Tehelka as Metaphor: Prism Me a Lie Tell Me a Truth

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In March 2001, the website Tehelka broke Operation West End, the biggest undercover news story in Indian journalism. Using spycams and masquerading as arms dealers, Tehelka’s reporters infiltrated the Indian government, bribed army officers, gave money to the president of the ruling party and the defence minister’s close colleague right in the defence minister’s residence. This eventually forced both the ministers’ resignations. In a rigorously researched and searing authentic account of the Tehelka exposé and its aftermath, Madhu Trehan does a forensic study of the imperatives at the root of it, the characters and heroes and villians of the story, and of how the system got back: by obfuscating, by attempting to destroy Tehelka and its investors. Trehan shows how the government used instruments of democracy to destroy the investors without leaving any footprints. In the style of Rashomon, the story is related by numerous participants of the same incidents and, of course, none of the stories tally. With exhaustive personal interviews, this is a must-read for anybody who wants to understand modern India – or even better, modern international journalism.

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Madhu Trehan studied journalistic photography at Harrow Technical College & School of Arts in 1968. She received her master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University, New York, in 1972. Trehan worked in the Press Section in the United Nations in New York and then as editor in India Abroad, New York. In 1975 she returned to India to start India’s leading news magazine India Today with her father V.V. Purie. Trehan became known for creating the first news magazine in India. She returned to New York to start her family and her brother Aroon Purie took over India Today to make it the success it became. When she returned to India in 1986, Trehan produced and anchored a path-breaking, controversial television news magazine programme Newstrack for TV Today, when the Indian government had complete control of the air waves. Newstrack became famous for incredible journalistic scoops. Trehan became known as a pioneer in investigative journalism. In 2000, Trehan left TV Today to launch wahindia.com, a website and print magazine. Trehan’s hopes for a sabbatical were dashed when, in 2002, Roli Books commissioned Trehan to write a book on Tehelka’s Operation West End. What she thought would be a three-month bang-off book turned out to be six years of heavy research and over forty interviews.