They were sticking out like sore thumbs – those palatial houses in the hinterlands of the eastern Indian state of Bihar. Sometime around 1995-1996, the Times of India (TOI) office in Patna kept receiving anonymous calls from people who wanted a Press expose on the sources of all those ill-gotten gains that had seen several officials of Bihar’s Animal Husbandry Department, with rather modest salaries and lifestyles, suddenly start building those imposing concrete structures in the middle of nondescript villages.
For Uttam Sengupta, the then resident editor of the Patna edition of TOI, those anonymous phone calls were just what he needed to tickle his ‘nose for news’, as he set off one of his staff photographers to click pictures of all those contentious buildings. Sengupta’s dogged determination to get to the bottom of the matter led him and his team of reporters and photographers on a fascinating trail of investigative journalism that finally helped unearth the Rs9.4 billion fodder scam. And the trail finally ended at the doorstep of Lalu Prasad Yadav, the then chief minister of Bihar! Lalu was sentenced to three-and-a-half years in jail last December 23 for his role in the scam.
Sengupta, now a consulting editor with the National Herald newspaper in New Delhi, shared his thoughts on the entire episode with Gulf News. Following are excerpts from a free-wheeling chat.
GULF NEWS: Are you happy with the fact that Lalu Yadav has finally been sentenced in the fodder scam case?
UTTAM SENGUPTA: There is really no room for satisfaction. Fodder scam provided us with the opportunity to first, make the system better and fool-proof; and second, to drive fear in public servants so that similar scams are never repeated. As a journalist, I believe we have failed on both counts, given the all-pervasive corruption and given the scams that have been surfacing in Bihar and in other states across India. The unilateral withdrawal of a criminal case against Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath by his own government and the indiscreet comments made by the judge of the CBI Special Court in Ranchi [on the fodder scam] have created the unfortunate impression that justice is skewed in favour of those in power.
What really set you and your team on the fodder scam trail?
The scam first surfaced in 1992-1993 when the Income Tax department stopped a plane in Ranchi, that was about to take off for Delhi, and forced some officials of Bihar’s Animal Husbandry department and their family members to deplane. They were carrying disproportionate amount of cash and jewellery, but after the initial report in the media, nobody followed it up. The Public Accounts Committee of the Bihar Assembly also began an inquiry around that time, confiscated documents and asked the then chief minister, Lalu Prasad Yadav, to stop a vigilance inquiry till the committee completed its examination. That was the time when I started following it.
How difficult was it to carry out this piece of investigative journalism against an establishment that was as entrenched as the one in Bihar in the 1990s with Lalu as CM?
Once the Patna edition of the Times of India, of which I was the resident editor at the time, started pursuing the scam, often carrying three or more reports on a single day, it became surprisingly easy to get information.
I would receive information over the phone from absolute strangers and government officials who went out of their way to part with what they knew. Even some of the politicians spoke freely -- sometimes surprising us with copies of official documents. The Principal Auditor General’s office was a major source of information. We effectively had four reporters looking into the various aspects of the scam.
All of us received veiled or direct threats of course. Bihar was quite lawless at the time and I remember a particularly chilling conversation I had with an anonymous caller who calmly and correctly named my wife and daughter, named the school my daughter went to and where my wife was teaching, and described in great detail what could happen to them. My only defence was to lie and tell the caller that I had installed equipment on my phone that would help the police track him down. In 1996, mobile phones were not that common in Bihar and the lie was apparently effective!
Do you think Lalu’s conviction in the case came a little too late? Could he have been implicated much earlier?
As chief minister, who was also the home minister and the finance minister of the state (in contrast Prime Minister Narendra Modi has no portfolio!) Lalu could not have avoided his responsibility. I had in fact advised him to resign, take the entire responsibility of the scam and call for an election. I had told him half in jest that he would win by a landslide.
But jokes apart, Lalu himself did not raise fake bills; he neither cleared the bills for payment nor did he make fake supplies. Officials at various levels and businessmen did that. They of course kept politicians happy and Lalu was certainly one of the many beneficiaries. Even an inspector of Bihar Police could have secured the conviction of the scamsters based on facts and stark documents. Registration numbers of vehicles had been given for transporting thousands of tonnes of fodder. The treasury did not have the required clearances and rules were defied. But the Patna High Court brought in the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) to inquire into the role of politicians in power. Without the active complicity of politicians in power, the court was convinced, the scam would not have continued for so long. I believe the CBI would have had a hard time proving in court the complicity of the then CM and may have relied entirely on circumstantial evidence. That is what I find is most interesting about this case. So, the fact that Lalu’s sentencing took so long is not without valid reasons.
In a country like India, where politicians are often known to have coerced the media into toeing the official line, how important and difficult do you think it is to stick to ethics?
Journalists are prisoners of the economic and political conditions in which they work. But it is important to stick to basics, to treat facts as sacred, to question literally everything and to believe that there are no sacred cows. In the fodder scam case, I believe we were enormously lucky to have been left alone. Some of the things we did during the investigation – for instance, publishing photographs of palatial houses of state government officials in their native villages -- were like fishing by amateurs and would not be allowed by cautious editors in most cases. We were also lucky to have had no interference from Bennett Coleman & Company Limited, owners of the Times of India and the Times Group, for which I worked at the time. And luckily again, 1996-1997 was the time when we did not have a strong and stable government in Delhi. Nobody in the Central Government had the time to bother about what was happening in the backwaters of Bihar. That helped us in our investigation.
Do you think your expose of the fodder scam could have had an even bigger impact had social media been as active in the 1990s as it is now?
I shudder at the thought. Had social media been there, it is entirely possible that the establishment would have had us, journalists, for breakfast, lunch and dinner! The court and the agencies would have been more influenced by social media manipulations and one-liners. It will take time for social media to win our trust.
Anything about this case that still bothers you …
What troubled me then and what troubles me even now is our inability in the media to deconstruct complex issues and make them simple enough to enable people to ask the right questions and get the right perspective. I wish I could master the art.
