Troubled Tidings
- August 17, 2012: CAG tables report on coal block allocations
- September 7-13: Zee News runs a series, ‘Kala Patthar’, after editors decide Naveen Jindal is one of the largest beneficiaries
- September 10: Jindal allegedly manhandles Zee reporters when they approach him for comments. Zee telecasts slap footage with reruns; footage runs on several other TV channels
- September 10: Jindal representative Ravi Muthreja phones Zee editor and business head Samir Ahluwalia asking for a meeting. Ahluwalia says Muthreja made an offer of Rs 25 crore to black out negative news. Muthreja alleges Samir sought ad contract for Rs 25 crore, which was upped to Rs 100 crore.
- September 15 and 17: Jindal and Zee officials meet to discuss modalities of deal. The conversations are videotaped.
- October 2: Jindal officials file an FIR alleging extortion, criminal conspiracy and cheating by Zee journalists. Jindal moves Bombay High Court, charging Zee with defamation. Also approaches Press Council and News Broadcasting Standards Authority.
- October 25: Jindal holds a press conference showing portions of the sting operation which are telecast live by TV channels.
- November 28: Zee editors are taken into police custody, a day after they are arrested. Police say they need to ascertain if Subhash Chandra and his son Puneet Goenka were in the know.
- December 8: Subhash Chandra asked to join probe. Seeks time as he is out of the country. He later joins investigations and also applies for anticipatory bail.
- December 13: Delhi court quashes police plea to subject Zee journalists to a lie detector test. Chandra serves Rs 150 crore defamation notice on Jindal.
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The Akira Kurosawa black-and-white classic Rashomon narrates one event in many different ways, each time from the point of view of a new witness or participant. It’s a parable of perceptual fluidity: in the end, no one can be sure what happened or did not happen. The trading of charges and lawsuits between the Jindal industrial group and the Zee TV news channel is taking on a similar multiplicity of perspective and truth. Jindal alleges the news channel demanded crores of rupees to withhold coverage of the former’s naming in the coal block allocation scam. The slapping by Naveen Jindal of a Zee reporter (caught on camera and repeatedly aired by the channel), the sting conducted by the Jindal group showing an alleged extortion bid, court calls, press conferences, denials, the arrest of two editors—all this, and the histrionics on part of both parties, make for a compelling, confusing drama.
In one corner are Subhash Chandra, the satellite TV pioneer, and his son Puneet Goenka. In the other corner is Naveen Jindal, a Congress MP whose company, Jindal Steel Power Ltd (JSPL), figures in the Comptroller and Auditor General’s (CAG) coal allocations report as a major beneficiary. Both business families are from Hissar, in Haryana, and this corporate battle of two families is playing out on TV as a bruising battle of egos and reputations. Here’s Zee’s version. A media group, performing its role of exposing and talking about corruption, is being lured or pressured to stop. It is also being gagged and publicly humiliated by a government that has much to hide. The Jindal group looks at it differently: an avaricious media house is using the shield of public interest to blackmail and extort money. In Rashomon, key characters are called on to testify. Here, computers and phone records are being examined; voice samples and sting footage too. And with zeal that could be hailed as exemplary if only it didn’t bring to mind the ‘Big Brother’ bureaucratic citadel another son of Hissar, Arvind Kejriwal, evoked with his concept of the Jan Lokpal.
Footage from the Jindal group’s sting operation
Zee says it all began with ‘Kala Patthar’, its six-part news feature on Coalgate. In their affidavits, Zee editors Sudhir Chaudhury and Samir Ahluwalia say they focused on the Jindal firm as they found it to be the single largest beneficiary in the coal block allocations. When Zee sought Jindal’s reaction, Jindal manhandled the reporter—an event caught on camera and aired endlessly on Zee channels and for which Jindal emphatically says he has apologised. Some other channels aired it too. What followed was Jindal unveiling a secret recording of a meeting of JSPL officials with Zee’s representatives. According to Zee TV’s Ahluwalia, Ravi Muthreja of the Jindal group met him at a coffee joint in Delhi on the night of the slap and sought to “stop the footage of any story” (see timeline). Ahluwalia says it was the Jindal group which first offered Rs 25 crore to blank out “negative news”.
In the Jindal group’s eyes, this incident occurred completely differently. According to Rajeev Bhadauria, the group’s human resource director, when repeated requests to show their version went unheeded, a senior Jindal official sought an appointment with Ahluwalia, head of Zee Business. At this meeting, Ahluwalia is alleged to have demanded a Rs 25-crore, four-year advertising deal. This was apparently presented as a business model; in subsequent meetings, the demand is said to have been raised to Rs 100 crore.
“We decided the same evening to get to the bottom of what we saw as an attempt to browbeat and blackmail us,” says Bhadauria. “We decided we wouldn’t pay but will play along to trap them.” When the Zee editors and Jindal officials met next on September 15 and 17, the conversations were secretly videotaped. Armed with the “evidence”, Jindal filed an FIR in early October and then unveiled the video in a widely attended press conference. When the news broke, the Broadcast Editors’ Association acted quickly, too quickly in some people’s eyes, to set up a subcommittee which threw out Sudhir Chaudhury from the organisation. Chaudhary was an office-bearer, and the association’s president Shazi Zaman says he was expelled only after all parties were given a fair hearing.
It is a 10-second call reportedly placed by one of the Zee editors to Subhash Chandra after a meeting with Jindal officials which has seen the Zee boss, who was once locked in a tempestuous business partnership with the now-beleaguered global media mogul, Ruper Murdoch, getting embroiled in the story. The police say they want to ascertain if Chandra and his son were in the loop. Chandra senior first sought time, then anticipatory bail, and after two visits to the police station has served a defamation notice of Rs 150 crore on Jindal.
A Zee News discussion on media ethics
In the eyes of some people, there is little doubt that the Zee-Jindal sideshow has effectively swung the spotlight away from the main act, the coal scam estimated by the CAG at Rs 1,85,591 crore. By counter-attacking a media group, Jindal is seen to have turned the spotlight on media ethics and practices, and away from his own company. At a time when cynicism about the media is high, grainy images from the sting video have heightened calls for regulation.
Equally, the Zee group can be seen as being silenced for keeping its foot on the anti-corruption pedal. One of Kejriwal’s key men is a former Zee employee, and Subhash Chandra was a conspicuous figure at an event organised by Kejriwal’s NGO last year. As the Jindal case unravelled, the sudden exit last week of the editor-in-chief of the DNA newspaper, which is part of the Zee group, appeared to be collateral damage of sorts. The editor had written a column earlier this year that the UPA government had come down on the newspaper and denied it advertisements for its favourable coverage of the Kejriwal-Anna Hazare movement. Blackballed, in a way, by the Broadcast Editors’ Association, Zee is largely fighting without any obvious support from the media fraternity. In the cut-throat world of TV channels, there are certainly suggestions about rivals revelling in Zee’s situation even as rumours abound of Jindal’s own media plans.
There are questions aplenty, as in Rashomon. Why the delay in the arrest of the editors after the filing of the FIR? Were the arrests required at all? Is the video evidence collected by Jindal admissible in a court of law? Would someone try an extortion running over a long period, such as four years? Did the Jindal sting have the approval of the company’s board? If Zee has “counter-evidence”, why hasn’t it made it public? And what of the coal scam and its investigation? The biggest question, however, is: will anyone emerge smelling good from all this?
