#dnaEdit: Spies at large

The sordid face of corporate espionage has been laid bare by the arrest of seven persons, including a former newspaper journalist now running a trade publication, an energy consultant, serving and former central government employees, and a Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) staffer. Other oil company executives are also under the scanner indicating that this practice of securing secret government documents is widely prevalent among corporate giants. The intricate operation — involving former government employees entering the petroleum ministry’s offices at Shastri Bhavan after working hours with duplicate keys and temporary passes, and a journalist involved in vetting and selling the stolen information — raises the spectre of a longstanding arrangement that hitherto went undetected. Only the lowest tiers in this espionage racket, both on the corporate and the government side, have been nabbed. Will the central government go after the top honchos who sanctioned these surreptitious methods?

The timing of the bust-up also merits attention. Dispelling notions that the Modi government would favour the Mukesh Ambani-headed RIL, the company had to be satisfied with only a marginal hike in gas pricing, from $4.2/mmbtu to $5.61/mmbtu. In contrast, the erstwhile UPA government had pitched for the Rangarajan Committee’s formula of $8.4/mmbtu. The Centre is also planning to divest its stake in ONGC this fiscal, a move which will certainly attract many oil majors, considering ONGC’s considerable involvement in exploration and drilling projects, in India and abroad. In this scenario, government documents become monetisable market intelligence. There is no doubt that the BJP government, thanks to its commanding majority and Modi’s position as the arbiter of all crucial decisions, is not as vulnerable to corporate arm-twisting as the UPA. Three oil ministers in the 10-year-long UPA regime — Mani Shankar Aiyar, S Jaipal Reddy, and Murli Deora — were sacked unceremoniously for perceived antagonism or favouritism to RIL. The last UPA oil minister, Veerappa Moily, was foiled in his attempt to hike gas prices to $8.4/mmbtu by the Election Commission, which cited the model code of conduct coming into effect before the Lok Sabha elections.

The need to steal secret government documents is symptomatic of a crony capitalist system that lives in perpetual fear of corporate rivals taking undue advantage of access to politicians and bureaucrats. Despite the 1991 reforms, India has hardly progressed from the license raj era when a clutch of industrialists prospered by subverting a flawed policy. Rather than the interests of the market, the interests of big businesses have come to represent the progress of the economic reforms trajectory. RIL has clearly not learned lessons from its previous involvement in a case of corporate espionage. A Delhi sessions court framed charges in 2012 against the company, and its three veteran lobbyists, V Balasubramanian, AN Sethuraman and Shanker Adawal over a 1998 case involving the recovery of four secret government documents pertaining to economic sanctions against India, a high-level secretarial meeting on disinvestment, and tariff rates in the hydrocarbon sector. The involvement of a journalist in Thursday’s episode is reminiscent of the Radia tapes when top journalists like Barkha Dutt and Vir Sanghvi were caught having compromising conversations with lobbyists, industrialists and politicians. For the Modi government, the incident is a reminder that the interests of the government and corporates often diverge. Despite privacy concerns and hacking fears, installing more CCTV cameras in government offices and forcing employees to transact government business on secured digital paperless platforms becomes more appealing. Both measures, which leave a digital trail, become attractive options to counter corruption and corporate espionage.