Sting

Is it possible to cause a sensation by revealing something that everybody already knows? Certainly that is what seems to have happened in March 2001, when an up-and-coming Delhi-based Internet news Web site, Tehelka.com, broadcast videotaped evidence of corruption at the highest levels of the Indian polity. The tapes showed prominent members of the New Delhi power elite, some of them elected politicians, either discussing or actually receiving bribes from Tehelka journalists pretending to be dealers of military equipment. Tehelka, named for the kind of tumult that a sensation or scandal might produce, had already made waves the year before when it broke a story about match fixing in that holiest of Indian holies, cricket (Bahal [2000] 2003). Its target this time, the defense establishment, was only marginally less sacred—particularly in the wake of the patriotic frenzy that had swept the mainstream media during the Kargil border war with Pakistan in the summer of 1999.

In retrospect, it is easy to be cynical about the importance of Tehelka's sting, code named Operation West End. For a short while it looked like the government might collapse, as several key players—Defense Minister George Fernandes, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) president Bangaru Laxman, and Samata Party chief Jaya Jaitley—tendered their resignations. But soon it was back to business as usual. Fernandes was reinstated (he had in any case never been caught on video) and the commission instituted to investigate the sting dragged on and on, to waning public attention. Overnight media darlings, the team at Tehelka soon found their fortunes reversed as they were subjected to a labyrinth of legal and paralegal harassment.

The government, having recovered its footing, quickly exhumed the trustiest of Indira Gandhi–era bogeys, the foreign hand. Rumors were planted: Operation West End had been masterminded by the Pakistani secret service, the ISI; Tehelka was being directly bankrolled by the notorious Dubai-based gang lord, Dawood Ibrahim; Operation West End was part of a stock manipulation scam by a concern called First Global, which owned a chunk of Tehelka shares and which was, some claimed, a front organization for the Congress Party, then in opposition. Uncovering an apparent assassination plot against Tehelka's editor-in-chief Tarun Tejpal allowed the Delhi police to put him under maximum security. The plot itself was read as a stratagem on the part of the ISI to discredit the Indian government. Tejpal, Mathew Samuel, and Aniruddha Bahal all received death threats in the months after the story broke, and the Tehelka offices were subjected to a dizzying good cop/bad cop oscillation of protection and raids. Writing approximately a year after Tehelka went public with Operation West End, Aman Singh (2002) estimated that the Web site had already been subjected to something like two hundred legal summonses and twenty-five police raids.

So, given that the mere revelation of corruption in India is hardly big news, how can we begin to explain both the extraordinary attention that the sting initially attracted and the intensity of Tehelka's subsequent persecution? The public life of Operation West End generated and absorbed an extremely diverse set of narratives and commentaries. Some were ostensibly neutral and descriptive, such as this journalistic summary published the year after the March 2001 exposé:

Two journalists, Aniruddha Bahal and Mathew Samuel, posed as agents from a fictitious arms company called West End. They hawked a nonexistent product—hand-held thermal cameras—to the Defence Ministry, and paid money to the president of the [then ruling] BJP, bureaucrats and army men to push the deal through. They . . . captured all transactions on spycam and exhibited the footage at a press conference. They had almost sold a product they didn't have to the Government of India. (N. Singh 2002)

I have already indicated the paranoid profusion of defensive interpretations that the sting generated within the government and its informational subcontractors. But Operation West End's perpetrators, allies, and sympathizers were also busy telling stories. As we shall see, these ranged from dourly predictable proclamations about the moral responsibilities of the fourth estate vis-à-vis degenerate politicians to mischievous village projections of the Internet as a corruption-exposing X-ray machine that was striking fear into the hearts of national leaders.