How the media reported Essar Tapes

For an exposé this big, the reaction was muted.

WrittenBy:Kshitij Malhotra
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Six years after the Radia tapes gave the public a glimpse of how corporates, bureaucrats, politicians and journalists connive to rig democracy, a fresh set of leaks – sourced from a former Essar employee – have once again brought to fore corruption at the highest echelons of power. According to reports in the Indian Express and Outlook, the Essar Group allegedly tapped conversations said to involve some of the most powerful people in the country – politicians Jaswant Singh, railway minister Suresh Prabhu, power minister Piyush Goel, former minister Praful Patel, Mulayam Singh Yadav, Amar Singh and the late Pramod Mahajan (among others), and members of corporate powerhouse Reliance Industries Limited (RIL), including Mukesh, Anil and Tina Ambani. The tapes also allegedly feature former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s National Security Advisor Brajesh Mishra, his foster son-in-law Ranjan Bhattacharya, former CEO of ICICI Bank KV Kamath, Subroto Roy of Sahara and Amitabh Bachchan. The new leak comes nearly a year and half after internal emails of the Essar group were made public, showing how the group influenced people in power with the help of favours and gifts.

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For a scandal of this scale, the mainstream media has been quite subdued, which is not that surprising given the high-profile names involved. On the day that IE and Outlook went public with the story (Friday, June, 17) Business Standard, The New Indian Express, ETNow and International Business Times were among the few new media outlets) covered the story. Apart from IE, ToI dedicated the most amount of space dedicated to the story between Saturday and Monday. The ToI coverage comfortably overshadowed that of the Hindustan Times and the Hindu, although none of the stories, in all three newspapers, carried bylines. The absence of bylines could be indicative of a lack of original information, although it can also be seen as unwillingness to investigate the story further. The Economic Times carried one story with a byline on Sunday, while there was no mention of the entire affair on the Mint. RIL-owned website, Firstpost, has just the one story with RIL’s rebuttal to the scandal.   

On the news channel front, India Today TV led the pack, devoting a 50-minute exclusive to the story. Both NDTV and CNN-News18 paid only marginal attention to it, but that doesn’t come as a shock considering RIL owns a stake in both of them. The most deafening silence, however, comes from the channel that is usually the loudest – Times Now – which has completely blacked out the entire story.

The lack of media frenzy certainly did not go unnoticed.

Even though several media outlets have covered the story, the lukewarm manner in which it has been done highlights the compromised state of big media. When the same corporate houses that run the media have allegations of corruption slapped against them, there is no rush to be the first to report the ‘breaking news’, no prime time debates scheduled, no outrage and no drama.

The tapes apparently expose the scope of RIL’s influence over the government, like “dictating the tariffs plans of BSNL”, getting letters written by CMs and MPs to “mark their support in favour of Pramod Mahajan’s continuance as the Telecom Minister” and saving “Rs 1,300 crore from being paid as the Cellular Operator License fee by removing the file from the TEC”. There are also conversations involving Anil Ambani, Satish Seth and Harish Shah, in relation to the Krishna-Godavari basin case where it is mentioned “that if there would be an enquiry then ‘sabka band baj jayega’”.

There appears to be some confusion regarding the time frame of the tape – while the IE report says it went on for five years between 2001 and 2006, Outlook claims that it continued for 11 years, starting from 2000. Both publications have conceded that they cannot vouch for the authenticity of the tapes, even though they have listened to some of the conversations.

The tapes have surfaced due to a complaint filed with the Prime Minister’s Office on June 1, 2016, by Supreme Court lawyer Suren Uppal. Uppal claims to represent a former Essar employee Albasit Khan (apparently Uppal has misspelt Khan’s name according to this Times of India report, which says his real name is Basit Khan), who was the head of security and vigilance at Essar and was apparently in-charge of the entire setup. In his complaint, Uppal reveals how Khan was first recruited by Essar in 2000 to “help them in some highly sensitive projects” and goes on to detail the technological infrastructure that was set up to listen in on conversations. Conversations were tapped using BPL Mobile (now Loop Mobile) and Hutch servers, facilitated by cloned SIM cards and tape recording equipment.

Khan managed to retain copies of the recordings even after he was forced to resign in 2011. In 2015, Khan was visited by Shishir Aggarwal (a senior executive at Essar), which spooked him and made him approach Uppal in January, 2016. After March, 2016, though, Khan stopped responding to Uppal’s calls and messages and went incommunicado; Uppal felt that “he (Khan) was being bought over by these corporates”. Uppal’s suspicions seem to have been confirmed, as Khan has now distanced himself from the entire affair. In an email sent to Uppal by Khan (via Essar’s security head and public relations team), he wrote that the allegation of phone tapping “is absolutely incorrect, false and baseless” and claimed that Uppal “had made demands for huge monies from Essar Group and Reliance Group using my name”. He has also professed that the tapes were made by an ex-Mumbai crime branch officer and were given to him before the officer’s death. To validate his allegations, Uppal has in turn made public photographs of the recording equipment supposedly used by Khan, transcripts of recorded conversations, emails exchanged between Khan and Uppal and handwritten call logs.

The PMO has now reportedly asked the home ministry to look into the affair; incidentally home secretary Rajiv Mehrishi who has to decide how to tackle the inquiry was himself a target of tapping by Essar. Political parties, including the Congress, Janata Dal-United and the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), have demanded that the tapes be made public and a probe be initiated to investigate the matter.

As expected, the corporates have issued an unequivocal denial – Essar claims to have never authorised the operation and RIL and the Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group (ADAG) have both said that the tapes are doctored.

Update: 

Six days after the Essar tapes story first broke, it continues to be grossly underreported by the mainstream media, with some exceptions.India Today TV followed up Sunday’s exclusive with another one on Monday evening, in which the discussion focused on certain ‘snoop diaries’ allegedly written by Albasit Khan, containing names and numbers of people whose phones were tapped. Unfortunately, India Today TV stands alone among news channels as far as reporting on this scandal is concerned. NDTV, CNN-News18, NewsX and Zee News have not followed up on the story, barely acknowledging its existence. And while Arnab Goswami was thrashing Salman Khan over his callous rape remark last night, he and the channel he heads – Times Now – hasn’t said a word on the Essar tapes since the story was made public.

In newspapers, The Times of India carried one report yesterday, June 21 (and none today), while there was not a single report on the issue inThe Hindu, the Hindustan Times and the Mint. Reliance Industries Limited (RIL)-owned news website Firstpost still doesn’t have a proper news report about the tapes.

On the bright side, The Indian Express and Outlook – two publications that first reported on the story – have dug deeper into the controversy.Outlook has published three purported conversations from the tapes; the first between Amar Singh and an unidentified caller, the second between Shashi Ruia and an Essar employee and the third between Mukesh Ambani and an RIL employee. The conversations pertain to political wrangling, financial contributions to parties, and rigging intelligence investigation and enquiries. Meanwhile, The Indian Expressreported today that Supreme Court lawyer Prashant Bhushan intends to “inform the court about them (Essar tapes)” by making them a part of his PIL as part of the older Essar email leaks case.

New media outlets too got into the mix, with the Wire conducting an interview with lawyer Suren Uppal (who alleges to be the counsel to Albasit Khan, the man behind the leak) and the Quint publishing transcripts of conversations from the tapes.

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