"It's Dressed Up As A Plea to Manmohan Singh, So It Won’t Look Like An Inter-Ambani Battle"
Radia’s uncomfortably cosy ties with media mavens, more than evident in the first tranche of 140 conversations released by Outlook, get further reinforced.
The 800 new conversations now in the magazine’s possession rip apart the artfully constructed façade over the last three weeks that the mediapersons were merely and innocently “stringing Radia along”.
Two examples should suffice:
• In one conversation with an unidentified associate in the run-up to cabinet formation in May 2009, Radia says: “Congress ne tho statement thank god issue karva diya. Barkha ne karvaliya usay. It is not about individuals. (Thank god, the Congress has got a statement issued. Barkha got it done.”)
To which the person at the other end responds: "Haan woh to maine dekh liya. Aa gya na Manish Tewari ka. (Yes, I saw the Congresss spokesman’s statement.)”
• A month later, the columnist Vir Sanghvi recites to Radia (a lobbyist for Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries), the tone and tenor of his Sunday Hindustan Times column on the gas dispute.
“I’ve dressed it up as a piece about how public will not stand for resources being cornered, how we’re creating a new list of oligarchs,” says Sanghvi.
“Very nice, lovely, thank you, Vir,” responds Radia.
Sanghvi goes on to say, “It’s dressed up as a plea to Manmohan Singh, so it won’t look like an inter-Ambani battle except to people in the know.”
As a media meister, Radia is justly seen spending time and effort in the various tapes to positively manage the public perceptions of her clients and their companies through the media.
But two things stand out in numerous conversations contained in the 800 conversations:
The first is Radia’s close and direct involvement in the setting up and running of INX, the company that runs the news channel NewsX.
And the second is the ease with which she hops on either side of the lakshman rekha between what is kosher and what is not.
So, while her comment to an associate, "The ‘Society’ [magazine] article on Nita Ambani will have zero impact," may sound harmless in hindsight, but there are plenty of others which sound less so.
• In a conversation with her aide Manoj Warrier, Radia gives an indication of getting her main clients, the Tatas and Ambanis, to blacklist the news agency PTI. She then goes on to instruct Warrier not to put this on paper, so as not to give the impression that she is batting for rival news agency UNI.
• In a June 2009 conversation with Noel Tata, discussing media plans for Tata subsidiary Trent, she says: “Which is why I stopped the ‘BusinessWorld’ story and shifted it to ‘Business Today’ because I got the questions I wanted and not the questions that they wanted.”
“Jehangir… is cleared...Raja is cleared, Raja is cleared,” a distracted Radia purrs to Jehangir Pocha, head of the news channel, NewsX, announcing the inclusion of A. Raja in the UPA-team in a different tape. NewsX's first headman was Vir Sanghvi.
“She’s got Chaya Mamaya or whatever her name is. She hasn’t told her the truth that she has been buying ‘Bombay Times’ at a price for her. She is under the impression that Chaya is doing all the great stuff for her which is not true. You tell me how you position ‘Nita Ambani’, let’s move from Bombay Times and Mid-Day”
• In another tape, she issues instructions to an employee on how to manipulate the media in Jammu to generate bad press. When a local official fails to mention the name of the Anil Ambani-owned Reliance Communications in a official release, she says, "Press must put pressure on the SSP to name the telecom operator".
• “He [Vir Sanghvi] has a series of interviews lined up and he has agreed to ask the questions we asked him to ask. The first one is with Mukesh [Ambani] and Ratan [Tata],” she says in different conversation with an associate.
In the end, the charitable view is that Niira Radia was merely doing her job in working the media to suit her ends. But was the media doing its job?
Check out the audios we have put up and watch out for more transcripts and analyses as they get updated
Next Story on 2G scam on DMK
800 New Radia Tapes
Some of the key conversations in the second lot of tapes unearthed by Outlook
Outlook magazine has unearthed 800 new tapped conversations involving the lobbyist Niira Radia in the 2G spectrum scam.
The conversations, all part of an officially sanctioned tap, are on top of the 140 conversations placed in the public domain by Outlook three weeks ago.
The intercepts offer fresh political insight into the working of the Kenyan-born British lobbyist who counts the Tatas and Ambanis among her clients.
While Outlook reporters are still decoding the tapes, it is clear that they shine a grisly mirror on the interplay between government and big business, with the media at the end of the frame, at the time Manmohan Singh was forming his cabinet in May 2009—and in the 2G scam itself.
What is also clear is that the retention of the DMK’s A. Raja in the telecom portfolio in the UPA-2 cabinet was central to the telecom ripoff, now presumptively estimated by the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) at a mind-boggling Rs 173,000 crore.
In one revealing conversation with Tarun Das, the former head of the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), Niira Radia says DMK chief Karunanidhi was insistent that the telecom ministry, held by Raja in the first term of UPA, should go to Raja again, although the stench of the 2G scam had already begun to emanate by then.
“Karunanidhi wants Raja because he is a Dalit. The prime minister is only insistent that former shipping minister T.R. Baalu [charged of corruption in UPA-1] should not be in the cabinet,” says Radia.
The Congress, Radia hints, was agreeable to this, but Raja’s predecessor Dayanidhi Maran, an aspirant himself, was spreading a canard that he was in touch with Sonia Gandhi’s political secretary, Ahmed Patel, who, Maran claimed, felt he was the more suitable candidate.
“Karunanidhi is a totally confused man,” says Radia in the conversation.
She also indicates to Das that the octogenarian Tamil Nadu chief minister was trapped between a daughter who threatens to commit suicide and a wife who wants “to do this”.
Radia then requests Das to convey to the Congress that they should only talk to DMK Rajya Sabha member Kanimozhi, who has a line to her father, Karunanidhi, and that the Congress must not talk to Dayanidhi Maran.
“The PM also spoke via her [Kanimozhi],” says Niira Radia.
Tarun Das interjects at this point and says Raja is very unpopular.
To which Radia responds: “That’s only with Sunil Mittal [of Airtel]… it is better to have Raja in telecom. He will behave himself. Trust me, he will behave himself....I have promised, Raja has promised that he will speak to Mittal and deal with the matter. Leave that to me.”
In another chat with an unidentified, female Tamil Nadu politician, Niira Radia reveals that she was clued into the internal politics of the Karunanidhi family that is now central to the 2G scam. She says it was a mistake on the part of Kanimozhi to let go of the Minister of State berth and that she should look after herself first and then think of others.
“Tell her [Kanimozhi], she should be friends with Azhagiri [Karunanidhi’s elder son],” Radia says.
The new conversations are contained in the over 5,800 conversations that are now in the safe custody of the Supreme Court.
The interception of phones belonging to Radia was done by the income-tax department and Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) while investigating a “criminal conspiracy between certain public servants and some private persons in the grant of UAS licenses in 2007-08.”
The Outlook Exclusive comes in the midst of a Parliament paralysed by opposition demands for a Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) probe, an investigation by the Public Accounts Committee (PAC), and the appointment of a former Supreme Court judge to probe the 2G spectrum allocation scam.
The leak also comes in the wake of a blazing exchange of open letters between Ratan Tata and former telecom entrepreneur Rajeev Chandrasekhar, and on the very day the Congress-led UPA government assured the Supreme Court of India that it would take every measure to check the leak of further tapes and transcripts involving Tata Sons chairman Ratan Tata.
Watch out for more transcripts and analyses as they get updated please click the following link
http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?268618
Source: Outlook.com
In Radia tapes, an alarming picture of media manipulation
| They show strategy of planting, killing stories, and blacklisting agency |
The new tapes reveal use or consideration
of strong-arm lobbying techniques
Vir Sanghvi defends conversation with Niira Radia as “sweet-talking” a news source
The contents of a fresh set of leaked phone conversations involving Niira Radia and her associates paint an alarming picture of the extent to which the influential lobbyist — whose clients include Mukesh Ambani and Ratan Tata — sought to influence, use, manipulate and even browbeat the media in pursuit of her corporate agendas. Apart from highlighting the use of journalists to plant stories and columns or as intermediaries with politicians, the latest tapes released by the news magazine, Outlook, suggest more strong-arm lobbying techniques were also used or considered, including the possibility of blacklisting the national news agency, PTI.
Outlook, which had earlier published 140 conversations originally intercepted by the Income Tax department as part of its ongoing surveillance of Ms. Radia, now says it has 800 more conversations in its possession. Nineteen of those audio tapes, with partial summaries, were published on its website by Sunday evening. Editor Vinod Mehta said that all the tapes were being vetted, and eventually would be put in the public domain, except for those which were purely private conversations.
In one tape, HT Media advisor Vir Sanghvi has a follow-up conversation with Ms. Radia regarding his June 21, 2009 column in the Hindustan Times on the tussle between the Ambani brothers over gas pricing, framed as an article about oligarchs taking over natural resources.
“Wrote it… I've dressed it up as a piece about how the public will not stand for resources being cornered, how we're creating a new list of oligarchs,” Mr. Sanghvi tells Ms. Radia. “Very nice, lovely, thank you, Vir,” she says, while he adds: “It's dressed up as a plea to Manmohan Singh, so it won't look like an inter-Ambani battle except to people in the know.”
Confronted with this tape, Mr. Sanghvi still insists he was just stringing her along, “sweet-talking” a news source. In an interview to TheHindu, he claims the final published column included elements that Ms. Radia was unhappy about, proof that he was not exclusively pandering to her agenda.
While this particular column seemed to have elements taken word-for-word from a previous conversation with Ms. Radia, the lobbyist's efforts to ensure the publication of favourable articles took various other forms.
In other tapes, she is heard instructing an IAS officer to do an interview with a journalist for a story critical of Civil Aviation Minister Praful Patel, and telling a subordinate to compile questions for Mr. Sanghvi's interviews with Mr. Mukesh Ambani or Mr. Tata, both of whom are represented by Ms. Radia.
In another conversation, she seems to be directing the entire restructuring of the channel News X, which raises questions about her editorial influence there as well.
She does not hesitate to take negative action either, the most striking example of which is the discussion of a communication plan for the Reliance Industries group, which includes a proposal to “blacklist” news agency PTI, possibly in cooperation with the Tata group.
Ms. Radia's conversations include an attempt to manipulate the media and the police into providing bad publicity for rival Anil Ambani's Reliance Communications in Jammu. She also discusses “incorrect edits” and “a serious problem with [ET's] desk in Delhi”, and gloats about shifting a Noel Tata interview from a resistant Businessworld to a seemingly more cooperative Business Today magazine. However, the final laugh seemed to be on her in that particular case, with Business Today's former editor, Rohit Saran, pointing out that he went ahead with his own editorial agenda in the final published version of the interview, much to Ms. Radia's chagrin
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