Comment

They are getting ready to shoot the messenger. You know the old story: the messenger, after days and days of arduous travel, often at great risk to life and limb, reaches the King with some very important news of developments on the war front. The tidings are bad. The King gets his guards to shoot the messenger.

An event with uncanny parallels happened in our national capital last month. On June 9, the crime branch of the police registered an FIR at the Parliament Street police station: “The authorities of Cobrapost and private TV channel Aaj Tak have committed an offence of abetment as defined under Section 12 of the Prevention of Corruption Act, 1988, by carrying out Operation Duryodhan and telecasting the same,” the FIR said.

In a literal sense, yes, the journalists who were part of Operation Duryodhan did abet corruption. After all, they did approach MPs and offer them money to ask questions in Parliament on behalf of a fictitious business organisation two years ago. Eleven MPs — ten in the Lok Sabha, one from the Rajya Sabha — fell for the bait.

The cash-for-questions scam rocked the parliament, as was to be expected, and all eleven MPs were expelled. When they appealed to the Supreme Court, the court upheld their expulsion.

It was, most people would say, a victory for journalism: here were representatives of the people abusing a privilege given to them for the public good, exercising it for private gain. The seriousness of the charge can be gauged from the punishment meted out: after all, you don’t expel parliamentarians for frivolous reasons.

So do the journalists concerned get feted for exposing the scam? On the contrary, they are now being treated as criminals. This isn’t new.

The registration of a police case two years after the event is only the culmination of the hostile reaction of politicians to sting operations.

Considering that the majority of the eleven MPs were from the BJP or its allies, and that an earlier sting operation had nailed the defence minister (George Fernandes, also belonging to the NDA), it is surprising that even Congress politicians have vociferously opposed sting operations.

Surprising only at first; politics, whatever its colour, is riddled with corruption, and politicians are always careful to protect their own kind.

Two reasons are given for opposing sting operations: first, that they are an invasion of privacy; second, that newspapers/television channels profit from them. The second argument is patently absurd: would a sting operation be worthy if the organisation backing it suffered a loss? Would the sting operation be okay if no one read about it or saw it?

As for the first argument, yes, sting operations can be invasions of privacy. The most obvious case involved actor Shakti Kapoor.

But this particular caper was so obviously flawed that everyone condemned it. Would anyone be able to make the same claim for some of the other scams exposed by stings?
Cash-for-questions, defence purchases where the top brass of the army was exposed, match-fixing involving some of the biggest stars of the Indian cricket team, the infamous Jessica Lal murder cover-up, Zaheera Sheikh’s bribing in the BEST Bakery case to give false evidence, doctors certifying unwanted wives as lunatics, foreign paedophiles in Goa…

This isn’t, by any means, an exhaustive list, but each sting demonstrably serves the public good, unless someone wants to make the case that corruption, falsifying evidence in court, and abuse of children are private issues. Dare even a politician make such a case?

Sting operations would be unnecessary in a society where the police did its job fearlessly, without interference from political bosses, and without corruption. But then, such societies are extremely rare, and at this point of time we too are far away from being one. But who is going to tell politicians that?