Washington Post’s Adani-LIC story fizzled out in India. That says a lot

Whether the story had substance or not, it is intriguing that there has been little to no follow up in mainstream print media to the Washington Post expose about the Life Insurance Corporation’s investments in Gautam Adani’s companies, allegedly at the behest of the Modi government.

Or perhaps, given the current state of much of our mainstream media, we should not be surprised that a story like this, in a major international outlet, landed in India and created only a small ripple before it disappeared. The ripple was the result of the Congress demanding a Joint Parliamentary Committee to investigate the allegations.

The tepid response in the Indian media cannot be dismissed merely by observing that given the media’s fixation with elections, currently the forthcoming elections in Bihar, there is neither time nor space to follow-up on the story. There is clearly more to this.

The Washington Post has alleged in its exclusive published on October 25 that a plan to invest $3.9 billion by the Life Insurance Corporation in Gautam Adani’s companies was overseen by officials of the Department of Financial Services.

The story states: “The documents and interviews show it was just one piece of a larger plan by Indian authorities to direct taxpayer money to a conglomerate owned by one of the country’s most prominent and politically well-connected billionaires. It is a vivid illustration of Adani’s clout within the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, his longtime ally, and of how officials in New Delhi have come to see his business empire as central to the country’s economic fortunes.”

Newspapers did respond to this story, but with headlines that mentioned the denial by the LIC and little about the substance of the revelations in the article.

Here are some of the headlines the day after the story broke:

“LIC refutes Washington Post report on $3.9 bn Adani investment” in the Economic Times.

“Made investments in Adani firms independently, after detailed due diligence: LIC” in The Hindu.

“‘No letter written to LIC,’ Govt official rejects Post report questioning $3.9 bn investment in Adani Group,” wrote Financial Express.

“‘False and baseless’: LIC denies Washington Post report, says investment decisions taken after due diligence,” stated Mint.

Most of the other headlines were similar. 

For readers, who would not have accessed the original article, all they read was that the LIC had called the allegations made by the paper “false, baseless, and far from the truth.” This rebuttal also appeared as an unsigned statement on the LIC letterhead on X.

The Indian Express carried a report with more details about the original story and quoted unnamed officials “familiar with the matter” dismissing the allegations. While the Washington Post had claimed that the investment plan had been “crafted by officials at DFS (Department of Financial Services) in coordination with LIC and India’s main government-funded think tank, Niti Aayog,” and “approved by the Finance Ministry”, the officials who spoke to The Indian Express said that their department does not write letters to the LIC like the one quoted in the Post article.

To quote from The Indian Express story: “A government official told The Indian Express that DFS has not written any letter to LIC asking it to invest in the Adani Group. ‘The documents being mentioned in the media are not from DFS. It’s not true that DFS wrote to LIC to invest in Adani companies… DFS doesn’t write such letters to LIC,’ the official said.”

In other words, readers are being told that what the Washington Post has reported is baseless but no one from the government will go on the record to say so, leaving it to newspapers to quote unnamed officials as The Indian Express has done. How then as a citizen, or a reader, do you decide that this is, or is not, a major transgression by the Modi government to boost one particular business house?

Sohit Misra, who used to work with NDTV before it was taken over by Gautam Adani, but now runs his own YouTube channel, raises important questions about the coverage, or rather non-coverage by India’s mainstream media of this expose in this report. 

Misra takes us back to the pre-Modi era, when the media relentlessly asked the government led by Manmohan Singh tough questions about several scams that were exposed, like the 2G scam for instance. Even though finally these cases were dismissed as there wasn’t enough evidence, at that time the media was out in full force questioning the government and alleging large-scale corruption. 

As Misra points out, the contrast today is striking. Even if the story in the Post is speculative or even wrong, given that it involves the government and India’s richest man, is it not an issue that ought to be followed up independently by our media? Is it enough just to run denials and quotes from anonymous officials? 

Of course, the journalists who have relentlessly followed the Adani story, how his wealth has grown dramatically in the last decade, have been subject to innumerable court cases and harassment. Journalists like Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, who holds that the Washington Post report is factual and substantive. 

This, in fact, is a story worth recounting because it illustrates how the job of investigating anything sensitive, that could land a media house in trouble, is now left entirely to under-resourced independent media platforms. 

Even as I write this column, another investigative platform, Cobra Post has come out with a story on the other big business house in India that is often in the news, the Ambanis. Given the response to the Adani story, if at all mainstream media takes note of this expose, the headlines in major newspapers will not surprise anyone. 

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