By: Luke Harding
in New Delhi  January 6, 2003

Tarun Tejpal is sitting amid the ruins of his office. There is not much left - a few dusty chairs, three computers and a forlorn air-conditioning unit.

"We have sold virtually everything. I've even flogged the airconditioner," he says dolefully.

Twenty months ago Tejpal, editor in chief of tehelka.com, an investigative website,
was the most feted journalist in India. He had just broken one of the biggest stories
in the country's history - an exposÀ of corruption at the highest levels of government.

His reporters, posing as arms salesmen, had bribed their way into the home of the defence minister, George Fernandes, and handed over £3,000 to one of the minister's colleagues. The journalists found many other people prepared to take money - senior army officers, bureaucrats, even the president of the ruling Bharatiya Janata party, who was filmed shovelling the cash into his desk.

The scandal was deeply embarrassing for the BJP prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee. Mr Vajpayee sacked Mr Fernandes and ordered a commission of inquiry. The scandal promoted a mood of national catharsis, and congratulations poured in from ordinary Indians tired of official corruption. Tehelka, which had only been launched in June 2000, was receiving 30 million hits a week. But the glory did not last.

"I had expected a battle. But we had not anticipated its scale," Tejpal said yesterday. "The propaganda war started the next day."

Nearly two years later, he has been forced to lay off all but four of his 120 staff. He has got deeply into debt, sold the office furniture and scrounged money from friends. "They drop by for dinner and leave a cheque behind."

The website, which once boasted sites on news, literature, sport and erotica, is "virtually defunct". George Fernandes, meanwhile, is again the defence minister.

The saga is a depressing example of how the Kafkaesque weight of government can be used to crush those who challenge its methods.

In the aftermath of the scandal, the Hindu nationalist-led government "unleashed" the inland revenue, the enforcement directorate and the intelligence bureau, India's answer to MI5, on Tehelka's office in suburban south Delhi.

They did not find anything. Frustrated, the officials started tearing apart the website's investors. Tehelka's financial backer, Shanker Sharma, was thrown in jail without charge.

Detectives also held Aniruddha Bahal, the reporter who carried out the exposÀ, and a colleague, Kumar Badal. Badal is still in prison.

"It got to the stage that I used to count the number of booze bottles in my house to make sure there wasn't one more than the legal quota," Tejpal recalls.

The government commission set up to investigate Operation West-End, Tehelka's sting, meanwhile, started behaving very strangely. "The commission didn't cross-examine a single person found guilty of corruption. It was astonishing," said Tejpal. Instead, it spent its days rubbishing Tehelka's journalistic methods.

The official campaign of vilification against the website has attracted protests from a few of India's prominent liberal commentators, such as the veteran diplomat Kuldip Nayar and the respected columnist Tavleen Singh. Tehelka's literary supporters, who include Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh and VS Naipaul, have also expressed their outrage. But in general, India's civil society has reacted with awkwardness and embarrassment to the website's plight.

"I read all of Franz Kafka when I was 19 and 20, but I only understand him now," Tejpal wrote in a recent essay in the magazine Seminar. "He accurately intuited that all power is essentially implacable and malign."

The treatment of the website's investors has scared away anybody else from pumping money into Tehelka. The company owes £620,000. Mr Vajpayee's rightwing government has bounced back from the scandal and is expected to win the next general election in 2004. Last month, it won a landslide victory in elections in the riot-hit western state of Gujarat after campaigning on a virtually fascist anti-Muslim platform.

The murky world of arms dealing goes on. Tony Blair and his ministers are still trying to persuade the Indian government to buy 66 Britishmade Hawk jet trainers, but the billion-pound deal remains mysteriously stuck over the price.

Tehelka's exposÀ was not about "individuals", but about "systemic corruption", Tejpal insists. He admits that his sting operation would have gone down badly with any government, but says that the BJP's response was venomous. "The degree of pettiness has been extraordinary. They have a crude understanding of power and a lot of that stems from the fact they are in power for the first time. Our struggle is emblematic of a wider issue: can media organisations be killed off when they criticise governments?".

The gloomy answer appears to be yes. Last night Balbir Punj, a leading BJP member of parliament, claimed the government had nothing to do with the website's collapse. "Just because you do a story exposing the government doesn't mean the gods make you immortal," he said. "Many other [internet] portals have closed down. The boom is over."