Search the Internet          Tips

Message Board

Your Take on the      Scandal

Tehelka has been the biggest casualty of defence expose: Tejpal

"Tehelka.com has been the biggest casualty of the defence scandal that it exposed last year," Tarun Tejpal, the New Delhi-based news portal's chief editor, said on Wednesday afternoon as a team of Central Bureau of Investigation officials raided its premises.

No political parties, political individuals or officers had been brought to justice after the expose, he said.

The raid came on a day when Tejpal was supposed to appear before the Venkataswami Commission, which is looking into the defence scandal, and his advocates were to cross-examine Samata Party leader Jaya Jaitly.

Tejpal said he and his advocates could not appear before the commission, thus weakening the portal's cross-examination of Jaitly.

The raid, incidentally, came exactly 27 years after the declaration of Emergency by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, which resulted in the worst ever gag on the media after Independence.

In 1987, the Enforcement Directorate had raided the premises of the Indian Express.

The Outlook magazine was recently raided, as part of the government's search for its owners, the Rahejas.

CBI officials said Wednesday's raids were in connection with a poaching case in Uttar Pradesh, in which Tehelka reporter Kumar Badal's name had appeared.

Sources said the CBI officials seized details relating to travels of Tehelka reporters outside the capital, documents relating to various stories, and were reviewing the tapes of Operation Westend, which dealt with corruption in defence deals.

The CBI officials, armed with personal pistols and automatic guns, were searching through documents and records. An expert was sitting at the server, opening every computer in the office, searching through every possible document.

He was taking out printouts of documents that the agency thought were sensitive. Among them were documents downloaded from the Internet on poaching and other topics.

Also, printouts of emails of senior Tehelka journalists, including one written by Shankar Sharma of First Global to reporter Aniruddh Bahal and Tejpal, were also taken out.

The CBI sleuths came with huge bags and a search warrant. The bags were being filled with documents till the afternoon.

Tejpal clarified that "no documents relating to poaching" were seized from his office.

He said Tehelka had been cooperating with every agency that was serving them notices and was providing all documents that were asked for.

"We are being victimised, whereas they are the culprits," Tejpal said, adding that thousands of pages filed by the government before the Venkataswami Commission did not say anything about corruption, but went in length to prove that Tehelka was working at somebody's behest.

"They have called us an ISI [Inter-Services Intelligence] agent, a Dawood [Ibrahim] agent, a Congress agent. We are only journalists," an agitated Tejpal said.

"Not a word [of the affidavits] is true, but shamelessly the government is pursuing" the case against Tehelka before the commission, he said.

Tejpal said Wednesday's raids were "yet another tactic to intimidate us" and that the government and its agencies were harassing the portal under some pretext or the other ever since March 13 expose last year.

He said his company was pursuing journalism as best as it could, its reporters continued to work on stories "within the limited resources" at their command. He admitted that Tehelka had not given salaries to its employees for the past five months.

The number of employees at Tehelka had come down from about 120 to less than 20, who were working without pay, he said.

The only outsider who had invested money in Tehelka, Shankar Sharma, had been served over 200 notices by various government agencies and was shuttling between courts and government offices after a stint in jail, he said.

And there were no indications of any fresh investment coming into the troubled news portal, he added.

ALSO READ
Jaya Jaitly denies having met Tehelka reporter

The Defence Scandal: Complete Coverage | Defence Sites

Back to top

Tell us what you think of this report