The Radia Tapes debate--swallowing the bait

The Radia tapes raise many questions. Certainly there is a privacy issue here but, as argued forcefully by Poornima Joshi, that is a separate discussion. (Sadanand, you are a dear pal and I greatly respect you but I beg to disagree this once. I know there are bits in the tapes that are pure gossip, but I assume we are mature enough not to damn a person for gossip. Who does not do loose talk?). 

 To harp on privacy, at this crucial moment, is to deliberately close our eyes to the deepening rot within. Indeed, whatever their provenance -" it is instructive that hardly anyone has disputed their authenticity --  the tapes have come as a welcome opportunity to turn the mirror inward, something we have avoided doing all along. Forget the inward gaze, we have unfailingly struck a moral pose, condemning everyone else, especially the political class, as greedy, vile and self-serving while refusing to acknowledge that many of us may be sharing the same traits.

 Hearing the tapes is like looking at the x-ray plates of a diseased patient. From the outside, you see a person, rollickingly healthy and perfumed to boot. But the insides have been so badly corroded, you don’t know how he lives. The most shocking aspect of the tapes is what they have to say about the state of business journalism in this country. Undoubtedly there are exceptions and these must be named. Papers like The Business Standard, Business Line and Mint have conducted themselves with a degree of dignity. Yet they occupy a small share of the market. In the larger bazaar of the biggies, it is almost as if every story is a plant, every headline is pre-determined and every placement is up for sale. The lobbyist dictates lines to be written in a column, and if the journalist concerned is too daft even to take dictation, not to worry. A written script will be passed on which can be faithfully reproduced. In one of many conversations between Niira Radia (was it the numerologically-inspired double "i" that took her to such great heights? If so, what about the fall? ) and a Mukesh Dhirubhai Ambani (hereinafter MDA) groupie, they both chuckle at the susceptibility of the journo they have collectively fooled.

 For those not in the loop, the MDA group, at that point, has just been disadvantaged by a High Court judgment on the pricing of gas. The judgment favours younger sibling Anil, so it is imperative that Radia and her cohorts bring the hacks around to helping big bro. How do you do it? If you tell them the judge had no business going against bade bhai, the effort will be too obvious and, worse, it will show in the copy. So why not plug the line that the judgment must be reversed in the national interest?  Over the next fortnight, Radia methodically sells the "national interest" line to each one of her intended "victims", who, in turn, gratefully grab it. At one point, soon after the first of the columns has appeared, Radia and her fellow conspirator in the MDA group tell each other that other journalists reading the column will likely know exactly where the line has come from. After all, they have been briefed too.

 Agreed, the tapes establish no quid-pro-quo. But they do establish connections between conversations and columns. Within a week of Radia offering the "national interest" line, one column after another appears parroting the same line. If this sounds incredible, just go to the Outlook website, hear out the tapes and match the conversations with the columns that followed. The insidious nature of the lobbyist-journo nexus is revealed in other details too. Radiia decides which journalist she wants and which journalist she most certainly "DOES NOT" want -"  she goes as far as the highest in the newspaper management to realise this end --  she berates a quaking, quivering Chief of Bureau for daring to miss a story; the COB in turn blames the awful miss on the Anil Ambani faction in Mumbai; Radia dictates that a particular story ought only to go on page 1, and if all this is not enough, she also fumes that no one can get away with hurting MDA.

 It is not just that financial news and views were slanted in favour of MDA. Journos deliberately turned a blind eye to the  MDA camp’s misdoings, among them a sudden upward revision in the expenditure costs of exploring gas to the tune of Rs. 30,000 crore.  No less than Prashant Bhushan described this as a scam but for the majority of the financial media this was not even news. 

 One small aside: In her conversation with the editor of a Delhi-based national daily, Radia says Dayanidhi Maran has offered Rs. 600 crore to the K family to keep his seat in the Cabinet. Assuming this is indeed the value of a Cabinet berth, anyone facilitating a ministerial berth must be deemed to have done a huge, huge favour to the beneficiary. It stretches credulity that a favour of such generous proportions will be rewarded only with "more information," as argued by the defence. As for stringing along, can we, even for a moment, believe that the likes of  Radia " who can wake up star journalists from sleep and pester a pest out of existence " can be strung along? If it was that easy, Niira Radia of the double "i",  would not have gotten where she did.