Inside Track: A money-making racket from day one

Now it can be told. The Tehelka Commission was derailed by those who feared that it would soon unravel their own dirty doings.

Fearing exposure of their get-rich-quick scam in the name of public service journalism, a conspiracy was hatched to embarrass commission chairman Justice Venkataswami, with the sole objective of provoking him to quit in a huff.

An honourable man, Justice Venkataswami played straight into the hands of those who desperately wanted the commission not to look into their financial skullduggery.

When they questioned the propriety of Justice Venkataswami's appointment as chairman of the Tribunal on Advance Rulings for Customs and Central Excise, he quit. The only people relieved were the self-confessed conmen at the tehelka.com portal, for the commission was all set to probe their financial dealings, including the multi-million operations of the share-broker couple who had bankrolled the website.

Chief Justice of India S. P. Bharucha, one of the most straightforward and no-nonsense judges to have become the CJI in recent years, had recommended Justice Venkataswami's's name for heading the Tribunal because (a) it was a light charge which would in no case interfere with Justice Venkataswami's's work as the Tehelka Commission chief, and, (b) no other retired Supreme Court judge was available to take up this part-time work. Justice Venkataswami's was unlikely to gain from his additional assignment.

Most significantly, the second appointment of Justice Venkataswami's was made early in June this year while the campaign of slander against the judge was launched only in November. Between June and November the only thing that had happened was that the Commission was now ready to explore the financial aspect of the tehelka.com portal, including the crucial question whether its so-called expose was a cover to help its chief financier to make a huge killing on the stock exchanges by bear-hammering. That is when they pointed a finger of blame at Justice Venkataswami's and, predictably, ensured his ouster.

A tight lid was thus put on the dirty doings of the clever operators behind the dotcom company who now go around posing as the victims of official vendetta even as they refuse to account for the millions of rupees that they had made in the name of so-called public service journalism.

For instance, the founding editor of the dotcom helped himself to about Rs200,000 in salary and perks every month. Turning it into a veritable gravy train, he extended the largesse to his brother and sister as well, gifting them Rs100,000 and Rs50,000 every month. Public service, clearly, began with the service of one's own family and friends.

In the words of C. R. Irani, the Editor of the venerable The Statesman "... there were call girls, bribes, sale of tapes to Zee TV for Rs5 million, and a search for a venture capitalist to finance operations. Hindujas were approached... the search of tehelka.com offices showed as many as 437 sex items..."

And one of its little known editors in a mysterious transaction received advances of $2,50,000 and £75,000 for a work of fiction, Bunker 13, which no one knows when, if at all, will see the light of day.

Worse, the counsel of the commission was found to be mixed up with the counsels of the get-rich-quick dotcom company. The telephone records bear out the fact that the counsel of the commission was in constant touch with his tehelka.com counterparts.

Indeed, in a tit-for-tat operation, Samata Party leader Jaya Jaitley exposed the unholy nexus between one of the counsels of the commission with the main counsel of the controversial portal.

The story of the tehelka.com, then, is the story of extraordinary sleaze and dirty tricks. Its promoters hit upon the idea of dotcom boom to become millionaires overnight. The prevailing rot in the society served as an excuse for them to exploit it for personal enrichment. Thus it was that one of the main promoters floated a publishing company while still working as a full-time journalist (which was worse than a serving policeman or a chief minister floating a charitable trust or an NGO).

Again, the antecedents of one of the reporters behind the so-called expose would not bear scrutiny.

Remember that one of the first exposes by tehelka.com had sought to blacken the face of India's original sporting icon, Kapil Dev. The majordomos at the dotcom had relied on the former Indian cricketer Manoj Prabhakar to sully Kapil's name. But here again tehelka.com was exposed when Prabhakar found himself in jail on charges of running a fraudulent chit fund company which had deprived the poor people of Uttaranchal of their meagre savings while Tehelka's victim of calumny had his name duly cleared by a thorough inquiry into the so-called Cricketgate.

Had they allowed the Venkataswami's Commission to complete its inquiry, there was every likelihood that tehelka.com would have ended up with further egg on its face for its so-called Defencegate. Hence the conspiracy to force Venkataswami's out and shut down the commission looking into one of the sleaziest stories in Indian journalism.

Managing editor of the large selling weekly, India Today, Swapan Dasgupta, and its special correspondent, Uday Mahurkar, while covering the Gujarat election campaign sought 'press passes' from the local Congress party office in Ahmedabad to cover the upcoming rally of the Congress president Sonia Gandhi in the city.

A day later they were duly handed two envelopes each, one containing the press passes and the other containing Rs400 in cash. When the two journos protested and returned the cash, the Congressman handling these matters were all at sea, saying that most of the others had pocketed the cash without any fuss.

There's more from the campaign trail in Gujarat. When a self-important leader of an opposition party landed at the Ahmedabad airport, his local handlers were suitably prepared to give him a grand reception.

But in these days of rent-a-crowd rallies, you cannot really vouch for the integrity of every hired hand. So when he stepped into the public arena from the airport lounge, some raised slogans hailing him as a great leader, chanting 'Desh Ka Neta Kaisa Ho, ...Jaisa Ho' (how a nation's leader should be like, ....be like). But the monotonous chant was broken by the shrill response from a section of the hired crowd which responding to the first part of the slogan, cried out loud, 'Jis Ki Jeb Mein Paisa Ho' (in whose pockets there is money).

Our 'neta' in question belongs to a party which does not have much of a presence in Gujarat, but nonetheless is keen to play the role of a spoiler for the main opposition party in the state.

Newly-elected member of the Rajya Sabha from Uttar Pradesh, hotelier Lalit Suri, has already made his presence felt in the House.

The other day he made a couple of telling points in the debate on the disinvestment, though the scrupulous followers of parliamentary etiquette noted that since he was a beneficiary of the ongoing disinvestment programme he should have refrained from speaking on the issue altogether.

Suri clearly did not think much of this nit-picking so when a couple of days later Finance Minister Jaswant Singh was answering que