Little room for morals

There are no universal Lakshman rekhas which journalists must or must not cross

IS it kosher to provide prostitutes to prove and confirm the guilt of those in high office? Pose the question in this fashion and you will invite a howl of protest, ‘‘Of course not!’’ The answer is likely to be more ponderous if you pose the question differently. ‘‘Is it in the public interest to expose men in high office even though, to prove their guilt, you have to go through sleaze?’’ It is almost a universally accepted code that means are justified provided it can be established that the story serves public interest. Has public interest been served by the Tehelka expose? Can iron-clad rules be framed that a journalist can go this far, no further in an investigation?

Let me tell you the story of how I nearly lost my job for exposing a drought in Rajasthan. On hearing the first reports of a drought, I hired a taxi and drove through Bikaner, Jodhpur, Barmer and Jaisalmer. When I returned to Jaipur (I was then the staff correspondent for The Statesman in Rajasthan), I was shocked to see the national dailies which arrived from New Delhi by lunch time, carrying photographs of the Rajasthan canal with captions like — ‘Desert blooms: Rajasthan canal flows with water’. All papers, except mine, carried this photograph. Within minutes I had a message on my teleprinter from the Deputy News Editor. ‘‘We appear to have been beaten on the Rajasthan canal story.’’

I was angry because I had just returned from the drought affected areas unlike my colleagues who filed the story handed by the state’s publicity department. I drove to the office of Rajendra Shankar Bhatt, Director of Publicity. Bhatt laughed when he saw me shaking with rage. ‘‘You are a novice, Mr Naqvi’’ he mocked. ‘‘Jo chap gaya wohi satya hai’’. (That which has been published is the truth).
I returned home and hammered out the story of which the opening line was: ‘‘The exclusive Goebbels formula that an untruth if widely published, ultimately becomes the truth appears to have been applied to the Rajasthan canal project with obvious success.’’

The story made second lead on page one. That evening the editor summoned me to Delhi. ‘‘Do you realise that when you describe somebody as Goebels or Hitler you are employing intemperate language?’’ If you lose balance so easily, he suggested, how can we trust your judgement from an important state capital? My not very distinguished career in Rajasthan was soon terminated for this and similar indiscretions. I was strong on facts but had a tendency to become shrill — not the Statesman style those days.

In the sixties it was possible to expose a state government but severe penalties were attached for intemperate language or poor judgement. By the seventies, public morality itself was deteriorating and journalists were pushing the frontiers of what they could probe.

The equilibrium was totally upset after the imposition of the Emergency: battle lines were drawn. By the eighties and the nineties, systems were breaking down and a general permissiveness was afflicting the media as well.

And India was not the only country where the media was pushing the ethical limits. In England, Donald McIntyre’s ‘‘undercover’’ stories for BBC were the hottest piece of journalism two years ago.

McIntyre would spend a year, say, with football hooligans, become one of them and film how soccer matches were systematically disrupted. While exposing modeling houses, he even promised (or procured) ladies of leisure for the bosses of the modeling firms to get certain models cleared for the catwalk. He won awards. Phillip Knightley, the only journalist to win the Reporter of the Year award three times in Britain, posed as an Australian antique dealer to expose corrupt antique dealers’ ring in London. Recently, journalists posed as businessmen and bribed a member of the House of Commons to ask certain questions.

Remember the chicken factory story in the US? An employee in the chicken factory approached the local newspaper. His proprietors were selling rotten meat, he said. But if the proprietors found he had blown the whistle, they would sack him and worse. So the newspaper asked one of its reporters to seek employment in the factory. After the story, the factory owners went to court against the reporter who, their plaint was, obtained his job on a false CV. In the hearings, he revealed the name of the employee who had blown the whistle. The employee was sacked. The law spared neither the ‘‘undercover’’ journalist nor the errant chicken factory.

There are no universal Lakshman rekhas which journalists must or must not cross. As ethical standards in public life take a tumble in the wake of market driven mammonism, so will journalistic practices change to expose the cancer. Journalism, in this phase, will sometimes be anarchic.

Tarun Tejpal’s misfortune is that his timing was faulty. Had he set up his dot com two years ago when the Silicon Valley was throwing up ten Indian millionaires a day, each one eager to invest in Indian dot coms, it would have been different. Had he done his sting operations two years ago, he would have been a millionaire today offering employment to his critics. Tejpal missed it by being a year too late.
Exposing corruption, by means fair or foul, would have been incidental to his climb up the spiral, blazing a path for journalists to become dot com millionaires. In this era of Mammon and the market, what room for morals?

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