There are three kinds of sting
operations: 1) An authorised Law
Enforcement agency like the Police or CBI conducts a sting to make inroads into
a crime already committed to force evidence. 2) Lure innocent people into believing or playing roles to con
someone or commit a major crime. You know like that Special26 movie
about the jewellery shop robbery in 1987 where the conman recruited people as
CBI agents to rob the outlet. 3)
Fabricate a crime with some political or other motive and then try to fit
people into it. Catch them unawares by appealing to their baser instincts and
tempt them into a crime.
The recent sting on the AAP Party falls into the third
category. Try to appeal to baser instincts of people (and it is normal for a
large number of people who can succumb to temptation) and then claim they are
guilty. Tehelka’s history is full of
the third category. In other words, these are not even stings but more of
entrapments. Tarun Tejpal (TT) couldn’t
help molesting and raping a young colleague twice at a public event (Remember
NDTV, please insert alleged everywhere). Imagine what crimes he would have succumbed
to if offered inducements with call girls or prostitutes. Take a look at the
pic below:
Not hard to recognise the man in the
middle, is it? In 2009 Tiger Woods
was hospitalised and the media was trying to find out why. Then came news that
there was an accident and he suffered some serious injuries. People were
worried. Then came news that the injuries were out of his wife beating him up.
Then came news that the beating was because of his adultery and affair with
another woman. That should have explained. It didn’t stop there. Then came news
of three more women. Then another three! By the time the shock could be
absorbed it turns out Woods had rounded up a complete “cricket team” of girlfriends with whom he had affairs. He even
added a 12th woman to complete the bench; there were 12 women in all. But even the high-octane-libido-Woods
wasn’t accused of raping or forcing any woman into sex with him. Tejpal’s
daughter claims to have told “V”
(his victim) that her dad had done this before. So I wonder how many will
tumble out of his closet and speak up with the same courage as V.
Are we to believe that people around
Tiger Woods and many of his media chroniclers didn’t know about his sexcapades?
I don’t thinks so. Are we to believe all the friends of TT in the media didn’t
know about his sexcapades? I don’t think so in his case either. Every major
media celeb in NDTV, CNN-IBN, TimesNow, India Today, TOI Group, Mid-day,
FirstPost and all the cronies in and around Delhi and Mumbai would have known
about his history sheet. They remained quiet. They were all silent accomplices.
Chances are they are still accomplices to some other crooks like TT. In
particular, would Shoma Chaudhury be
unaware? Facts tell us she would be. After all, Tehelka was a small family and
not a giant like TOI. Shoma now comes across the scumbagini who’s the biggest
accomplice in terms of attempts to cover up of the whole episode. This is the
same Shoma who is quoted in Wiki
(Pic from DailyMail):
Chaudhary criticises the
current state of the Indian media. Speaking on a panel on investigative
journalism at the 16th World Editors Forum, she remarked on the state of
journalism in India as "pathetic"
as it had become "a corporate rather than a political act". She was
critical of the "focus on advertisement revenue" rather than public
interest, adding that "journalism has thus been undervalued, and this
needs to change”. On another occasion she was quoted as saying: “India's political, corporate and media
establishment sounds like a mobile cocktail party, gliding, champagne glasses
in hand, in and out of each other’s drawing rooms, television studios,
boardrooms and award ceremonies like actors in an elaborate charade”.
That last quote seems to pretty much
describe Tehelka itself. Surprising see doesn’t see Tehelka’s ugly face in the
mirror. “Drunken banter” said Tejpal
to his victim. Mobile cocktail party?
That’s what most media houses in Delhi are and they are part of the
Scotch-circuit of Delhi and Mumbai. The cocktails by themselves shouldn’t
bother us but it’s the kind of ‘Hammam’ and incestuous club it has created that
has destroyed the credibility of MSM. There isn’t one single media house that
is clean. All of them protect each other’s crimes. All of them protect each
other’s rapes, molestations, corruptions and frauds. There is a reason I fondly
call them a “mafia”. The earlier
tagline for this blog was “Crooks &
Liars in the Indian media are the greatest danger to our democracy”. It’s
not the middle and junior, it’s the top rung that is usually corrupt and
dangerous. The bottle-neck is always at
the top. It is only when it’s too late that some speak out. Most of the
media houses are scavenging on the death of Tehelka and are guilty of gross
negligence all this while. They’re like a “mafia wife”. But there are some who
acted out of courage, some whose voices never reached you earlier, spoke out.
Here are two former employees of Tehelka (Video: 6.00 mins):
Revati
Lal resigned after the murky handling
and cover up attempts by Shoma. It’s a courageous decision. Prithi Sen not only confirms the
misdeeds but seems to have been a victim herself and was effectively told ‘put
up or shut up’. Prithi must have just decided to leave. Surprisingly, Prithi
was on the lesser viewed NewsX
channel and not on the other real mafia channels (unless I’ve missed
something). Prithi makes a very important point about TT’s fraudulent claim of
“consensual sex” as he blames the
victim and calls her a liar. She rightly points out that even if, hypothetically,
the girl had made the advances it should have been the job of TT to discourage
her and ask her to behave. V’s letter to Shoma after the horrible incidents are
in the public domain and her account of the sequence of events don’t leave much
doubt about who the criminal here is. Tejpal
and Shoma don’t seem to realise that they have not only destroyed themselves
but the lives and careers of others. Employees had invested their trust,
their time and their careers in the hands of TT and Shoma. Tehelka is dead! The
innocent ones will have to seek careers elsewhere. I hope they find better ones
at better places.
That brings us to the other accomplices to
the crimes of Tehelka and the two bosses. These are the ones who claim to have
known TT for long and even as a “dear friend”. Here’s the Category5Moron with her story:
Those were Sagarika’s initial tweets
after the rape incident became public. Do you really believe she didn’t know
what had happened? Seriously, she cries for TT and claims he’s a loving,
generous friend and being in the media and ‘gossip-circuit’ heard nothing?
Never mind!
What are first reactions? It wasn’t of any shock or outrage that
you would expect from her had such an incident happened in some other event.
All that comes out is that she is more sorrowful for Tejpal than for the
victim. A bit later (bottom left tweet) she manages to applaud the victim for
her courage. Oh and “many of us have suffered, were
scared to speak” in the past? Who
is us? Has Sagarika suffered? If
so, is she referring to her past employers at Outlook or some other outlet?
What stops her from speaking now? Inconsolable in her tears, she manages to
demonstrate she’s a Royal Bimbo by connecting the “snooping” incident to the
rape incident. How moronic can you get? So somehow curse “Modi Bhakts” because
her dear friend turned out to be a rapist. She doesn’t fool me by pretending
she didn’t know TT’s history. Does she fool you? Here’s Sonia Singh of NDTV:
I haven’t seen Sonia Singh blabbering
too much on any topic even if she’s accused of bias being a Congi’s wife. That
should never matter in anyone’s consideration of what she says or does. But she
goofs up here. I disagree with her contention that publishing the notes of the victim
in a paper is the reason why women are scared to come out. Far from that I think
the more women speak out and publish the more the fear will dissipate. What
Sonia should wonder about is something else. If I recall correctly, she was
elevated as the Head of the Ethics
Committee of NDTV when the Sunetra Chaudhury incident
happened. What did NDTV do? Maybe NDTV did something and got an apology or
compensation and settled the issue. We don’t know.
Has Sonia ever asked why when NDTV has a
website Sunetra had to write about her humiliation in another newspaper (DNA)? Isn’t that odd? Sunetra also
wrote that despite the incident she had to attend a presser of the culprit
which quite scared her. It is just that Sunetra didn’t name the crook while in
V’s case the name was out on Social Media already. Had it not been for SM TT’s
latest would have been buried too. Other than that I don’t see any difference
between Sunetra publishing or V’s letter being published. This doesn’t occur to
Sonia or others who are making similar comments. I have mentioned in the
previous post that maybe if the Sunetra
incident had been blown up it could have prevented TT and maybe other crimes.
NDTV, therefore, is a moral accomplice to these crimes.
That then brings us to other accomplices
who are suddenly discovering Tehelka. All this past decade none in the media
asked a simple question: How did Tehelka
get so rich? How is it that despite consistent losses TT got so rich? How
did he get to buy prized real estate in Goa? How is it that Tehelka was able to
get funds for events like THINK and KINK. Nothing of Tehelka’s sales or ad
revenues would point to such massive funds. I say KINK because TT is reported
to have famously told delegates: They were in Goa “so they could eat, drink, be merry and sleep
with whomever you want". Does Goa lend itself to that reputation
or is it TT’s personal lifestyle? The fund-grabbing for 2011 included
arm-twisting of the then Goa CM Digambar Kamat based on a little help from
friend Ahmed Patel. Yeah; the guy who monitors Sonia Gandhi’s happiness
and unhappiness meter!
Anant Media is the owner of Tehelka. Here’s
what ET reports: For the fiscal ended March 31, 2012, Anant media posted a
loss of 10.5 crore, down from a loss of 16 crore the previous year. Royal
Building and Infrastructure, the Alchemist group company, extended an unsecured
loan of Rs19 crore to Anant Media during the fiscal ended 31 March 2012. KD
Singh has been in the news for his brush with the law on two occasions in the
recent past. In 2011, he was intercepted at New Delhi airport carrying an
unspecified but large amount of cash. He was boarding a flight to Assam, where
assembly polls were due and Trinamool Congress was contesting…airport officials
allowed him to travel after he identified himself as an employee of the
Alchemist group… SEBI barred Alchemist Holdings from accepting deposits from
the public. It held that Alchemist Holdings and Alchemist Infra Realty Ltd had
together raised more than 1,400 crore in illicit schemes… In 2012, the
government had ordered a probe by the Serious Fraud Investigation Office into
Alchemist group companies.
So a majority of the investment is from
realty companies. They even extend an unsecured loan of 19 crores against
accumulated losses of 26 crores in the previous two years to Tehelka. Sound
business sense, eh? Of course, we don’t know what the accumulated losses were
before that. How does a small rag, tag and bobtail outfit like Tehelka make
such losses? Where does the money go? An
investigation into the personal finances and assets of TT and Shoma should
answer that. A thorough investigation into the personal assets and finances
of many media celebs would reveal a lot. This was the company that was broke
and had to be resurrected with the intervention of Sonia Gandhi. Hindustan Times narrates a
similar story.
Mumbai Mirror goes further into the
murky dealings of TT. This includes the sacking of a man who was about to
expose a major mining scam in Goa. It seems TT fired him to bargain funds for
THINK2011. The Grand Hyatt, where KINK2013 and the rape happened, is reportedly
owned by a beneficiary of the suppressed scams. It goes further about TT: “He was also getting a seedy reputation for talking loosely
about the sex lives of people he knew and for brushing aside sexual harassment
complaints. One of his former
colleagues, who quit journalism after an incident in which the Tejpal-Chaudhury
duo played a questionable role, remembers the indifference with which he
treated her sexual harassment complaint against a colleague who had circulated
pictures of her exposed midriff all around the office”. All this
corruption and ‘poison-power’ flows
from only one fountain: The Congotri
of corruption. History hangs on tiny chances. Ask TT to tell you about it
someday.
They were all accomplices. One way or
another they covered up the crimes and excesses of the beast. After all, which
media house doesn’t have similar stories? That Tehelka will die isn’t of much
consequence to me. It’s the kind of the third-rate journalism and dishonourable
practices it employed that should really die. Excessive corruption, illicit
wealth and the wine of ‘69 drives
many of our media celebs. I’m naturally reminded of some lines from a song that describes this
culture pretty well.
Her
mind is Tiffany twisted/ She got the Mercedes bends/ She got a lot of pretty
pretty boys/ She calls friends… Mirrors on the ceiling/ Pink champagne on ice/ And
she said, “We are all just prisoners
here of our own device”/ And in their master’s chambers/ They had gathered
for the feast/ They stab it with their steely knives/ But they just can’t kill the beast…
