A year-old Internet media company disguised its reporters as weapons dealers, gave them piles of cash and dispatched them to expose corruption in India's political and military establishment.
The result was hours of videotape that captured defense officials accepting bribes for arms contracts -- an expose leading to the resignations of two Cabinet ministers and calls for the government to step down.
PHOTO: AP
The scandal has set off screaming matches in Parliament and prompted Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee on Friday to promise an inquiry into the matter.
"I shall get to the bottom of the allegations which have been made, I shall work to clean up the dirt that has come into view," the prime minister said. "Let us get back to work."
He said that either a serving or a retired Supreme Court judge would investigate the allegations.
The furor forced UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan to cancel a visit to parliament.
"Our job was to blow the whistle on corruption in India's defense procurement. We wanted to nail them down," said Tarun J. Tejpal, the 37-year-old chief executive of the media company Tehelka.com.
His company's upstart Web site -- which carries the banner "News. Views. All the juice" and runs an eclectic collection of news, political intrigue, literature and sports in English -- has hit a nerve among Indians.
Since it broke the scandal on Tuesday, the site has been flooded with 1,000 e-mails every day and millions of hits making it difficult to log on, said Tehelka.com's information manager, Sanjiv Kapoor.
Reactions to the expose have ranged from euphoria among its readers to calls for its young reporters to be arrested.
"I'm proud to be an Indian today! We've shown the corrupt underbelly of India that they cannot take us for granted," said Adnan Adeeb in a letter to Tehelka.com.
The company launched itself in May by interviewing a key figure in a cricket match-fixing scandal.
Then in August, Tehelka.com began its undercover operation into India's defense purchases.
Their plan was to enter at the lowest level -- the section officer in defense procurement -- and work their way up.
Tehelka.com reporters Aniruddha Bahal, 25, and Mathew Samuel, in his early 30s, spent months pretending to be defense contractors and pushing a fake US$870,000 deal for hand-held thermal cameras and other equipment. They secretly filmed the transactions.
Thier findings astounded them.
"Eight months into the investigation we are still astonished at how incredibly high the ladder goes ... we are still astonished at how blinding the greed was, that two rank amateurs with close to no knowledge of defense hardware, hawking a patently absurd product, could go so far as to slice open an entire industry of high corruption," said Tejpal, who has worked as a journalist for some of India's leading publications.
The scandal rattled Vajpayee's government, which took office in 1998 vowing clean government.
The first head to roll was Bangaru Laxman, the president of Vajpayee's Bharatiya Janata Party. He resigned Tuesday after Tehelka.com made public videotapes of him accepting US$2,175.
On Thursday, Railways Minister Mamata Banerjee resigned from the Cabinet and withdrew her party from the governing coalition, saying she was taking a stand against corruption. Later the same day, Defense Minister George Fernandes resigned.
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