I joke that he’s Jesus Christ Superstar and we all have to pull up our socks around him!

An impassioned crusader exposing corruption in high circles…A modern-day Quixote tilting at windmills… Wordsmith and literary animal….The man behind India’s biggest news story in 55 years, Tarun Tejpal, speaks to RENUKA CHATTERJEE about ‘Operation Westend’, the many apostles who soldiered by his side, the Judases who sold out for a bag of silver and the resurgence of Tehelka

[Tarun Tejpal]

Then, when he joined hands with Sanjeev Saith, to set up IndiaInk, I began to hear of him in publishing circles – often with envy: how many publishers can land a Booker with their very first book, a first novel by a first time writer? Clearly, it took a Tejpal and an Arundhati Roy and a ‘God Above All Things’ to pull it off.

Through all of this, our conversations remained friendly but – strange are the ways of big cities – it was only when I met him for this interview that we really talked. When he was no longer just Tarun Tejpal, but the man behind India’s biggest news story in 55 years; the man who made Tehelka as much a part of the Indian lexicon as yeh dil maange more (though in widely differing contexts, I hasten to add, lest the levity upset Mr Tejpal).

For levity does not seem to find much favour with Tejpal these days. He insists that the ‘madcap’ side of him still exists. (“Ask my daughter, Tiya. She sent an application to an American university the other day where she wrote, ‘My father is a famous journalist and a lunatic!’”) But, gravitas is the order of the day when we meet: it is with the zeal of a crusader that he speaks of the death on the cross of corruption of Tehelka, the website, and its resurrection as Tehelka, the newspaper; the many apostles who soldiered by his side and the Judases who sold out for a bag of silver.

“Post ‘Operation Westend’, which was March 2001, for the first two years, my only concern was, I will not let them kill us. It was a daily battle, there was no grand plan, there were legal problems, there were all kinds of money issues.… We must have spent about 1,00,000 man hours in the commission – we spent eight months doing the story and three years defending it. And we saw the incredibly immoral stance the government took – the whole thing was a scandal. But two years into it, when the Venkatswami Commission was scuttled and the government said now we’re going to set up a new commission, that’s when a switch took place in my head and I said, the past is over. We’ve said everything we could, we’ve given everything we had, our conscience is clear now, we’re freed of the story as far as I’m concerned. And that’s when I started to think of how to move forward and how to bring Tehelka back.”

No one gave them a ghost of a chance, they had two false starts but, on January 30, 2004, Tehelka, The People’s Paper hit the stands – the first paper in recent history to be entirely funded by the people. The strategy was simple – invite founder-subscriptions of one lakh rupees each from as many people that cared to give them and ordinary subscriptions from the rest. In the end, Tehelka launched with 172 founder-subscribers and a total of 15,000 subscriptions; news-stand sales account for another 45,000-50,000 copies. Tejpal has reason to be happy and the list of 172 is an interesting, to say the least, sampling of the keepers of the nation’s conscience – ranging, as it does, from the first, Vikram Nair, ‘Citizen of India’, to Mira Nair, Alyque Padamsee, Mahesh Bhatt, Shah Rukh Khan, Aamir Khan, Shabana Azmi, Pritish Nandy, Sunil Khilnani, Mark Tully, Shyam Benegal, Naseeruddin Shah....

The eclectic cross-section dovetails with the mixed responses to the paper. In its first few issues, Tehelka has done stories on US President, George Bush’s secret agenda for Christian conversions in India; on the mood and mindset of the Indian army; Deputy Prime Minister, L.K. Advani’s neurosis of being number two, and what the Congress Party really thinks of itself. To follow a Tehelka with a Tehelka is a tall order but, so far, none of the stories have created more than a storm in a teacup – no questions raised in Parliament, not even the hint of an enquiry. Readers’ reactions range from supporting Tehelka, the cause, without passing qualitative judgement on the paper, to one of appreciation – Tehelka is back in form, hitting on stories that are more important than they may appear at first – to disappointment – the stories lack punch. Tejpal is unfazed by the critics. He is in grass roots mode – he has been travelling the length and breadth of the country and is convinced that the people of India, the real people, are with him. “I’m not creating this paper for the 50 talking journalists of Delhi, I’m very clear about that. This paper is being created for the reader and today, I have a far greater sense of who the ordinary reader is, than I ever had in my last 18 years of journalism. Because I have never travelled so much in my life – in the last one year, I must have been to about 40 or 50 towns and cities, Indore, Cochin, Guwahati, Nagpur, Trivandrum – and I began to realise a couple of things. The fact that people were investing us with so much, when all we’d done was an anti-corruption story, made me aware of how desperate we are as a country for hope, when even the smallest chink represents a ray of light for us. Then I saw the connection that Tehelka had with people; two paradoxical things happened after March 2001. One, we faced the incredible might of the establishment and the government in the worst kind of way – the hate, the legal attacks, every government agency on our backs, the arrest of three of my colleagues…but there was an incredible upside and that was the kind of goodwill and affection that we faced, across classes and people, in the country.We get a phenomenal amount of mail every day from readers, reacting well – so I’ve got no issues.”

Was the whole Tehelka experience worth it? Today, the government they tried to expose still stands, corruption is as much a part of the national landscape as it ever was. So what changed – other than the lives of the Tehelka team itself? Says Tejpal, “Something very peculiar happened to us – I think all of us who were living through that period got yoked to a much larger picture. I realised that somewhere in this is a very important message and we must make sure that the message goes across right. For me, if Tehelka shut down, the message was, do the right thing, be punished for it and be forced to shut down. But the message I was adamant in sending out was, do the right thing, you may suffer for it, but you can succeed in the end. Why should anybody do the right thing if the price is extinction? I think that’s the recipe for a lousy society. For me, it would have been easy – at any point of time, I can pick up the phone and get myself a fat cat job as boss of some media company and be done with all this. But I never once thought of getting out of it, I think there was a kind of moral outrage that grew in me from the beginning, that made me dig in my heels more and more.”

Messiah of the masses or not, there is another sobriquet Tarun Tejpal has long since earned, and that is ‘Friend of Naipaul’. It is an association that began seven or eight years ago with a simple phone call. “I was in London, I had always wanted to meet him and I just picked up the phone and called him. He invited me over for a drink and the evening went wonderfully well.” On Tejpal’s side, the bonding is easy to explain: “On my part, it’s a great sense of piety – he’s the writer I learned to write from, by reading him. I always say that the more you know writers, the less you respect them but with Vidia, knowing him has actually made me even more admiring of his incredible integrity as a writer, the amount of rigour he puts in – he is always and ever the writer, always listening, always analysing, always curious, always trying to make sense of the word. I find that extraordinary.”

And on Naipaul’s part? Tejpal is candid in his response. “It’s a mystery, why he has the time for me. But there is a kind of bond there – I don’t know where it comes from but I believe it has to do with nothing else but the fact that I know his work and he feels I understand it.”

Whatever the chemistry at work, Tejpal obviously inspires Sir Vidia to do things he wouldn’t do otherwise: he consented to be on the Board of Directors of Tehelka; he and wife, Nadira, have accompanied Tejpal to the Supreme Court in public support of his cause and he held a press conference in New Delhi, at the height of the inquiry, to speak out against the BJP government’s persecution of his friend.

He also recently accepted an invitation from the BJP to visit their cultural office and engage in a dialogue with their members. Tejpal sees no ambiguity in this – to see this as Naipaul throwing in his lot with the BJP is a complete misinterpretation by the media. “He has never come out in favour of the BJP. If you read all his utterances, he’s not interested in the BJP, he is interested in what is this movement that is bringing forth these energies. At the end of the day, what he says is, you cannot dismiss them – here is a grouping that is today taking 30 per cent of the vote. There is surely something happening there that we need to understand. The curiosity was the curiosity of a writer…if the Congress had invited him, if Sonia Gandhi said come and spend an hour with me, he would go.”

Naipaul is not the only friend in high places that Tejpal has. Indeed, a roster of those with whom he dines with frequent regularity would make a veritable Who’s Who of the country’s movers and shakers: Ram Jethmalani, Kapil Sibal, Arundhati Roy, Aroon Purie…. But there are others, friends from school and college, colleagues from the past, peons and typists, all of whom seem ready to lay their lives on the line for him, ready with money, a meal, a party. By his own admission, Tejpal has survived these last three years on loans from friends and family. What is it about the man that attracts friendships like these? The only explanation Tejpal himself can offer is that he is, in turn, a very generous friend. Wife, Geetan, has a different perspective. “He’s a very eloquent talker,” she says, “and the things he says are what you want to believe in, the right emotions, the right principles. He voices it and it makes people feel good. I joke that he’s Jesus Christ Superstar and we all have to pull up our socks around him!”

A wife’s hyperbole? If it is, it finds an echo in what two people who’ve known him the longest, have to say. Says Sumir Lal, his roommate from his college days in Chandigarh, “I think one of the great things about Tarun is that he’s able to paint the larger picture – he’s quite an inspiring sort of guy, a bit of a visionary.” And Shoma Chaudhury, who has worked with him at India Today and Outlook and is now one of the ‘two engines on which Tehelka moves’ (the other being Neena, Tejpal’s sister), has this to say: “As an editor, his greatest strength is that he empowers people – he enables them to rise to their highest level. He really values excellence and isn’t threatened by it.”

Jesus Christ Superstar or Teflon Tejpal? For the dissenters are there too, who see him as Machiavelli with the gift of the gab. A notable exception, for instance, from Tehelka’s spanking new South Delhi office is Aniruddha Bahal, he who carried out the sting operation that started it all in the first place and whose idea it originally was. Ask Tejpal why he isn’t there and pat comes the reply: “We’re still great friends, we have lunch together every week. But he got this book deal (Bunker No 13) which was very lucrative and, at that point of time, I think he felt that he had a ticket to freedom – you have to remember that Tehelka then was sitting in one room in South Extension with four people and a mountain of liabilities – it was not something anybody wanted a piece of. So in fact, I freed him; I told him, you have a ticket, you want to leave, you can. He wanted to set up his own company – he runs a website, Cobrapost.com – and that’s how it happened. Our paths took different turns, I think there was a difference in the way we wanted to play out our individual journalism.”

And what of Tejpal, the ladykiller, I ask him, switching tracks. The air of injured innocence couldn’t be more genuine. “Where did that come from? Geetan is the single most important person in my life…we spend every evening together.”

It would take more than one meeting to crack the code but there is a Tarun Tejpal that few can doubt: the wordsmith and literary animal. He defines himself through the books he has read: “In my teens, I read everything there was to read and in a sense I was created out of what I read… my literary life is what helped me survive the last three years – it gave me a greater understanding of power, helped me keep the discourse at a certain level.” But then he adds, “It’s true, though, that these three years have changed me in a very deep way. For very long in my life, I loved people who spoke beautifully and wrote beautifully; today I have to say that the people I admire the most are the people who have a kind of moral centre – I admire action way more than I have ever done in my life. I would say that finally, the world is created by people who act.”

His first novel, The Alchemy of Desire, has just been bought by UK publisher, Picador, for ‘a very decent six-figure advance’ which he hopes will make him solvent soon. Andrew Kidd, Picador’s publisher, has this to say about the book, slated for an early 2005 launch: “It is a novel quite unlike any other, with a power and a weight of feeling one almost never encounters in contemporary literature.” The story? Tejpal himself isn’t disclosing much as yet, other than to say that it’s ‘about love, desire, pain, the usual stuff.’

Amazingly, the book was written as Tehelka crumbled all around him, as the debts piled up, the lawyers and commissions of inquiry and reams of paper and rhetoric played themselves out. “For me, the more I look back, the greatest thing, in a very perverse, bizarre, way was that the trauma of the last three years just freed me up so much. In the worst time of my life, it created the space for me to write the book. The 500-odd days of writing that I did, I wrote in total, stately calm. I wrote 2,00,000 words in one shot. I wrote on flights, in lounges, in hotel rooms… and I haven’t gone back and re-read even a single line before sending it to Gillon (Aitken, the literary agent). The triumph of the book, for me, is that I found the tone that I’ve been struggling to find for the last 20 years, to tell the kind of story that I wanted to tell.”

The book begs the question: will he stay with Tehelka forever? He is famous for his restlessness, for growing bored and moving on. Sure enough, he says, “I think it would be a mistake if people identify Tehelka with me alone. I think in two years’ time, there should be a team of 10 or 12 people who can take over and run it.”

When the day comes, it may not be restlessness but the desire for repose, that will take him away. And, the desire to write. “I’ve been working since I was 19 – I’m 40 now and I have never had any repose.” And then he quotes another writer whom he admires. “O.V. Vijayan once told me that the problem with being a journalist is that you spend 20 years running around and then suddenly you find your life is over and you haven’t written anything.”

The security guards still sit outside his door but the biggest lesson Tehelka taught him, he says, was to free him completely from fear. It will be interesting to see the paths down which The Alchemy Of Desire will take Tarun Tejpal.