Internet X-Ray: E-Governance, Transparency, and the Politics of Immediation in India

Is it possible to cause a sensation by revealing something that everybody already knows? Certainly that is what seems to have happened in March 2001, when an up-and-coming Delhi-based Internet news Web site, Tehelka.com, broadcast videotaped evidence of corruption at the highest levels of the Indian polity. The tapes showed prominent members of the New Delhi power elite, some of them elected politicians, either discussing or actually receiving bribes from Tehelka journalists pretending to be dealers of military equipment. Tehelka, named for the kind of tumult that a sensation or scandal might produce, had already made waves the year before when it broke a story about match fixing in that holiest of Indian holies, cricket (Bahal [2000] 2003). Its target this time, the defense establishment, was only marginally less sacred — particularly in the wake of the patriotic frenzy that had swept the mainstream media during the Kargil border war with Pakistan in the summer of 1999.

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