Tarun Tejpal

"He does not seem to have understood the gravity of the offence. India's elite lauded the amendments to the IPC, widening the definition of rape, little realizing that they did not apply simply to lower-class men, but could affect them too. While there has been much clamour for the death penalty in cases of rape involving the lower classes, would the elite now like to apply this to themselves?"

"Later, years later, a famous editor who regularly took tea with Sonia and who became a close confidante of her daughter Priyanka had a story to tell. We were having coffee together in the coffee shop of the Oberoi in Mumbai and I, as always, looked up to the eighteenth floor and paid silent tribute to those who were lined up against a wall and shot dead by the Pakistani jihadi terrorist, Fazlullah, on 26/11. And I was thinking of those who were killed in this coffee shop that same horrible night, when the editor said something that brought me instantly back into the present moment. This was not long after Tarun Tejpal was jailed for the alleged attempted rape of a friend of his daughter’s in a lift in the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Goa. We were talking about how astounding it was that he had made so much money from a magazine that barely sold a few thousand copies. ‘The money didn’t come from journalism,’ the editor said. ‘I am sure not,’ I said. ‘Well, let’s just say that Tarun Tejpal had good reasons to be very, very close to 10 Janpath.’ In my head it was as if the pieces of a puzzle started to come together. I met Tarun through Vidia and Nadira Naipaul. Although he was always charming and friendly when we met, there was something about him that kept me from sharing their admiration of him. And I had always been sceptical whether his sting operations were sting operations or exercises in entrapment. His most famous sting operation was conducted in the third year of Vajpayee’s government, and it so discredited Vajpayee that it turned his government into a lame duck. The two people caught on hidden cameras accepting money from fake arms dealers were the BJP president, Bangaru Laxman, and Jaya Jaitley, who had long been the closest aide of George Fernandes. George had to resign as defence minister and the scandal never died. But because I saw it more as entrapment than journalism I began to follow other Tehelka exposés closely and noticed that they seemed always to expose Sonia Gandhi’s opponents."