should inform you of these issues.
Cass’s fax implies that the oath of secrecy was violated. Such an astonishing matter was taken lightly by everyone, including our party, and the BJP, which was now in opposition.
On 28 May 2004, Kapil Sibal, a minister in the new government and the champion of Tehelka causes, had already announced to the public that the tapes had been found to be genuine. We wondered whether this was telepathy or prescience since no formal document or report had come to the Commission. Tejpal also announced the same news, claiming his source was an army officer, which was highly far-fetched.
This time the new government’s counsel tried to cut short the deposition of the British forensic expert by objecting to him being crossed-examined by all of us. Luckily, he was overruled and it tumbled out that in fact, the tapes which were originals were not untampered since there were cuts in conversations within them, switches ‘on’ and ‘off’ in certain places, sound drops, and other unresolved areas where the expert could not understand the Hindi dialogue in the tapes.
Justice Phukan was a man in a hurry but the government counsels kept asking for more time since they were unfamiliar with the contents of the mound of documents. They obtained relief from their government when on 1 October 2004, the Ministry of Finance ordered the Commission not to inquire into Tehelka’s journalistic motives or the financial aspects of the entire matter. These were precisely the areas in which Tehelka would have been caught out because they had already admitted in the Commission that they had sold the tapes to Zee TV for a hefty sum, making it a commercial rather than a journalistic venture. Also, by September, when the Commission was still at work, Sonia Gandhi, as head of the UPA and the National Advisory Council, wrote an official letter to finance minister P. Chidambaram, dated 25/27 September 2004—a copy of which was provided to me by a highly placed source in the Opposition—asking him to ensure that First Global, Tehelka’s financiers, are not meted out ‘unjust or unfair treatment’. She was, in fact, saying the very same thing I was trying to explain to the Tehelka person asking me a favour for the purpose of entrapment. Here again, irony was visiting.
The Commission had by then convened and held 247 hearings. It set the date for the next hearings on 1 November 2004. The date was memorable in that it brought the Commission to an end. Everyone got to know this only through the media. Instead of allowing the government counsels reasonable time to go through documents as they had requested, and fixing a deadline for the Commission to wind up its work, the government, which included the law minister, accused the Commission of delays, not doing any work, not giving any report and ‘going nowhere’. The Judge was accused of misusing government facilities and being corrupted. Closing down the Commission became one of the points of self-praise the government put out on its official website celebrating one year in office in 2005.
We could clearly see that the constituents of the UPA had insulted two former judges of the Supreme Court of India, closed down a Commission of Inquiry in the last phase of its work, betrayed oaths of secrecy, blatantly defended unethical and fraudulent journalism and sought to protect its financiers from a simple inquiry. It seemed to me there must have been something very major to hide. Tehelka seemed to have powerful guardian angels.
Ultimately, from being noticees in Operation West End we became abandoned victims of what I will call Operation Abort.
Then the government got entangled in its own contradictions. It first said there was no report, then a ‘non-report’, then a mere 41-page summary*, then an accusation that the Commission had not gone into the issue of corruption. It avoided the fact that Justice Phukan had specifically mentioned he had found nothing irregular in the role of George Fernandes in the fifteen actual procurements. This was crucial to reassure the country that nothing in terms of national security had been compromised. George Fernandes wrote to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh requesting that the report given to Prime Minister Vajpayee in February 2004 be tabled in Parliament. Months later, a mere summary was tabled upon the excuse that the whole report would compromise issues of national security. After accusing the Commission of no work, it closed it down before it could complete the last leg and then accused it of not working. With illogical arguments like that, who could win? Sadly, neither the BJP nor other constituents of the opposition NDA raised a hue and cry. It might have been over for them but it was not over for some of us.
~
All investigations on the fifteen real deals have since led nowhere. All probes specifically concerning George Fernandes have been closed by the CBI. Some cases concerning other victims like retired army officers and civilian officials from the Ministry of Defence, as a result of the UPA government and the CBI working together, are still mired in trial proceedings.
During my court hearings that followed, Tejpal appeared in the witness stand. Vindicating himself of any first-hand knowledge of how the sting operation was conducted, the call girls involved, or any awareness of the apparent misdeeds of individuals whose lives and reputations he had ruined for what for him was high infamy, I recall him leaving the courtroom in his nonchalant manner, heading for Goa.
In the luxury resort atmosphere of Goa, in the company of Hollywood actors, and after a raucous, supposedly intellectual, conclave at a luxurious hotel, Tejpal was arrested in 2013 after being accused by a junior colleague and daughter’s friend, of sexual molestation in the elevator. Following that, I wrote an article on Firstpost.com on 4 December 2013, titled ‘Truth behind Tehelka: Tejpal’s Non-journalism and Society’s Colluders’*. In that, I reminded everyone of the kind of journalism Tehelka had practised.
On 7 September 2017, the Mapusa sessions court in Goa asked that Tejpal be framed of nine charges, five of which are of rape. The court has decided that he needs to go on trial. During Tehelka’s operation, I had ironically felt violated by the hidden cameras, the unknown eyes. Perhaps, it is time that one understands how truth is more important than playing ‘politics’ with the help of ‘video-taped … edited material, sensationalism and hype’**. There, this episode rests.
*All the records of the Commission of Inquiry were handed over to the CBI after the commission was closed down. These are still in its custody.
**All the records of the CoI were handed over to the CBI after the commission was closed down. These are still in its custody.
*‘Opposition raises storm over new job for Venkataswami’, The Hindu, 23 November 2002, http://www.thehindu.com/thehindu/2002/11/23/stories/2002112304640100.htm
*‘Government rejects Phukan panel report, terms it incomplete’, Outlook, 13 May 2005, https://www.outlookindia.com/newswire/story/govt-rejects-phukan-panel-report-terms-it-incomplete/297836
*See http://www.firstpost.com/india/the-truth-behind-tehelka-tejpals-journalism-and-societys-colluders-1266197.html
**See above.
20
ON THE SIDELINES
Provocation and Peace
AS THE INQUIRY COMMISSION LUMBERED on, there were many sideshows that occasionally brought sunshine but usually offered more battles to fight, and stingers to swat away.
Even though I was kept fully occupied at the Commission and had stayed clear of party politics, I kept my work with craftspersons on track. I would lose myself in the solace of working with artisans who came to our Dastkari Haat Samiti office in South Delhi. There was a kind of meditational comfort in working with those who neither questioned nor judged me. My world of turmoil did not touch their domain at all. Media circuses and ugly allegations were so unbelievable that our craftspersons ignored them completely. I diverted my mind with constructive work much larger in scope than I had ever done before, and cuddled the dogs for warmth and relief when I got home. I also wrote nearly a dozen articles in various national newspapers on the need for ensuring the credibility and accuracy of taped evidence from a legal standpoint of modern technological changes, justice and fair play. Nothing worked.
My daughter and I visited the Guruvayur Temple in Kerala on 27 January 2003, for the traditional chorunnu ceremony (annaprashanam) where my six-month-old grandson was to be formally fed rice and given his name, Aiman. I received an urgent call from Delhi saying the Guardian, in London wanted me to answer some Tehelka-related questions within a week, failing which they were going to publish their story. I asked them to send me a fax. Luke Harding, their South Asia correspondent, wrote that they were planning to publish a detailed story on British attempts to sell sixty-six Hawk advanced jet trainers to India. I was to feature in the report and was being given a formal opportunity to comment beforehand. Hmm, handicrafts and advance jet trainers don’t quite go together, I joked to my cousin who was with us. But, thank God, at least they had better journalistic ethics than Tehelka, I thought to myself.
Harding wrote that I visited London in late 1999 and held discussions on the Hawk deal with John Weston, the chief executive of British Aerospace; and that I had also discussed the proposed Hawk contract with Chandraswami, a controversial holy man of that period. Harding also asked me to comment on any of the Tehelka disclosures. He gave me his numbers in Delhi. It was highly curious that such outrageous accusations were being spread about someone as irrelevant as me across the world. I was convinced of vested interests, of darker forces at play, and I was just a woman to be targeted, a scapegoat to those very interests.
I left our small ceremonial event in the temple to fax a handwritten reply from a small computer service joint in the bazaar. It was by no means as flippant as my initial reactions:
Dear Mr Harding,
I am shocked at the nature of the so-called information gathered by your newspaper. I would like to make it absolutely clear that:
a)I was not in London in late 1999,
b)I have never met or spoken to a certain John Weston whom you say is the chief executive of British Aerospace engineering. In fact I have never met or spoken to anyone from that company.
c)I have never met or spoken to Chandraswami and would avoid meeting such persons even by accident,
d)I have consistently maintained that the Tehelka investigation was fraudulent, stage-managed and concocted. A commission of inquiry is looking into the facts. I firmly believe that everyone should wait for the findings of the quasi-judicial body before giving any credibility to Tehelka.com’s kind of journalism,
e)Please note that if The Guardian even insinuates that I am in any way connected with the advanced jet trainer matter I will waste no time in suing it for defamation in the UK.
I would request your reporters to stay clear of vested interests who must be spreading such lies about me. Yours etc.
The Guardian story never appeared. However, the correspondent seemed to have some special link with the Tehelka group as the newspaper was again mentioned by the forensic expert in the UK as one such entity, along with Tehelka, who had sought information from his company about the forensic report at their London office.
Nasty articles and stories appeared in prestigious magazines all over the world. On 13 February 2003, the New York Times published a bunch of falsehoods fed to them by Tehelka called ‘A Web Site in India That Revealed Graft Becomes a Target’*. It was clear that it was almost dictated by Tehelka. I sent a rejoinder article titled ‘Sensation is not what it seems’ in which I sought to demolish all their accusations with the facts as they were, hoping its highly respected editor, James Reston, would publish it, but I never received a response. As luck would have it, he resigned right then amidst some controversy. Thus my contribution died a natural death.
When the Time magazine, which I value highly and read regularly, brought out a largely scurrilous story by Alex Perry on 1 December 2003 called ‘Teflon Government’, I became like our Alsatian dog that wouldn’t let go of a dirty old sock. The story referred to another sting called the ‘Judeo Tapes’ in which it said those ‘allegations’ ‘paled into insignificance when compared to the disclosures’ made about Bangaru Laxman and George Fernandes in the Tehelka tapes. I was described as the minister’s ‘friend’. This riled me as words of this nature when put in quotes become like a dirty wink-wink in print. I tried to meet Perry but he could only speak on the telephone. What I thought would be a polite and pleasant conversation allowing me to put the record straight, turned out to be surprisingly contentious. Perry was immediately rude, judgemental and combative. I was shocked that an impartial foreign journalist should behave in this manner. He belligerently asked why I had resigned from my position as president of my Party if I was innocent. I said that that needn’t have concerned him. When I remarked that since he had already formed an opinion about our guilt perhaps he should have headed the Inquiry Commission, he sarcastically replied he would have liked to head it. I asked him whether they knew I was no cheap ‘friend’ of anyone but a woman in her sixties with grandchildren and a thirty-six-year long career working with poor craftspersons without any questions over my integrity ever raised till then. There was no response to that. I wrote to Karl Tarlo Greenfeld, Editor-in-Chief, Time Asia, Hong Kong, telling him all that had happened, enclosing a rejoinder to the story in a Letter to the Editor. Greenfeld made up for Perry’s boorishness by immediately telephoning from Hong Kong and asking me to call him. After that, his Senior Editor, Zoher Abdoolkarim, sent me a fax with a shortened version of my letter which they published in the next issue.
On another occasion, my old college friend, Congress politician Mani Shankar Aiyar wrote an article in the Kolkata Telegraph saying I had been caught with my hands in the kitty. I challenged him with a personal letter recalling our friendship and reminding him his daughters still regularly visited my children at my home.
In Lalu Prasad Yadav’s regime, cartoon hoardings were put up in Patna with images of my son-in-law and me wearing greedy grins, surrounded by dollar notes, guns and cricket bats. The same happened in Chennai. I could not understand who was up to this in Tamil Nadu. I had to contact the head of police in the city to request him to have them taken down. He did so but traced the source only as far as a small flex hoarding shop. Writers like Arundhati Roy and Madhu Kishwar and various others on the social scene who had been friends for decades, made mocking remarks about Tehelka’s brilliance or my crookery. It thrilled their own audiences. Then there was an article in a short-lived newspaper about me by a writer under a pseudonym. It had a whole paragraph on the length of my choli (or blouse), which I supposedly wore very short, or long, covering my midriff, depending on the company I kept. It went on to say I was a socialite, not a socialist.
I challenged every piece of rubbish that was published in all but the worst rag mags. It gave me a feeling of engagement. For me this was part of a political fight against false allegations, fake journalists, media manipulations and calumny against women in public life. It wasn’t about me alone. I wondered to myself how many women in act
ive politics at my level have had to face such situations where they have been accused of something abominable without a shred of credible evidence. I didn’t feel upset or sorry for myself. I only felt very angry most of the time.
~
Much later, on 4 October 2004, Hans Raj Bharadwaj, the newly appointed Law Minister of India, held a press conference announcing the closure of the Phukan Inquiry Commission and the matter being handed over to the CBI. Later, all newspapers quoted him as saying, ‘How could a private person function from the house of the then defence minister and talk about defence deals?*’
I was angry enough to write him on 6 October, saying,
You obviously are completely ignorant of facts, law, and what constitutes basic decency in public life…. you are also unaware I was President of an important political party and not a private person … I have never stayed at the residence of the then Defence Minister…. If the visit and sharing of public work at a party leader’s house amounts to ‘staying’, then how do you describe the presence of your party leader’s political secretary at 10, Janpath?…. You also seem to have conveniently forgotten that a truly private person who was also a foreign national stayed at the official residence of the Prime Minister of India and carried out illegal business activities from there, including violation of foreign exchange laws for fifteen years….. By your action of scrapping the Commission of Inquiry and justification given by you, it is clear that your government thinks that the judges of the Supreme Court can be influenced. What was the justification of the Government to scrap the Commission, which had practically finished its work? The Government if it was so keen could have ordered a simultaneous inquiry by the CBI…. Under these circumstances, I suggest that you move to repeal the Commission of Inquiry Act itself so that such institutions do not lend themselves to attack and denigration when they do not work according to the requirements of your government…. the very least you can do is to tender an apology to me for your unworthy and unwarranted comments on me… Yours etc.
