2014: The Election That Changed India (20 page)

Advani’s supporters say his actions were propelled by nothing more than a genuine concern over the party becoming a one-man show. ‘Advani had observed Modi’s style of functioning in Gujarat and was worried that he would bring in a similar brand of unilateral decision-making which was not part of the BJP’s culture,’ says an Advani loyalist. Advani also told BJP leaders who met him that he was convinced that if Modi became the face of the BJP campaign, it would lead to a Hindu–Muslim polarization and the core issue of governance and UPA misrule would be forgotten. ‘We will not get allies and we will be stuck with 180 seats like in 1996,’ he warned.

The truth is, Advani had never reconciled himself to the 2009 defeat under his helmsmanship. There were reports (denied, of course) that he would consult astrologers on when the Manmohan Singh government would fall. He even seemed to blame me for denying him his moment of ultimate glory, in an episode that revealed the darker side of our politics.

The cash-for-votes scandal had broken out during the nuclear deal vote in Parliament in 2008. There had been much speculation at the time that MPs were being offered bribes by both sides but
we were not being given any evidence. CPI leader A.B. Bardhan had even claimed that Rs 25 crore was being offered to each MP for their vote. Our investigative reporter Siddharth Gautam had been attempting to get more details but had made no significant breakthrough. I was sitting in Parliament’s central hall listening to the nuclear debate when Jaitley joined us. The BJP leader claimed some of his MPs had been contacted by the government to switch sides. ‘We are planning to expose this in a sting operation,’ he said. He agreed to allow our cameras to be a fly on the wall, watching MPs being ‘purchased’.

That evening, we got a phone call from Jaitley, and sent Siddharth and a production unit to meet Sudheendra Kulkarni who was supervising the entire sting operation. The silver-haired Kulkarni, a former journalist, had worked in the Vajpayee PMO. He was now an Advani loyalist with an obsessive desire to see his leader as prime minister. Kulkarni had also played an important role in shaping Advani’s contentious homage to Jinnah. Now, he was hoping that the sting would bring down the Manmohan Singh government. With Kulkarni were three BJP MPs, Ashok Argal, Faggan Singh Kulaste and Mahavir Bhagora, who had offered to be ‘whistle-blowers’. None of us had met or heard of these MPs till that day.

The other key player in the sting was a more mysterious individual with a rather intriguing name—Sohail Hindustani. Our reporting team had no clue as to who Sohail really was. Dressed in a T-shirt, he was, by all accounts, one of those Delhi wheeler-dealers who liked to show off his alleged connections with powerful people. It was Hindustani who was trying to organize the actual money transaction.

Our investigating team was first taken to Hotel Meridien where we were told that Congress leaders, including Ahmed Patel, would be found striking a deal. But when the MPs who had been miked up with a hidden camera reached the hotel, they did not meet anyone. All we had were dark shots of people moving in and out of the hotel lobby. Something seemed wrong. Kulkarni was livid. ‘Where are the Congress leaders you promised to get us?’ he asked Hindustani.

An increasingly desperate Hindustani started making more phone calls virtually offering the BJP MPs ‘for sale’. Late in the night, he finally got lucky. A Samajwadi Party MP, Reoti Raman Singh, landed up at the residence of the BJP MPs. Our team secretly filmed the conversations where the two sides talked of a potential money deal. Reoti Raman Singh asked the BJP MPs to meet his ‘leader’ the next morning to clinch the transaction. The presumption was that it was Amar Singh he was referring to. The MPs agreed. They went to Amar Singh’s house in the morning in a Zen car with tinted glasses but crucially refused to take the hidden camera or mikes in with them. ‘We don’t want to get caught and take any risk. Amar Singh is a dangerous guy,’ one of the MPs told Siddharth. We, however, did film the car entering the house.

But the real big breakthrough came an hour after the Amar Singh meeting. We had on camera someone called Sanjeev Saxena, ostensibly an aide of Amar Singh, meeting the MPs at their residence with a large bag of money. Kulkarni was delighted. ‘We have nailed this now, the sting is done!’ He even hugged our team and congratulated them. The cash was laid out on a table.

The tapes landed in the office around noon. Watching them, I knew we were onto potentially explosive stuff. The newsman in me was excited. ‘This story is going to really create a splash,’ was my gut reaction. Not all my senior editors were as convinced. ‘This is a BJP-driven operation, surely we need to do some verification before we can go on air with it.’ The more considered view that I eventually fell in line with was that the tapes on their own did not make a journalistically sound investigative report and the ‘evidence’ in them needed more examination. Remember, contrary to popular belief, we did not have Amar Singh or any Congress leader offering money on tape, either by way of audio or video.

Given the sensitive, even dramatic nature of the story, we decided to consult our lawyers. I also spoke to former solicitor general Harish Salve who advised restraint. ‘The tapes will not stand legal scrutiny without due diligence and could be seen as unlawful entrapment,’ was his expert opinion. After a long debate during our editorial
meeting, we decided to hold off airing of the footage till we had done further investigation.

By now, it was 4 p.m. The BJP leaders who had organized the sting were getting increasingly impatient—they wanted us to telecast the tapes immediately while the vote was on. We said that a genuine, credible investigation meant there would have to be a process of cross-checking the information, especially as there were middlemen with questionable reputations involved. ‘Give us a few days, we will put it all together,’ I assured my BJP interlocutors.

The lawyer in Jaitley seemed to understand our predicament but not the others. The BJP was determined to block the nuclear deal vote. So, around 5 p.m. that evening, barely a few hours after we had caught the initial money exchange on camera, the BJP MPs went ahead to Parliament, displaying the bundle of notes in the Lok Sabha. By that one act, the BJP left us with no choice but to abort the investigation. Key players like Sanjeev Saxena just disappeared when we tried to track them down. I went to Parliament and met the Lok Sabha Speaker Somnath Chatterjee, and gave him a copy of the sting tapes. ‘You have done the right thing. It is now for the Delhi police to investigate further,’ he told me.

Three weeks later, we testified before a parliamentary committee on the cash-for-votes sting and placed all the tapes before them. Importantly, the very night of our testimony, we did telecast the tapes in a three-hour-long programme without editing out any relevant information. We also fully cooperated with the police investigation which was sadly slipshod (the police, for example, never sought the phone conversations of the MPs involved in the operation which were later obtained by
Tehelka
magazine). But, importantly, there was no cover-up—we were simply placing in the public domain whatever we had. No footage was ever hidden from any authority. Our investigating team’s chief producer Rohit Khanna can vouch for this.

Advani and Kulkarni, though, were still fuming, convinced that we had held back the tapes under government pressure. The BJP even boycotted our channel for a few days. I tried to reason with Advani but knew I was fighting a losing battle. ‘You have let us down under
pressure from the Congress,’ he said, incensed. ‘You have betrayed us,’ shouted Kulkarni.

The truth is, there was minimal external pressure not to show the sting. A worried Congress leader Prithviraj Chavan, who was a minister in the PMO, only called up to know if any Congressmen were on the tape and asked why we had done a ‘deal’ with the BJP. Others like Ahmed Patel, who had been closely involved in managing the numbers for the government during the vote, seemed just relieved to know that they weren’t on any tape recording.
‘Yeh BJP wale mujhe phasana chahate hain’
(The BJP wants to trap me), he claimed. Neither of them threatened me in any manner, contrary to some reports.

The only one who was really worried was Amar Singh. ‘You are part of a conspiracy to destroy my career,’ he told me. On the night we telecast the sting, he rang up and warned me, ‘I will deal with you and Arun Jaitley for doing this to me.’ Years later, at a book release function, he even accused me of being the journalist who sent him to jail. ‘I will never forgive you for it,’ he said angrily. I found myself in the strange situation of being condemned by everyone involved: the BJP accused me of protecting the government; the government blamed me for being hand in glove with the BJP; and Amar Singh believed I had sent him to jail.

Did I get the cash-for-votes sting horribly wrong? Should we have simply aired what we had right away without any journalistic checks? It’s a tough one to answer. Maybe I should have gone along with my original instinct, which was to simply air whatever we had on tape and let all other issues be settled subsequently. We had strong circumstantial evidence against Amar Singh even though there were still plenty of holes in the overall story that needed rigorous cross-checking.

However, it is a golden rule of journalism that bigger the story, the greater the need for vigilance. ‘The publish and be damned’ theory cannot allow for an incomplete investigation to be aired. I am no votary of sting journalism. A sting must only be carried out when the public interest is so great that it necessitates the use of the hidden
camera. The cash-for-votes scandal did qualify by this criteria—I am proud that we were able to point the searchlight on a seamier side of Indian politics and even the courts have praised our role. Where I badly erred was in not maintaining a sufficient firewall between the BJP politicians involved in the sting and our own reporting team. We had wilfully allowed ourselves to be used by a political party in their quest for power and my constant reporter’s search, indeed hunger, for a big story.

The fact is, the decision when and how to telecast a sensitive story is an editorial prerogative based on sound legal and journalistic advice. Timelines cannot be decided by political parties. Political timelines and journalistic deadlines often do not, and should not, match. I know the sting operation damaged my credibility in the eyes of many BJP supporters, and I was the target of a sustained vilification campaign based on lies and abuse. Much of it was hurtful. I was even accused of taking money from the government and the likes of Amar Singh. Delhi can be a cruel city—even so-called friends here will look to find ways to bring you down. The cash-for-votes scandal left me scarred and shaken. I realized that in a surcharged political atmosphere, journalists are better off not getting entangled in murky dealings where the political stakes are blood-curdlingly high.

While I introspected, Advani thought that his chance to topple the government had come and gone. Now, his prime ministerial ambitions were being thwarted again, this time by one of his own. And yet, to suggest that Advani’s rebellion was occasioned purely by envy towards Modi would be unfair to a leader who has devoted a lifetime to the party. Yes, he still felt he deserved to be prime minister, but Advani was also an instinctive democrat, someone who had vigorously opposed the Emergency in 1975. Perhaps he saw shades of an autocratic Indira in Modi’s behaviour and was looking to warn the party of the negative consequences.

But the party he had once so effectively piloted now had little time for the tantrums or advice of the ageing neta. The new leadership represented by the Modi–Rajnath–Jaitley troika was in no mood to
bend. Even the RSS, which had once been fiercely aligned to Advani, had now seen the writing on the wall.

The RSS has been often described as an extra-constitutional authority that lies at the apex of the Sangh Parivar, a ‘brotherhood in saffron’. The RSS claims it is apolitical, that it only acts as an ideological guide to the BJP. The relationship between the RSS and the BJP, though, is often more intricate—the two are umbilically tied by their shared notion of cultural nationalism, and a cadre and leadership that work in close collaboration. The dual membership of the RSS and BJP (or Jan Sangh, as it was known then) had even contributed to the collapse of the non-Congress Janata Party government in the 1970s. The RSS may not be the BJP’s daily remote control, as its critics suggest, but neither is it some voluntary organization solely devoted to social welfare. It is, at the end of the day, the final word within the saffron ‘family’—the paterfamilias who has veto rights in the event of any internal dispute. In the build-up to the 2014 elections, the RSS had made its decision—Narendra Modi would be the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate.

The backstory to the RSS’s involvement in the ‘Modi for PM’ campaign began in the aftermath of the 2009 election debacle. If the 2004 election verdict had stunned the Sangh Parivar because of the surprise element, the 2009 result had left it despondent. The BJP, it seemed, was in terminal decline, the karyakartas were dispirited and the leadership was weak and fractious. The RSS, too, was facing the challenge of shrinking cadres, and a generational crisis was looming—a paradigm shift was called for. This is where Mohan Rao Bhagwat, the RSS
sarsanghchalak
(chief), decided to step in.