Off the record

It’s not just industrialists who pay the price of Mukherjee’s role as the UPA’s chief crisis manager, journalists found themselves at the receiving end too. Several journalists were interviewing senior bureaucrats when a phone call came through from Mukherjee. The journalists were asked to leave the room while he took the call and return when he finished. What he realised when the journalists returned was that they had left their recorder behind and it was still switched on. As a result, he made them delete the entire recording, which included the first part of the interview.