Salman Khan, Niira Radia, Ratan Tata and phone tapping

A few years before this, The Indian Express ran a series of reports called the ‘Tata Tapes'. They were about how Tata Tea may have paid extortion money to Ulfa extremists in Assam to allow them to run their plantations in that state. The paper carried transcripts of conversations recorded after Nusli Wadia's telephone was tapped. They featured industrialists Keshub Mahindra and Ratan Tata, Tata Tea's RK Krishna Kumar and former soldier Sam Manekshaw. The Tatas were doing what any company should do — protect their employees — because the State could not. However, the conversations were seen by many as an act of anti-nationalism. This wasn't so much because of the actual actions of the people taped as their conversations which, because they were private and unguarded, lent themselves to being sensational in cold print.
The real story was why Nusli Wadia's phone had been tapped and who had done this. The State denied any role. The Indian Express reporter who broke the story, Ritu Sarin, said she had promised her source (apparently after being made to place her hand on her child's head) that she would never reveal his or her name. Who was it? Was it someone in the police or the government? Was it a corporate enemy, like Wadia's old enemy Reliance? What was the motive behind getting the story published? We do not know.
And now the latest round of leaked tapes features stars from business, politics and journalism talking to the fixer Niira Radia.
Who recorded these conversations? We know this because home secretary GK Pillai says it was his department. Why was the home ministry taping Radia? Pillai says it was because of suspicions of tax evasion. This is astonishing, but not unusual here. In India, the State insists it cannot police effectively unless it is increasingly intrusive. But this isn't true of civilised States. No European nation taps the phones of citizens suspected of not paying taxes. Their solution is increasing competence and efficiency in the State; our solution is always to give the State more power. But this isn't really a solution.
The sensational nature of the Radia conversations must not throw us off the real issue the tapes have thrown up. Corruption is India is caused by a cultural lack of morality. Where there is opportunity, there will likely be corruption. This cannot be resolved through intrusion. In fact, such intrusion encourages corruption. Here's how. Arbitrary spying on citizens gives individuals in the state power over them. The deeper the penetration of the state, the more power in the hands of government individuals, the more opportunity to be corrupt.
Pillai, the most powerful bureaucrat in India, does not even know who leaked the tapes he's in charge of. He says he has not even heard the tapes. Then who is in control of this material? Has someone suppressed some conversations and released others? Did someone pay off an official to leak them? We do not know.
Like Salman talking rubbish, a lot of the material on the Radia tapes can be discarded as the work of loudmouths impressing other loudmouths. Journalists have an exaggerated sense of their power, and we can safely dismiss the idea that a politician will appoint someone or affect a change in policy because a journalist weighed in on the matter.
The real revelation is that the State is up to no good. The newspaper Mint reported that the government records 5,000 phone conversations a day. That's 18 lakh a year. It has a legitimate cause to this only when it comes to saving people's lives from violence and terrorism. But it chooses to do it so arbitrarily, as we have seen in the case of Salman Khan, and so often, as we see with Radia, that they falter when they must do it competently, as they should have done in the case of judge Singh.
From Aakar Patel's write up in HT. More Here
Aakar Patel is a director with Hill Road Media. The views expressed by the author are personal.
More Here

Editors, power brokers and the Radia tapes!

L K Advani once said that when Indira Gandhi wanted the media to bend, it chose to crawl. Last fortnight, when the Niira Radia tapes showed the dirt within the media and it was expected to stand up to the high moral standards it sets for the rest of society, the conventional media buried its head in the sand. A pitiful attempt to cover up one of the biggest media scandals. Thank god for the new media which forced the old to mend its ways, just a wee bit.

Sanghvi, Sanghvi/Yes, Papa...
Fixing columns?/No, Papa…
Telling lies?/No, Papa…
Show me proof/How Dare You?

That twisted nursery rhyme sums up some of what top editors of India did and most of what media organisations failed to do (or did not care to do) in the last fortnight.

This was a fortnight in which the national media exposed itself by deciding not to expose itself. It demonstrated that it interprets “free press” as freedom to ignore serious questions about their own conduct and credibility.

For a long time, newsroom wisdom had it that if a dog bites a man, it is news. That definition turned on its head in the early 90s, possibly coinciding with the onset of the MTV generation. A dog biting a man was no longer newsworthy. Now, we were told, it’s news only if a man bites a dog.

Then came 24x7 news, relentless and unceasing. Everything became so passé so quickly that the definition of news underwent another rewrite. Man biting a dog became news only if the dog died of rabies as a consequence!

And then, on November 19, the Indian media’s man-bites-dog-and-dog-dies-of-rabies moment came. Busy as it was exposing scam after scam involving every strata of society, the media itself landed in the middle of an embarrassing scandal.

Damning audio tapes of many editors, notably two icons, Vir Sanghvi and Barkha Dutt, were put out by Open and Outlook magazines.  In the tapes, both the editors are talking to a corporate lobbyist Niira Radia who is desperately seeking to fix a key appointment in the Manmohan Singh cabinet in May 2009.

Radia is trying to block DMK’s Dayanidhi Maran from becoming the telecommunications minister because Maran had rubbed the Tata Group, one of Radia’s principal clients, on the wrong side earlier. In his place, Radia is pushing for A Raja, who was the telecommunications minister in the earlier government (during which time he gave the country its biggest financial scam ever).

Radia is asking Vir and Barkha to carry messages to the Congress Party that the DMK, which had withdrawn from the cabinet, was actually dying for a rapprochement, in complete contrast with their grandstanding in public.  By clearly agreeing (as it seems from the tapes and as both of them have since admitted) to carry that message to the Congress, the two editors opened themselves up for serious charges of professional impropriety.

Did they cross the “Lakshman rekha” of journalism and become complicit in a dirty corporate game to fix even the appointments to the country’s cabinet?

That was a question that needed to be taken by the scruff of its collar and debated vigorously if only to show that the media is as unsparing of itself as it is of others.

Instead, NDTV put out a cursory, indignant, dismissive and, why, even a condescending clarification on their website (and once on air) as did Vir Sanghvi on his personal website. Then the media collectively buried its head in the sand, hoping that its most embarrassing moment would pass quickly. If there were some rotten eggs in its midst, nobody needed to know. Least of all their readers/viewers.

They say awareness of a problem is 50% of the solution. The Indian media obviously thinks ignoring a problem is a complete solution.

So, all we got instead was deathly silence. No breaking news, no screaming headlines. As I write this on November 30, 12 days after the expose, the scandal is yet to make it to the front page of any daily in the capital (though Mail Today followed it up extensively on the inside pages, a happy exception).
An enquiry might yet find Vir, Barkha and other editors such as Prabhu Chawla and MK Venu not guilty of gross professional misconduct, but we need no enquiry to pronounce the Indian media guilty of a clumsy, attempted cover-up.

First, the two organisations that Vir and Barkha work and report/write for, Hindustan Times and NDTV (tagline: Experience  Truth First). Vir is advisory editorial director of the paper and writes a “most-most read” Sunday column called Counterpoint. In addition to agreeing to carry messages for Radia, two of Vir’s past columns (June 21, 2009 and August 15, 2009) concerning the Ambani Brothers’ gas wars came to be suspected  as plugs for Mukesh Ambani, written to Radia’s specifications.

Vir and Barkha defended their reputations. What did HT and NDTV do? They took Vir and Barkha’s word and left it at that. Much like prime minister Manmohan Singh six months ago. He said everything was above board in the 2G telecom licences case. Who told him? A Raja!

But the greater shock is how the so-called national press handled the issue. The Hindu’s editor, N Ram, unlike other editors was unequivocal. “They have certainly crossed the line,” he said on CNN-IBN. “They would not have lasted five minutes in a foreign news organisation.”

His newspaper though put the story, incredibly, on the edit page!

The Indian Express ignored it till November 30 when it put out a full page with a very telling headline: “Government has ordered a probe, Tata has gone to court, the Radia tapes have forced the media to ask questions: about itself.” Yeah, 12 days of behaving like nothing happened.
Same with the Times of India. Not a word on the biggest media scandal of recent times. Santosh Desai’s column appears every Monday in the Delhi edition of the paper. On Monday, November 20, he wrote in his column: “There is a Soviet silence on television these days. Beneath the noise of the 2G scam…lurks a deeper silence that haunts every minute of every channel. The decision to blank out the murky goings-on involving some of India’s top names in journalism is a staggeringly significant one.”

That column appeared on the paper’s website, but was yanked out of the paper itself!
Arnab Goswami’s Times Now, who never tires of asking questions,  wrote an internal note warning his journalists but evaded asking questions of his profession even as the “whole nation was watching tonight”  busying himself with every scam other than the media scam.

The only news show of consequence happened on CNN-IBN. Karan Thapar’s Last Word took up the issue squarely, named Vir and Barkha, and asked all the uncomfortable questions. But that was not before his editor and president of the Editor’s Guild, Rajdeep Sardesai had brushed it aside: “If you can prove quid pro quo, do it. Else don’t tarnish hard-earned reputations.” (Mail Today).


When the dust settles on this scandal, it will be clear that even if conventional media wants to hide, the new media will not allow it to. Even to date, conventional media is seen as trustworthy, that what it prints or broadcasts is sacred. But that age of innocence of the reader is well nigh over. If that bond is strained more or broken again, conventional media might lose its relevance to the new media faster than we foresee.
From the shameful behaviour of the national media in trying to cover up its scandal, that might not be such a bad thing.

From B V Rao's article in Governance Now magazine. More Here

This first appeared in the Dec 1-15 issue of Governance Now magazine (Vol.01, Issue 21).

"Ratan, the media is very, very greedy" said Niira Radia to Ratan Tata.

"Ratan, They are buying up the media. They're using their buying power with the media. I can't tell the discussions I had with the media, in particular the Times Group and Dainik Bhaskar.... They say, Niira, every time we do a negative story on them, they withdraw advertising. So, I said, fine, others can also withdraw advertising.... They leverage every dollar of their mediaspend to ensure they don't get any negative publicity. The media is very, very greedy."


From Sukumar Muralidharan's comprehensive analysis on Radia Tapes, Indian Media. The catchy title of the analysis says it all: "Media : stenographer to power". To download the pdf version of the analysis click Here.

The curious case of Barkha Dutt (and others)

Excerpts from Silver Blaze (The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes), by Arthur Conan Doyle

Gregory (Scotland Yard detective): "Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?"

Holmes: "To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time."

Gregory: "The dog did nothing in the night-time."

Holmes: "That was the curious incident."

Reality TV met News Opinionating met Court TV yesterday when well known TV journalist Barka Dutt, news editor of the NDTV channel came under cross questioning by four editors - Sanjaya Baru of the Business Standard, Dileep Padgaonkar, former editor of the Times of India, Manu Joseph of the Open Magazine which broke the “Radia tapes” story and Swapan Dasgupta, right wing columnist and contributor to The Pioneer and The Telegraph among others.

The key behind this charade held by the channel was to bring into focus the role played by Barkha Dutt as a news editor reporting during the UPA-II cabinet formation based on information she received from corporate lobbyist Niira Radia. The conversations with Radia establish a few things - 

a) Barkha Dutt explicitly agrees to act as a message courier between Radia (ostensibly speaking for entities within the DMK) and Congress leaders - senior ones like Ghulam Nabi Azad for e.g., 

b) Radia was particularly keen on passing the message as to who among the DMK was a preferred candidate for ministership in certain berths.

The anger against Barkha Dutt expressed online was on various counts. Many in the public were linking this up with the 2G scam and role of DMK minister A Raja in it. They saw it as a case of Radia playing a facilitator for the re-entry of A Raja into the UPA-II cabinet despite serious questions about the 2G scam during UPA-I and journalists helping her in the process. It was galling for the public to see journalists who they ideally see as detached players wanting to partake into such murky processes orchestrated by corporate players.

No wonder, Barkha Dutt, being the high profile journalist that she is, was prominently highlighted along with a few others. The other high profile journalist Vir Sanghvi was caught even more red handed, playing the rat to Radia’s Pied Piper in helping in message delivery and opinion making about two issues - again the A Raja re-installation in cabinet and also the Mukesh Ambani line in the gas dispute between the Ambani brothers. Sanghvi has recently taken a break from writing his column, Counterpoint. And he makes a bogus defense based on “stringing his source”, but the proof is in the pudding that is his writing and there, as is pointed out earlier, he is caught red handed doing Niira Radia’s bidding.

Evidently Vir Sanghvi is more interested in pushing for the national interest as long as that interest expediently serves the corporate lobbyist's.

Barkha Dutt in her first response was outraged by the insinuations of lobbying in particular. She insisted that her assurances to Radia were basically “fibs” wanting to string her to get further information. And it is this outrage that pervaded her response besides the point on media ethics, where she questioned Open magazine (and Outlook magazine)’s decisions to publish transcripts of her conversations without contacting her for a response and so on.
This was evident in her replies during last night’s inquisition-of-sorts as well.

But substantively, the key question remained and asked only by a relative few - Siddharth Varadarajan of The Hindu in his article, and by the Open magazine’s editor, Manu Joseph and his colleague. 

Joseph asked Dutt why wasn’t it that as a news editor she saw it necessary to bring to the public’s purview that a corporate public relations person having two of the richest clients in the world and indeed most powerful in India, was trying to pass on messages on which DMK leader was suitable for a particular cabinet post? Wasn’t it obvious that the role of corporate players wanting to  have a say in getting ministers of their liking was a case of gross crony capitalism?
Why was her coverage restricted to the minute-by-minute reporting of what the DMK’s demands were and what bargains were being struck by the Congress and the DMK rather than this substantial question of great public import? And why wasn’t this point highlighted even during the height of the revelations of the 2G scam, as representatives of various political parties pointed out irregularities in the 2G auction and the losses to the public exchequer (as early as early 2008). Or even during the recent release of the CAG report that put a number to the notional loss suffered by the exchequer - a mind boggling Rs 1,76,000 crore. 
Why didn’t Barkha Dutt want to bring out the undue and unusual interest shown by corporate players in wanting A Raja’s continuation in cabinet, during her reportage of the 2G Scam recently? Surely it was in public interest to bring out the nuances and minutiae of how crony capitalism worked and how ministers were at the bidding of big corporate players who controlled the strings of functioning of democracy from without, wasn’t it?

No, according to Barkha Dutt. It was a mere judgement call whether to report this or not. This was commonplace - the undue and shady corporate interest in public affairs and day-to-day and she didn’t consider it important enough.

Here is where Barkha Dutt is trying to string the public along with her and fib to us. Here is where  the main contradiction is brought out clearly. Here is why the import of the Open magazine and Outlook magazine stories are brought out in the clear and in substance. It is similar to why the dog didn’t bark in the Silver Blaze story in the Sherlock Holmes series.

Our news media revels in trying to outdo each other in bringing out procedural, titillating details as if they are doing ball-by-ball commentary of a cricket game, when it comes to political reporting. But they do not want to displease their advertisers, mostly big corporate fund dispensers, by seeing and reporting things that are fundamentally wrong in the core issue of crony capitalism. It makes more sense for them to ridicule the political class and play up the middle class imagery of the crooked political class without distinction and difference and win eye balls in that process.

This is the problem with Indian news journalism. As Lydia Polgreen of the New York Times tweeted, “the larger problem of political journalism, esp[ecially] on TV: it privileges process minutiae over substance”. The question is why? This editorial in the EPW commenting on the Paid News issue can provide answers - “The Indian media is selling its soul to the market and forfeiting its claim to be an independent estate” or this editorial , which comments on the media coverage of the 26/11 incident says,

The manifest failures of the political establishment though, cannot obscure the fact that older notions of the media serving as a vigilant watchdog over public affairs have once again proven hopelessly romantic and outmoded. The media is a slave of the market. Its social role is little else than to serve as an echo chamber for the voices of the rich and the powerful, however shrill, irrational or lacking in coherence these may be.

Or more systematically as to how profit privileges public interest in the mass media, by the formidable intellectual, Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman in the excellent book, “Manufacturing Consent”. A film made on the subject can be viewed here - 

From Pragoti.org More Here

''Your case was cleared last night only", responded Nira Radia

My case is cleared, na?" said the politician who wanted to be telecom minister to the lobbyist for a telecom major four days before the present Union Cabinet was sworn in last summer. The middle-woman, Nira Radia, was coy and comforting in her first-name-basis response: "Your case was cleared last night only."
The truly touching aspect of the politician's piteous plea is a syllable, na. It has every shade of pathos, not to mention every variation of bathos, kneaded into it. The lobbyist is in command, and why shouldn't she be? She knows something that is privy to perhaps three or four people at the very highest level of the present government. She has a vested interest in telecom, and therefore a direct stake in the person who will run this department. The minister-to-be, A. Raja of the DMK, is in her debt, and he better not forget it. She does not convey how she knows the decision was taken the previous night, but she implies that she has intervened on Raja's behalf. Raja does not care whether a corporation got him this job or not. He is merely desperate to get it.

We know this today, a year later, because of some sterling journalism done by the television channel Headlines Today, which obtained transcripts and audio recordings of the taped conversation and honored the profession of journalism by doing the story. Text demands context for greater clarity. Raja is an intimate associate of the Karunanidhi family and Radia must now be the most famous middle-woman in the world. She is on the payroll of some of the most important corporates in contemporary India, both those with a tradition of grease and those with historic claims to probity.

From M. J. Akbar's take on Spectrum controversy in his blog.

To continue reading click here.

In less than a decade, Vaishnavi has emerged as the biggest PR player in an industry whose influence within the media and policy making circles is disproportionate to its commercial size. What earned her Ratan Tata’s redoubled confidence, say sources, was her deft handling of a controversy around Tata Finance’s accounting irregularities in 2001-02, an issue that was sorted out to everyone’s satisfaction—all-willing—before it could blow up into something seriously traumatic.

By 2005, as she ascended the VIP curve as a mega-success in her own right, Radia’s ambitions had soared higher still. With low-cost flying the hottest business idea in town, she planned a no-frill airline of her own called Magic Air. But she hadn’t yet made quite so big an impression on Delhi’s power structure. Her plans were grounded by a failure to get the requisite regulatory approvals. “Radia has few equals in understanding the aviation business in India,” says the former CEO of an Indian airline Radia was once an advisor to, “If Magic Air had taken off, I have no doubt that it would have been amongst the most successful even in a bleeding market.”

From a feature on Nira Radia by Dhirendra K. Jha and T. R. Vivek in Open

To continue reading click here.