Tehelka.com?s expos? of the corruption in India?s defense establishment has the ruling party picking up the remains of its now shattered ?honest? image.

The investigation forced the resignations of the Bharatiya Janata Party president Bangaru Laxman, and Defense minister George Fernandes. The scattered ruling party is now making a concerted effort to undermine Tehelka?s investigation with a smear campaign against the dot-com, though accusations range from the hilarious to the outrageous.

Government spokespeople have openly accused Tehelka of having dubious ties with opposition parties and suggested that it is linked to Pakistani and European intelligence agencies. Some even went as far as to suggest that notorious Indian Mafia don Dawood Ibrahim (an Al Capone-esque fugitive) funded Tehelka?s investigation.

One of the more serious allegations is against First Global, a brokerage with a 10 percent stake in the portal. It alledgedly used knowledge of the Tehelka tapes to predict an adverse stock market reaction, then sold off various shares before the tapes were released.

Tehelka?s Editor-in-Chief Tarun Tejpal dismisses these allegations. ?Nobody but for the very few in Tehelka were aware of this operation,? he said.

On the basis of public reactions recorded on Indian television, the faith in the government has touched its nadir. The disgust is so strong that people in general have chosen to overlook the blatantly unconventional and arguably unlawful method of investigation that Tehelka employed to expose the sleaze that transpires in the corridors of power.

The two journalists, Anirudha Bahal and Mathew Samuel, posed as agents from a fictitious arms company called West End. They hawked a non-existent product -- hand held thermal cameras -- to the Defense Ministry, and paid money to the president of BJP, bureaucrats and army men to push the deal through. They then captured all transactions on a spycam and exhibited the footage at a press conference. They had almost sold a product they didn?t have to the Government of India.

There is visible panic in the ruling party. Days after Indian media revealed the names of those involved, the government announced a proposal to replace the Press Council with a Media Council empowered to look into code violations on the Internet and Television.

However, the government?s propaganda machinery got a big boost when Samuel, one of the two journalists, went into hiding in Kerala after the expos?, fearing a threat to his life. He had accused Home Minister L.K. Advani (second only to the Prime Minister in BJP?s hierarchy) of involvement in the defense scandal, even though Tehelka had no evidence to back his statement.

Advani?s office latched onto Samuel?s statement and Tejpal was forced to write a letter retracting the correspondent?s statement. The government tried its best to use this retraction to insinuate that Tehelka might have got the facts wrong. Despite this, Tehelka is still propped-up by a rather universal phenomenon ?- nobody believes the government.

The Prime Minister has issued a statement saying that it was time for the party to examine its conduct. But the primary reaction of his government has been to attack Tehelka. Former Defense Minister George Fernandes, who was forced to resign, said it was shocking that the military intelligence did not detect the site's investigation. He said the lapse was greater than the agency?s failure in detecting the Pakistani infiltration, which led to the Kargil war. His main complaint, even today, is not that his aides were corrupt, but that Tehelka got away with exposing them.

But Tehelka stands canonized today because it laid bare a grim tale that every Indian had heard about -- the tale of corruption in the highest places of the Indian administrative system.

Behind Tehelka

Less than a year ago, Tehelka was involved in a similar breaking story about the corruption in cricket. In that instance, Bahal, along with a disgruntled cricketer, captured footage of prominent players agreeing that some members of the Indian team were throwing matches to favor bookies. Tehelka was launched with the cricket expos?, but the site almost vanished when the story cooled off.

The Defense Ministry scandal put Tehelka back in the national consciousness. In India, an investigation on the scale of Operation West End, as the sting act was called, could only have been planned and executed by a dot-com.

It was a labor of eight months and cost about 1.1 million rupees (US$25,000). In a country where a journalist?s life earnings may not ever reach half that amount, it is not a negligible sum for just one story.

This of course shouldn?t undermine the role of Tehelka publisher Tarun Tejpal, the former managing editor of Outlook, a major news magazine. His reflection on Operation West End is best expressed in his words: ?When Aniruddha Bahal began work on it, I did not give the story a chance in hell. When we first discussed the story, it was the devastating and dubious fire at the Bharatpur ammunition depot and the continuing wrangling over the Kargil fiasco that were the uppermost drivers in our mind.

'The idea was to plunge into the murky depths and see if we could spot anything telling that could be dragged into the light. Sympathetic to the army man, we were irked by the idea of the defense dealer. Operation West End is the frightening story of the death of India?s last sacred cow: the defense establishment.

'It is the story of the suitcase people. The story of nakedly greedy middlemen, nakedly greedy army officers and nakedly greedy politicians. It?s the ultimate indictment of Indian governance and ethics. If we had more money we could have ripped open the entire system end to end. We were just a group of amateurs, a leanly funded media organization with limited resources. Suppose we had been the ISI [Pakistan's intelligence agency].?

What stunned everybody was the ease with which two journalists who knew very little about the arms business were able to fool the government. ?Every week that our cover lasted was a bonus,' Bahal said. 'Starting off, we never really thought that we could last undercover that long. Every session was a risky one as the risk of detection was always there. And in many situations if we had been discovered, it could have got ugly physically.

'Give us some credit for creating a cover that pulled the wool over so many people at the same time and didn?t prompt anyone to check our antecedents in a thorough manner. There were many moments when our hearts sank.?

Their masks should have slipped many times. But they didn?t, even when a defense middleman asked ?Who is your banker?? and undercover scribe Mathew replied ?Thomas Cook.? As for where the dummy company was based in England, he answered ?Manchester United.?

Spycams, Ethics and Media Reactions

Few in the seemingly conservative multitude of India have raised ethical questions over Tehelka's tactics in the uncovering the scandal. The general perception is that the site peeped into homes, but it's justified because these were the homes of crooks.

But some senior journalists have expressed their reservations. Swapan Dasgupta, deputy editor of India Today, the largest-selling newsmagazine in the region, said on a televised debate as Tejpal stood right next to him, that Tehelka?s ends did not justify the means.

?Tehelka should explain how it can be above board when 16 percent of its stakes belong to a smeared company like First Global,? Dasgupta said.

?But 84 percent of Tehelka is held by a journalist,? Tejpal countered.

Krishna Prasad, who first broke the cricket betting scandal story with colleague Bahal in Outlook, says ?corruption has continued to rage in this nation regardless of all that the press has done. According to Transparency International, a Berlin based organisation, only 18 other nations on this planet are more corrupt than India.

'If the corrupt and the criminal have been repeatedly voted back into power, it is because 60 percent of this country is illiterate. They couldn?t read all the tomes we wrote. But now they can see what is being done to them by their leaders. That can result in a huge tectonic shift in perception.?

Prasad, now a Web columnist, also points out that such an expos? would not have been possible in most countries without the fear of severe legal backlash. He cites ABC News' Food Lion investigation as an example. ?The network sent off a reporter with a spycam who caught rotten meat being packaged for public consumption. After the hullabaloo died down, Food Lion sued ABC. But it sued the channel not for the contents of the story (which were updisputed), but for the ?misrepresentation? by the reporter. The jury awarded huge damages to Food Lion. ABC complied.?

The fact that it?s highly unlikely for any Indian court to award large damages to the victims of a sting operation may have encouraged Tehelka.

Senior journalists express other fears, such as an increase in the use of spycams by young journalists. However, Tejpal asserts that ?such means should be employed selectively, only when matters like national security are concerned.?