Bye bye smoking gun: The Niira Radia tapes and the modern political scandal

by Sandip Roy and Lakshmi Chaudhry What ever happened to the smoking gun? When Nixon’s secret tapes were unearthed in the White House, it led to the resignation of the president. Even a wily a character as Richard Nixon, couldn’t wiggle out of that unassailable proof of his attempts to cover up Watergate. Fast forward almost four decades to Radiagate and its now infamous tapes. Niira Radia might have just shut down her high profile communications firm but everything else about that scandal remains as murky as ever. Those damning conversations were supposed to be the smoking gun. But the only thing that is still definitively smokin’ in this whole scandal is the innuendo and gossip about the smoking hot Ms. Radia. [caption id=“attachment_119675” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“Niira Radia. Reuters”]  [/caption] That, at least, is incontrovertible. The tapes, on the other hand, have immediately become disputed territory. Vir Sanghvi claims that three tests abroad have concluded that the tapes were “manipulated or faked.” Of course, Sanghvi is one of the journalists purportedly “caught” on the tapes. But that only adds to the smog of confusion. The Radia tapes are not the only bits of digital proof that have ended up in controversy recently, unsettling more than they settle. When a video popped up on Youtube showing Swami Agnivesh apparently talking to Kapil Sibal and advising him to act tough on Anna, he was branded a Congress mole. Kiran Bedi called Agnivesh “absolutely unethical.” Agnivesh responded with the now standard claim of manipulation, calling the video a “cut and paste” job. That’s pretty much what Prashant Bhushan said when he dismissed that infamous CD with the conversation between his father Shanti Bhusan and Samajwadi Party honchos Mulayam Singh and Amar Singh as “ fabricated and doctored.”  He too claimed a la Sanghvi that tests by a lab in the US showed that the recording was not “authentic.” What these stories all show is that technology is neither infallible nor indisputable. The story will no longer be about what is in the tapes. Instead it inevitably becomes mired in that seemingly unanswerable question: is the damn thing doctored or not? Government forensic labs come up with their answer. Well-qualified experts hired by the other side rebut them. Soon we’re in the midst of an extended episode of  CSI: New Delhi. Television anchors have a field day with all the political CD-slinging. And the public, always a sucker for the conspiracy theory, will assume that everyone is lying. Besides didn’t the Radia tapes prove just that: everyone is in bed with everyone else, or at least in each other’s pockets? But it was not supposed to be this way. Technology was supposed to set us free. We could all be iReporters now, citizen journalists, armed with cell phones, free to publish on the internet in an instant. The notion was seductive. Point the cell phone camera; tape that phone conversation; dump those documents on Wikileaks. Turn on the lights and watch the rats scurry for cover. Digital information was the real thing. Incontrovertible proof that couldn’t be doctored and “re-created” unlike a land deed or a ration card. Or so we thought. But technology can be outsmarted by technology. Forrest Gump showed us that we can go back in time and change history by clicks of the mouse, seamlessly inserting Tom Hanks into Watergate, Vietnam, rubbing shoulders with Lyndon Johnson, Nixon and John Lennon. It was great entertainment. But more tellingly, it was an extraordinary mix of fact and fiction, blurring the boundaries of both so we couldn’t tell where one began and the other ended. The digital truth, it turned out, could be diced and spliced endlessly, its bytes subject to eternal manipulation. But all of this has just made us even more hungry for transparency, to find that definitive answer. The only problem is now we can’t even trust our own eyes. Or our own ears. “Audio labs told me that with modern technology, editing and manipulation done to digital files by a professional can be almost untraceable,” said Vir Sanghvi. Yet we keep pinning our faith in technology hoping that it will be the ultimate arbiter, the indisputable Rosetta Stone which will decode the hieroglyphics. Hence, the clamour for electronic voting machines (EVMs) as a way to combat electoral fraud. Before the last elections, Jayalalithaa demanded reality TV vote counting with every step video taped from the breaking of the seal of the EVM to the counting of the votes. It’s almost touching, this faith in technology to save us from ourselves. In the US, political activists alleged that the machines themselves, paperless and touchscreen, are vulnerable to tampering. Machines don’t have ideologies and agenda but their masters do. “If I was a programmer at one of these companies and I wanted to steal an election it would be very easy,” said David Dill, a computer science professor at Stanford. Alex Halderman, a professor  of computer science at the University of Michigan, said the Indian EVM could be attacked with an electronic clip that could rewrite the votes – an “electronic form of booth capture.” The trail thus leads us back to square one. The truth might be out there. But whose job is it ultimately to verify the truth? And who verifies the verifier? Perhaps, a Jan Lokpal. But I digress. The discovery of the Radia tapes or the Watergate tapes or the Bhushan CD would once have been the climax of the story, the dramatic moment where all the dots would have been connected, and the bad guys exposed. But not anymore. We are left in the eternal limbo of speculation, still wondering what may be, could be, is most likely. Perhaps it’s time to update that famous Omar Khayyam couplet for this new era of perpetual uncertainty: The Smoking Gun fires; and having fired, Moves on (to a TV show): but no fear, your Pundits and Press conferences Can lure it back to cancel half a Line (or all of it), And all your Tears can wash out any Words you like.