For all those missing the heady drama of IPL-Lalit Modi till just a week ago, the Niira Radia tapes are like manna from heaven, gossip that can keep you in circulation for several cocktail parties in a row. The tapes are alleged transcripts of taps on the phone of Niira Radia, a PR professional, who is high-profile enough to handle the accounts of both Reliance and the Tatas. Like the Modi affair, the insinuations in the transcripts are near-impossible to verify. How do you confirm, for instance, what a letter from an income tax officer to the CBI says is actually true — the letter says Radia’s taps revealed that she was guiding a new telecom operator on how he needed to delay the inflow of funds so as not to give the government the impression that he had made a windfall profit by selling part of his equity? Or that she helped some telecom operators to get licences from the ministry. There are a lot more such purported facts in the transcripts.
There is, of course, the related issue that rocked Parliament, on whether the government can be tapping phones at will. As BJP leader Arun Jaitley said in the Rajya Sabha, relying upon a Supreme Court judgment, tapping is allowed only in the case of a public emergency or public safety. Given how phone taps are so prone to be misused, allowing income tax officials to tap phone calls at will is an issue that needs to be seriously debated. Surely, tax evasion needs to be cracked with money trails and not phone taps. Indeed, the Central Economic Intelligence Bureau (CEIB) gave up its powers to tap phones (powers that later got transferred to the income tax department) in the early 2000s after CEIB officials were found tapping phones of other officials. It would be interesting to read the documents pertaining to the home secretary authorising the tap of Radia’s phones since it is unclear how any of her conversations, even if true, could possibly involve either public emergency or public safety.
What is intriguing, of course, is what exactly the investigators were hoping to find through the taps. That the licences were given by Communication Minister A Raja without an open auction is well known; that he helped a handful of firms by choosing an arbitrary cut-off date for processing applications is equally well-known; that there were other problems in the process is also known. Even without taps, the Comptroller and Auditor General’s investigations have pointed out that a handful of firms that were the first to deposit their money seemed to know when the application window would open… How does it matter who called Raja or his colleagues — if what he did wasn’t wrong enough to remove him, how does lobbying with him become a crime?
What’s hilarious, of course, is the statement by the Tata Group. On April 29, a couple of days after the issue rocked Parliament, a presser from the group read, “The Tata group has had a long and fruitful association with Vaishnavi Corporate Communications and its Chairperson Ms Niira Radia, which has added substantial value to the group’s communications and public perception.” This is unusual to say the least since it is the PR firm’s job to help boost the client’s image and not vice versa — in this case the Tatas appear to be building Radia’s image!
And what do you make of the rest of the statement? “All of Vaishnavi’s interactions with the government on behalf of the Tata group have been related to seeking a level playing field and equity in areas where vested interests have caused distortions or aberrations in policy. Further, Vaishnavi’s interactions with the government on behalf of the Tata group, have, in keeping with Tata values, never involved payouts or seeking undue favours.”
Level playing field? Wow! This is one of the most powerful industrialists in the country we’re talking of, an industrialist who is so powerful he heads a committee whose job is to attract foreign investment into India, and to take care of all the problems foreign investors face. If Tata has a level-playing-field problem, what does it say of the problems lesser industrialists face? And if Tata is facing such a problem, that’s the worst possible advertisement for attracting foreign investors.
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In any case, it is difficult to imagine what these level-playing-field problems could possibly be. Sure, the Tatas had alleged Anil Ambani got preferential treatment in a case involving an Ultra Mega Power Plant, but this has nothing to do with Raja, which is what the Radia taps are about. Indeed, the Tatas benefited when their land-line licence was converted into a mobile phone one in 2002; and then again when Raja created a special “dual-technology” window for CDMA-mobile phone firms like theirs to get GSM spectrum — which possibly explains why, in December 2007, Ratan Tata wrote to DMK chief M Karunanidhi praising Raja’s “rational, fair and action-oriented” leadership. So, what level-playing-field problems did the Tatas have in telecom with Raja in the saddle?
The Tata clarification may have done more damage to the group’s reputation than the original tapes which, apart from providing some entertaining gossip, prove little else. Apart from, of course, showing the government doesn’t think individual privacy is something it needs to take too seriously, that phone taps are a substitute for good, old-fashioned investigations and that it is naïve enough to think that, in the 2G licence case, any further investigations are even needed.