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COVER STORY: TEHELKA
Sting Theory
By Namita Bhandare
The phone's ringing off the hook at the Tehelka.com
office. Ringing at the rate of six a minute as everyone, but everyone,
wants to talk to the man of the moment, Tarun Jit Tejpal. National Public
Radio has called from Washington. So has a former president of the students'
union at Jawaharlal Nehru University. And journalists of course, by the
dozen, everyone from Time magazine onward.
When the man everyone's waiting for finally
strides in he's talking into, what else, his mobile. "All we've done
is follow a story through to its logical end," he says. But it's
clear that this is his moment of glory: every journalist's dream of delivering
a story with enough punch to stir the system.
In a city where innuendo flows faster than the
Yamuna, Tejpal seems a bit perplexed by the whisper campaign that's underway.
Who funds Tehelka.com? Was this a young dotcom's cheap but sure-shot way-complete
with double exclamation marks-to ensure fame? Were journalistic ethics
compromised? Were the tapes doctored? How much has been edited out?
Tejpal says he's got nothing to hide. He sees
nothing ethically wrong in his methods: "Nobody was going to admit
they were taking money. This was the only way."
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DETECTIVE.COM: Bahal (left) and Tejpal spent eight months and Rs
21 lakh on the story
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The website is only one part of a media company
called Buffalo Networks. In March last year, Tejpal, then managing editor
for Outlook magazine, and journalist Aniruddha Bahal-who along with Mathew
Samuel broke the defence scandal story-were still riding high on the match-fixing
story that was their scoop. Along with Tejpal's brother Minty, a former
ad copywriter, the two decided to float a media company. While the majority
of its shares-Tejpal says nearly 70 per cent-are held by the three promoters,
Tejpal's college pal Shankar Sharma, director with First Global, a stock
broking firm, owns another 14.5 per cent. The rest, says Tejpal not giving
any names, is held by various investors. Its board of directors comprises
such celebrities as Amitabh Bachchan, V.S. Naipaul and Khushwant Singh.
Tehelka.com was the first of Buffalo's products.
The company also has a books division. Its first and so far only title
Fallen Heroes is, in the words of its publicity blurb, the "sensational
undercover investigation" into the "world of match-fixing and
cricketing icons who have betrayed our trust". There is a TV division
that will produce entertainment and news programmes for various channels.
There's a design division that, according to Expressindia.com, recently
bagged a $2 million order from firms in the United Kingdom and west Asia.
Finally, the company plans to introduce its first music artist in May
this year.
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The beauty of
Tehelka's spycam was its simplicity. It yielded a rivetting 270
minutes.
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So where's the money coming from? There are no
apparent ads, except for one in-house ad and another for Naturence, cricketer
Manoj Prabhakar's beauty products company. Prabhakar of course had collaborated
with Bahal in secretly filming tapes of the match-fixing saga (later the
CBI implicated him too in cricket's rigging scandal). Says Tejpal, "We're
still in the investment stage. It'll be a while before we actually start
making money."
Right now the company is in the second stage
of its funding: the first round of funding amounted to around $1 million.
Tejpal isn't forthcoming about who he's talking to considering nothing's
been finalised. But he denies a rumour that Zee's Subhash Chandra has
bought 26 per cent, adding at the same time that he is indeed talking
to Zee about funding. He also adds that Kerry Packer's Indian venture
had shown some interest but has since backed off.
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Eye Spy
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The
most popular spy cameras are buttoncams, watchcams or pencams, all
of which are very small. With the front aperture of the lens being
about 1 mm in diameter, these cameras are ideal for covert operations.
A wire connects the camera to a matchbox-sized transmitter which sends
video signals to a recorder which could be stationed even 75 to 100
yards away. Estimated cost: between Rs 60,000 and Rs 2.5 lakh. |
By Tejpal's reckoning, the company spent some
Rs 21 lakh to chase the defence story: Rs 10.8 lakh as bribes and pay-offs
and more or less the same amount in newsgathering expenses spread over
eight months. But the beauty of the defence scandal story-as with the
match-fixing story-is its simplicity.
Rumours of defence dealers running the corridors
of power are old hat. All that Tehelka did was equip itself with a spycam,
set up a fictitious company called West End International (its India rep
Alvin D'Souza was none other than Bahal) and it was in business. Only
four people-the two correspondents, Bahal and Mathew Samuel, and the two
Tejpal brothers-were in the picture when the team began working on the
story in August 2000.
Five months later a secondary team began sifting
through the footage and transcribing what would eventually emerge as 270
minutes of tape. The unedited version meanwhile will be made available
for an official inquiry or probe when that comes.
As for stories about suppressing the involvement
of certain political heavyweights or even of "more to come",
Tejpal dismisses these, even as Samuel in Thiruvananthapuram talks of
Rs 1,300-crore deals involving the home minister. The tapes, says Tejpal,
contain a lot of loose allegations made by arms dealers. Since Samuel
was away when the story broke, he didn't really know which parts had been
edited and which hadn't. Still, it does seem strange that a key reporter
should not have been in Delhi when the story went public. Tejpal says
Samuel's on assignment.
Conspiracy theories will inevitably dog a story
like this but there's no denying that Tehelka's got itself a whopper of
a story. One that will not only endow it with the sort of shine that made
journalists crusaders through much of the 1980s but also ensure more page
views: according to Tehelka's webmaster the number of hits has gone up
by 10 times to 30 million since the story broke (seven million in the
first eight hours alone).
Whether this will translate into an infusion
of fresh funds for the venture is another matter. For now Tehelka-which
shares its name with a B-grade Dharmendra film of the early 1990s that
dealt with, ironically, corrupt defence officers-seems content with its
moment of glory.
-with Sayantan Chakravarty
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