"It would have been better if we had stung them"

Can you briefly describe what exactly happened? The public does not seem to have all the details?

SAMIR: The CAG report came around the first week of September. We started doing stories immediately since at nearly Rs 1.8 lakh crore, it was indeed India’s largest ever scam ever. So we started doing stories. Around September 10, I got a call from Ravi Muthreja of the Jindal Group saying that he wanted to meet me. The first thing he did on meeting me was offer money to stop this coverage. I obviously refused. He next offered an advertising deal with the channel and I told him that I do not handle advertising. Next day, I discussed this with our editor Sudhir Chaudhary and we devised a plan for a much-bigger story.

SUDHIR: When Samir told me that they are willing to do anything and willing to spend any amount of money to stop negative coverage, I suggested that Samir keep them engaged and see to what extent they could go. Our ultimate aim was to sign the deal with them and then go to press with the document.

SAMIR: Ravi finally gave me a figure saying that the group could spend up to Rs 25 crores in terms of advertising. So we thought, let us push him some more to do a Rs 100 crore deal with us. Then we could go to town on our channel with headlines saying that the Jindal group offered ZEE News Rs 100 crore to stop the news against them. That, we thought, would look voluminous.

But why only Jindal Group? There were others also named in the CAG report.

SUDHIR: We did stories not only on the Jindals, but also on the Abhijeet Group and Jaiswals. But when we went out to investigate, the first person in this web of coal scam is Naveen Jindal. He got a fifth of the total coal allocation so obviously we aimed for him.

Now they have charged that you sought advertisements worth Rs 100 crores on behalf of the channel. Did you have any inkling that this was going to happen?

SUDHIR: Not at all. In fact, when they asked us to finalise the deal, we drafted a stupid kind of 10-12 page contract on a plain paper and not even on an official letterhead. Basically, we wanted him to get confused by the number of clauses in the contract. After that, we got a mail from them that they had got our proposal and wanted to carry it forward. I and Samir met them on September 17 and we had an almost two-hour meeting that day.

SAMIR: The idea was to sign the contract on that day and then go bang bang on ZEE News with the story on September 18.

SUDHIR: We went there with the hope that we would finalise the contract that day but again they made some excuse about consulting the legal and marketing departments and said they would meet us again to settle the contract.

But if you were there to do a sting, would you not carry a spy camera of your own?

SUDHIR: See, one of the executives of JSPL was going to sign the contract. It was not Naveen Jindal per se. So we thought that a spy cam would not give us much mileage. We had thought that once we had the contract, signed and sealed, that would be our story. What would be the need for a sting if we had that?

SAMIR: On September 19 they called us again and said that everything is settled and that they wanted to meet again. I went alone this time and their Deputy MD offered me a personal bribe of Rs 25 crore and asked me to forget the contract with ZEE News. That is when I got out of the meeting and I said we were not interested. Sudhir and I then decided to call the whole thing off.

So the recordings of these meetings is the evidence they have submitted to the police?

SUDHIR: We do not know what evidence they have given. What I feel is that they must have made recordings of five or six meetings and now it's up to them which recording they want to recognise. If you simply present your chosen recordings as evidence, then you are really not giving a full account of what transpired.

Why do you think that the Jindals targeted you in particular? Did you have any sensational story planned against them?

SUDHIR: No. Whatever documents we had against them are all in the public domain and with CBI. Every media outlet was doing the same stories based on the CAG report. We relentlessly pursued it for three weeks. All newspapers carried the story but suddenly they stopped. ZEE News never stopped.

Are you insinuating perhaps that other media organisations bowed down under pressure from the Jindals?
SUDHIR: Other people might have ignored this or we just picked up the lead.

Sudhir, your response to the Broadcast Editor's Association (BEA) decision to dismiss your membership?

SAMIR: Let me come in first on this point. BEA has no locus standi. It has no respect. So for the BEA, it was a big excuse to get into the limelight. And somebody needs to look inside the BEA, what the internal politics among office bearers is, who the frontrunner for becoming president of BEA was, who was opposing him, who wanted him out, what is the constitution of BEA, et al. In the three-member fact finding panel that BEA constituted, two members are not serving editors.

SUDHIR: See, there is a section in the media which is directly or indirectly siding with people like Naveen Jindal who are exploiting our natural resources and making money. Basically it's Naveen Jindal who is involved in coal scam and not Samir or Sudhir. Allegations are against him, the CAG report has mentioned his name not ours. He is the one who has grabbed thousands of acres of land in Chhattisgarh. So why is the spotlight on us? But I am happy to note that many in the media outlets are also siding with us because we are exposing corruption. We dared to do a great story which nobody has done till date.

But your attempted story did not get you the desired results.

SUDHIR: Yes. We didn't get the desired results. Maybe it would have been better if we had done the sting operation. Actually in this case they were stinging and we were stringing. We thought that our story was that signed contract and we were just focused on that. Experience has shown us that sting operations are always questionable. In this case also, it is questionable. In a court of law none of these stings are considered authentic. We thought we would do the story in a dignified manner by not getting into any controversies over doctored tapes and spy cameras. Our story would have been a clear cut story with a paper signed by Jindal or some senior in his company saying 'we want to give you Rs 100 crore worth of advertisements for these favours'.
SAMIR: Even the case that they have filed against us is an extortion case. We were actually pleading with them to sign the contract because we wanted our story. The word extortion means that I am threatening you.

So what is the way forward now?
SUDHIR: The coal scam is the largest ever scam in this country involving Rs 1.86 thousand crore and I am just surprised that the media has simply stopped talking about it. Despite these allegations, ZEE News will fight it out and our coverage of Coalgate is not going to end.