Radia Tapes and the ‘Music of Democracy’

The media censorship is an obnoxious and parochial plea for muzzling of democratic public debate, against cleansing the system of corruption, and breaking the collusive nexus among business, media and politics

Praful Bidwai
There always were two components to the disclosures contained in corporate lobbyist Niira Radia's telephone conversations tapped by the government and eventually leaked to the media. The first was the role of certain high-profile journalists as political fixers and corporate stooges, who acted at Radia's behest to promote particular business interests and offered to carry messages to key politicians. The second was a demonstration of the enormous power that Big Business houses wield over politics, which they brazenly use to influence major official appointments, and the processes of policy-making and licensing of industries and their regulation.
For a variety of reasons - including paucity of time, misjudgement, and the deeply shocking conduct of 'successful' high-profile editors - it's the media story that got prominent display in the first set of exposures, with their emphasis on the 2G spectrum scandal. These showed that the concerned journalists crossed the vitally important line of demarcation between the media, corporate fixers and influential politicians. They colluded with Big Business to secure certain cash-yielding ministerial berths for people like Andimuthu Raja, the recently disgraced telecommunications minister, during the formation of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) ministry in mid-2009.
Even more important was the blatant lobbying by a particular corporation for a favourable deal for natural gas from the Krishna-Godavari Basin, and the willingness of some journalists to plug its line.
Credibility of the media was a major casualty of the Radia tapes disclosures. Not only were some of its self-styled superstars, including Hindustan Times' Vir Sanghvi, NDTV's Barkha Dutt and the India Today Group's Prabhu Chawla and others, caught red-handed doing the corporate lobbyists' bidding. The bulk of the mainstream media simply blacked out the story, demolishing its claim to being fair, objective and truthful.
The tapes show that Radia was trying to recruit Sanghvi and Dutt, among others, as mediators between the Congress and the DMK to influence the distribution of portfolios. Both agreed to help Radia by talking to senior Congress leaders. (Sanghvi even suggested he could approach Sonia Gandhi and had been talking to Rahul, and in any case he would speak to Ahmed Patel.)
On the Ambani brothers' gas dispute, Radia urged or coaxed several journalists to publish Mukesh Ambani's view prominently, preferably on the front page. Sanghvi agreed to endorse it in his weekly "most, most read" column. He duly 'dressed up' Radia's line as his own argument. The content of his article placed 'the national interest' (in pricing the gas high) over an agreement between the two brothers, which was upheld by the Bombay High Court in June 2009.
Chawla too offered gratuitous advice on how to conduct the Reliance (Mukesh Ambani) group's litigation-in-appeal in the Supreme Court. Some other journalists also collaborated with Radia on the gas pricing issue and shared with her information internal to their publications. One of them even proposed a meeting between his publisher and Mukesh Ambani.
Radia comes through in the tapes as someone who could command journalists at will, threaten them with suspension of advertisements from her clients, and otherwise coax, entice or push them to follow her line.
The journalists' conduct violates the elementary ethical norm that they should cultivate their sources for information pertinent to their professional work, but shouldn't act at their behest as fixers or even as facilitators/advisers. Journalists often have to engage their sources by discussing issues extraneous to their primary interest. Sanghvi and Dutt did that at length, including their assessment of DMK politics, top Congress leaders' predilections, and the strengths and weaknesses of various key players in Cabinet formation.
That's more or less legitimate.
What's not legitimate for journalists is to use their access to and influence with powerful politicians to fix ministerial berths and other positions in order to help the companies that employ the lobbyist-source, or to plug the policy line the source dictates. Half a dozen journalists did that, seemingly willingly.
The pretence that they were merely "stringing her along" is betrayed by some of the results, which show that they did exactly what she wanted.
This raises other issues too, including the distinction between "normal" sources and corporate lobbyists. Both put their own spin on events and trends. Good, experienced journalists know how to separate the spin from the facts. But there's a big difference. The lobbyist presents a craftily worked-out 'package' - facts+heavy spin+arguments, and a line calculated to hurt their clients' competitors, coupled with demands disguised as requests on how the story/article should be displayed.
Besides, lobbyists control access to industrial magnates. They trade it for favours and patronage which border on the unprofessional or transgress the boundaries between journalism and political fixing, and between sharing of information and outright bribery. Lobbyists command enormous resources and can dispense them with few questions asked - unlike most politicians.
The temptation to accept handsome but illegitimate favours has grown enormously in the recent past as business has discovered new ways of cornering public resources and influencing policies with the collusion of all willing, including journalists. At stake are thousands, often lakhs, of crores in contracts, licensing arrangements or business deals.
As our television-driven media competes, with no holds barred and few scruples, it becomes increasingly tempting for journalists to attach themselves to particular corporate lobbyists, who also become sources of instantly available (if processed, packaged and tainted) political information.
In such circumstances, it's hard to make sound discriminatory judgements. The journalists in the Radia tapes either failed to make such judgements - or didn't want to. They eagerly fell in line with Radia's demands.
Each of the journalists indicted in the tapes should have lost his/her job, as would certainly have happened with a more professional and self-respecting media culture which respects norms of integrity. Good newspapers in the West have sacked prominent journalists for much lesser malfeasance and comparatively minor infringements of professional ethics.
Unfortunately, only two of the journalists who figure in the Radia tapes have been relieved of their duties. Sanghvi has lost his weekly 'Counterpoint' column. And Chawla has had to quit India Today. The others still strut about as if they had committed no malfeasance or brought no disgrace to the media.
The media will take a long, long time to recover its loss of credibility in the public eye.
The spotlight has since shifted to the Big Business side of the tapes - much the larger issue. The disclosures reveal the huge but unaccountable power that business groups have come to acquire over governments and over political parties, and how flagrantly they deploy it to influence the allocation of scarce resources, with enormous financial consequences. The influence is particularly toxic in the licensing of natural resources exploitation, including land, minerals, real estate development rights, and airwaves.
As even former IMF chief economist Raghuram Rajan - who is no radical - has said, the key to the rise of all of India's new billionaires lies in their political contacts. Fortunes are being made by unscrupulous businessmen through gross manipulation and by rigging policies and even capturing regulatory agencies. 'Regulatory capture' is a reality particularly in petroleum and natural gas, telecom, urban real estate, mining and highway construction, which are among the highest-growth sectors in India.
This makes a mockery of transparency, rational policy-making, assertion of public control over rogue private economic activity, and even competition and the market. Rent-seeking businessmen, who have stashed away the equivalent of one-half of India's national income abroad over the years, are destroying the edifice of responsible and accountable governance and of democracy itself. This should jolt us into corrective action.
However, Big Business and its representatives have responded to these genuine public-interest concerns by issuing dire warnings against unsettling 'India's growth story'. Anyone who questions the unscrupulous policy-rigging conduct of our industrial magnates is maligned as anti-development and inimical to 'the national interest'.
People like Ratan Tata, Deepak Parekh (once regarded as the thinking executive's executive, if there is such a thing), Sharad Pawar and Arun Maira have all been roped in by a particular newspaper to articulate this parochial and self-serving view. Some have even called upon the prime minister to 'intervene' and reassure industrialists that their phones won't be tapped and their rivalries won't be made public.
Their new anthem is: don't rock the boat; India's global image is at stake; the Radia tapes and public discussion of the processes through business suborns government are hurting industry's interests. At this rate, Indian businessmen will stop investing in India and go abroad. Industrial expansion and economic growth will collapse. The people's faith in governance will be weakened. Don't confuse such public debate and contention - part of India's one million mutinies - with the "Music of Democracy". We need order and institutional discipline, not 'negativity' and a culture of suspicion and witch-hunting.
It's not hard to see that this is an obnoxious and utterly parochial plea for censorship and muzzling of democratic public debate, and against cleansing the system of corruption, and breaking the collusive nexus between business and politics. The collusion is necessary to keep the wheels of corruption lubricated, and for rent-seeking and earning super-profits at public expense to continue untrammelled. In other words, let Big Business continue to poison the system of governance - and the 'growth story' will go on, driven by India's sleazy capitalism.
To accept such counsel is to give up on the agenda of reforming Indian capitalism, and to shield malfeasance and monumental venality - in violation of the public interest. Caving in to such views means being complicit in the corporate takeover of government. Nothing could be more injurious to democracy.
The writer is an eminent columnist
Courtesy: Hard News, January 2011

News without principle

Journalism is not the only broken institution in India—but restoring its moral values is an urgently necessary step toward ending a national culture of corruption

Vinod K Jose


THIS-SCAM BLESSED YEAR has become an imperative to bring back higher moral principles in our public life—from journalism to politics to corporate governance.

“Journalism has not been this much fun for a long time,” a newspaper vendor named Ashok told me earlier this week. In this misty, sleepy Delhi winter, more and more people are stopping by the carpet of periodicals Ashok sells on a footpath outside one of the city’s nicer residential colonies. “Outlook, Mail Today and Open have been in demand for the last couple of weeks. And more people buy Times of India too,” Ashok said, rubbing a glass of hot tea in his palms.

It’s no wonder Ashok’s business is booming—the shock and masala on display in the headlines over the last several months has been unprecedented: CWG officials appropriating government funds; top army officers and politicians taking possession of apartments meant for the families of war martyrs; and a smart policy-pimp facilitating the loss of billions of rupees from the exchequer in the course of helping her clients exert influence in Delhi.

Now that it’s over, one thing can be said for certain about 2010: it will provide abundant research material for future historians seeking to understand how India really functions. The graduate students of tomorrow will need to pore through hundreds of articles in newspapers and magazines, and thousands of posts on blogs, Facebook and Twitter— not to mention the rapidly expanding collection of leaked recordings of Niira Radia on Outlook’s website.

At the end of this year of scams, is there anything to be learned?

If such lessons do exist, they must be larger than the tearing down of a few outsized personalities: the tarnishing of reputations is always titillating fare, but it tells us precious little about how to repair the tattered morals of public life. The bigger scandal here is not about Vir Sanghvi or Barkha Dutt, Suresh Kalmadi or Ashok Chavan, Ranjan Bhattacharjee or Niira Radia, Tarun Das or Mukesh Ambani or Ratan Tata.

The best way to understand the historical significance of India’s year of scandals is to forget the individuals who walk—or wish to walk—through Delhi’s corridors of power: the real story is the rotting foundation of the corridors themselves. Recall that it took a global economic crisis and a crippling recession to expose the greed and dishonesty permeating American financial institutions: our own crisis of corruption, seen in this light, reveals the fragile underpinnings of the idea of a ‘new India.’ Many of our journalists have no allegiance to any higher calling; they are content to serve as lesser gears in the corrupt machinery of power. Our government, in the service of its obligation to facilitate the creation of wealth, is eager to let powerful friends in the corporate sector bend laws and defraud the treasury. Our largest corporations, dependent on government largesse, leave nothing to chance: their vast fortunes can purchase any decision in Delhi.

The character of a country is written in the values it professes, even—and perhaps especially—when the real conduct of its public life falls well short of those lofty ideals. Hypocrisy, as the saying goes, is the tribute vice pays to virtue. But when few even bother to pay lip-service to morality, and the rot of corruption permeates every public institution, what will be left?

It may be easier, in fact, to explain how we got into this mess than to find a way out. For the sake of brevity, I will pass over the degraded state of politics, the judiciary and business, and focus instead on the institution to which I belong: journalism.

The corruption in journalism starts small, with the individual reporter. It’s not necessarily financial—though the ceaseless gossip about who’s on whose payroll is sufficiently disturbing—but corruption needn’t involve money, and a journalist with no ethical standards can still sleep soundly by reassuring himself that at least he’s not taking bribes. Journalists, like everyone else, enjoy being made to feel important—and flattery is cheaper than a briefcase filled with 1000-rupee notes. Politicians have long been masters at this game: they call out your name in a scrum of other journalists; they invite you over for a private lunch or an off-the-record drink; they send you a Diwali gift, or favour you with an official tour or a juicy bit of information to buy your loyalties. The new breed of public relations professionals— better known today as lobbyists—have learned these tricks well, and deploy them with even greater skill. When ‘success’ for journalists is defined as access to power and its brokers, corruption provides a sure route to the top.

Above the level of individual reporters and editors, we find increasing institutional corruption—though this rarely sees the light of day, given the unwillingness of most publications to cast aspersions on their peers. Yet one hears far too many stories about media houses—even those who tout their own integrity and independence—bending ethics to accommodate advertisers or financial backers. The phenomenon of ‘paid news’—in which publications charge a fee for fawning coverage of the buyer or negative pieces on his or her rivals—got a thorough airing after the 2009 elections.

And the third kind is even more alarming: Indian journalism as a system is habituated by an arrangement where someone very powerful in the public office—a minister, a businessman, etc—will choose only those journalists who they think can be influenced easily, and ‘plant’ the stories they’re comfortable with. In such cases, interviews are granted to a journalist only after all the questions are furnished beforehand and approved by the interviewee, or the final text/tape of the interview is played back to the interviewee and approved, or both together. A brief look at the Radia tapes provides ample evidence of this practice:

“I stopped the Business World story and shifted it to Business Today, because I got the questions I wanted... and not the questions that they wanted.” [Radia talking to Noel Tata]

“Between me and you, we had got an edited version” [Nita Ambani’s staff Srini with Radia discussing the Shoba De profile of Nita Ambani]

“It has to be fully scripted. I have to come in and do a run through with him [Mukesh Ambani] before… We have to rehearse it before the cameras come in.” [Vir Sanghvi telling Niira Radia how he would do an interview with Mukesh Ambani]

Editing, in this scenario, is outsourced from the newsroom to lobbyists, businessmen and even ministers. And as more journalists and publications consent to this soft corruption, powerful figures don’t hesitate to insist on such special treatment. Consider the interview conducted by Karan Thapar—one of the country’s most respected journalists, and someone I respect—with the current Home Minister, P Chidambaram, in 2008. Chidambaram, then serving as Finance Minister, refused to grant an interview unless he was given the opportunity to approve the tape before it aired and retained “the right to clear it [the tape] or deny clearance without giving any reason.”

Thapar, to his credit, did not attempt to hide the terms of this arrangement—which were displayed on a slide before the interview. I am told that Chidambaram did not, in the end, demand any cuts—but his brazen demand for prebroadcast approval is a reminder of the audacity of public figures today, who expect fawning treatment from the press—and can always, it seems, find someone whose ethical standards meet their low expectations.

This may have something to do with the explosion in media outlets over the last decade—nowhere more than on television, whose glamour and visibility have made it the standard-bearer for Indian journalism as a whole. A former BBC hand once told me that television was “75 percent logistics and 25 percent journalism: Your look, performance on the camera, ability to manage the cameraperson, driver, video editor, lights, luck with the equipment and technology, all these take 75 percentage of your thinking, and the time for research and preparation. What you end up doing in the name of journalism is more style, and very less substance.”

With television leading the way, style has definitively vanquished substance—and journalism has acquired the trappings of a glamourous profession, one that trades in images, sensationalism and sound bytes instead of analysis or investigation. Newspapers and magazines now compete to be as shallow and superficial as their TV counterparts, while young journalists angle for jobs in front of the camera. Journalism schools devote more and more time to training students on the technical business of television production at the cost of foundational courses in political science and history. Television’s emergence as the dominant news medium has transformed print media as well: reporters spent less time reporting each story, while the stories themselves get shorter and shorter. All one needs today to be a ‘success’ in print journalism is the basic capacity to write a sentence in English and a handful of contacts and official sources.

As a result, the best investigative journalist in the country today is the CAG—the Comptroller and Auditor General of India. Whoever pays close attention to what the investigative agencies of the government are doing can ‘break’ a story by repeating what officials say they’re doing or about to do—you just have to type up your notes faster than the competition. Running a close second to the CAG are the legions of vested interests happy to deliver tapes and documents that embarrass their rivals to your doorstep. Just as ministers, businessmen and their lobbyists are happy to serve as your editor, outside organisations now happily do the work once performed by reporters. Journalism has thus moved, gradually, away from the days when reporters went out and found things on their own: going through files, analysing connections, and travelling to remote locations have all taken a back seat to the fine art of waiting for juicy quotes and sensational sound bytes.

It is not too late, however, for journalism to rediscover its own higher purpose, and the process is a simple one. It may be comforting for journalists to hear that they are less corrupt than politicians or businessmen, but the duty of journalism to hold other institutions to account means an honest reckoning with our own failings is long past due. We need to change the way that we train and hire young journalists, and the way that we esteem and reward their work— for its style rather than its substance. We need to remember that while it is the job of officials and CEOs to keep secrets, it is our job to try to reveal them—and not because it sells papers or drives ratings higher, but because democracy cannot function without transparency. We must remember that the laurels of our profession are not invitations to the right dinners or drinks in the company of the powerful. We must cultivate sources, but not let sources cultivate us.

Journalists are not elected by citizens or shareholders, but we remain accountable to the people whose trust in the accuracy and integrity that enables our work. Much of this has now been squandered. But history will mock us if we don’t act quickly to put it right.

(Courtesy: The Caravan)

(Vinod K Jose is Deputy Editor with The Caravan. In 2007 he attended the MA program at Columbia Journalism School, New York, where he was a Bollinger Fellow. He won the 2008 Foreign Press Association award)