The nation needs to know

Arnab Goswami's purported claims must be investigated

The reams of leaked WhatsApp messages purporting to be between Republic TV Managing Director and Editor-in-Chief Arnab Goswami and the former chief executive officer of the Broadcast Audience Research Council (Barc), Partho Dasgupta, have raised serious questions about the dynamics of the relationship between the government and the four-year-old news channel. The exchanges, said to be part of a supplementary charge sheet filed by the Mumbai police against Barc and Mr Goswami’s channels over the manipulation of television rating points (TRPs), transcend the revelations of a close relationship between the current regime and the media owner or the prurient details of Mr Goswami’s opinions of his competitors, film stars, and ministers.

Some of the expose can of course be explained away as mere bluster and boasting on Mr Goswami’s part and can be equated with the revelations of a few media editors caught power-broking on the infamous Radia tapes. The authenticity of the messages also needs to be closely verified from a legal point of view but the public revelations so far do signal that Mr Goswami enjoyed so much preferential access that Mr Dasgupta could importune him for a job in the Prime Minister’s Office. Of immediate concern, however, are serious questions over whether Mr Goswami’s relationship with the government extended to sharing of classified information that directly impacts national security.

It is certainly wince-making that Mr Goswami should apparently boast to Mr Dasgupta that his channels were the first on the ground following a terror explosion and exult that “we have won like crazy” when 40 Central Reserve Police Force jawans were killed in the attack. Of greater concern, however, is that just over a week later Mr Goswami tells Mr Dasgupta that “something big” would happen against Pakistan, that “it would be bigger than a normal strike” and would strike in such a way that “people will be elated”, and confirmed that these were the “exact words used”. Although it is true that the prime minister had publicly vowed retaliatory action, he had not specified the dimensions. Certainly, no one in the media had anticipated that, three days later, Indian Air Force aircraft would cross the Line of Control (LoC) and bomb an alleged terror camp in Balakot. At the time the government had claimed that the attack was to disperse terrorists across the LoC, but if Mr Goswami’s message is any indication, the action was taken with an eye to the Indian electorate, with the Lok Sabha elections just months away.

The same messages also hinted at “something major on Kashmir”. Five months later, the state was stripped of its special powers and bifurcated into two. Again, this had long been part of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s agenda, but it is interesting that Mr Goswami should claim prior knowledge and boast that even National Security Advisor Ajit Doval called to ask how he had advance knowledge about the abrogation of Article 370 and the actions that would follow. This remarkable evidence of inside knowledge of state security secrets certainly warrants an impartial investigation as former finance minister Yashwant Sinha has suggested. At the very least, the nation needs to know whether Mr Goswami, who is out on bail in the TRP scam case, was given access to critical inside information by the government.