I am writing to point out certain inaccuracies in Ajaz Ashraf’s article in The Hindu, “For hardy political ‘ethic’, a battle of survival (Op-Ed, October 19, 2012 ). The writer seems to suggest the following: that Outlook was pressurised into not carrying a story on Ranjan Bhattacharya and later, the Centaur Hotel sale.
The drift of Ashraf’s article is that no one dared touch Mr. Bhattacharya, not even Outlook. This is not an accurate representation of the facts. To put the record straight, there were two cover stories done in 2001 which led to raids on the magazine’s owner. The first was “Rigging The PMO” (March 5, 2001) — which Ashraf mentions — and the “Reign of The Triad” (March 26, 2001).
Both stories were filed by Ajith Pillai and Murali Krishnan. The second of these focused on Ranjan Bhattacharya, Brajesh Mishra and N.K. Singh. It was a damning story and pointed at several deals including the awarding of contracts under the Rs.50,000 crore National Highway Project. A quick look at the story says it all. The cover of the magazine carried Mr. Bhattacharya’s picture most prominently among the triad that called the shots then.
Then Ashraf mentions the Centaur deal and suggests we also killed stories on this. The fact is that we did three stories. The first, “Hotel’s Dirty Linen,” appeared in the July 19, 2004 issue and created a furore in Parliament leading to the Finance Ministry taking a second look at the deal. We followed this up with two other reports, “Sellout at Juhu” (August 2, 2004) and “Enter, Laundromat” (August 30, 2004).
I filed all three reports. Needless to say this involved a lot of hard work — meeting bankers who funded the purchase and making sense of a huge volume of documents. The three reports were carried by the magazine despite considerable pressure. The late CPI(M) MP, Dipankar Mukherjee, subsequently contacted me for the documents that I shared with him as the Left parties raised the matter and stalled Parliament after the deal was exposed. Incidentally, all this appeared in the month before Rajesh Ramachandran joined Outlook on August 16, 2004. He suggested his Centaur story several months later.
Hence it is important to point out that Outlook had taken on Mr. Bhattacharya and subsequently exposed the Centaur deal. Finally, it must be pointed out that several decisions that were taken by the political section were in private with then Editor-in-Chief Vinod Mehta. Ajith Pillai then ran the political bureau and I covered the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) regime. Ajaz Ashraf was not with the political bureau, so it is possible that certain facts were missed by him.
I am writing this piece as I feel there should be an accurate account of the relations of certain media groups with the erstwhile NDA government.
That was an age when there was no RTI or any sustained campaign against corruption, nor the hype on TV. It was therefore harder to do such stories.
(Saba Naqvi is Political Editor and Bureau Chief (Delhi), Outlook.)
