Meticulous planning is necessary for any sting operation.It takes time -four ,five months or even more to meteralize the entire operation.First, a strong team headed by an experienced journalist closely monitor the entire operation.Review the progress every day.He must ensure that only junior or less experienced reporter will send into the field along with an experienced reporter.Legal experts should review everything from timee to time,its legal aspects,tapes of sting operation and should have the power to remove the unacceptable parts.Above all you should have a strong pretext and deception so that you can convince your subject.Your contacts should be active particaptants in the whole process and obivously a steady flow of fund to carry out the operation.But, its another point that despite all these precautions including maintaining journalistic ethics ,follow the law properly,you could still be in trouble(read law suits).Operation Duryadhan,operation Chakravuh -these are not the code name of any millitary backed operation against terrorism,but sting operations were carried out against greedy policitians.Operation Duryadhun where 11 MPs accepting money to ask questions in Parliament. Another TV channel came out with yet another expose highlighting corruption among MPs in selecting the projects for Local Area Development Scheme. Conducted by a Cobrapost.com(an online Investigative news portal headed by ex-Tehelka reporter Aniruddha Bahal) and Aajtak investigation, 10 Lok Sabha and one Rajya Sabha members were caught on camera as they accepted money from the team of a non-extistent body called the North Indian Small Manufacturers’ Assosciation (NISMA) for asking questions in the Indian Parliament.The MPs were Narendra Kushwaha (BSP), Anna Saheb M.K. Patil (BJP),Y.G. Mahajan (BJP),Manoj Kumar (RJD),Lal Chandra Kol ,Dr Chhatrapal Singh Lodha (BJP),Pradeep Gandhi (BJP),Suresh Chandel (BJP),Chandra Pratap Singh (BJP),Ramsevak Singh (Congress) Manoj Kumar (RJD).
I quote Aniruddha Bahal from his article appeared in Cobrapost.com.
The MPs submitted questions on NISMA’s behalf and some of them were selected—and their answers given—in the Parliament’s rigorous balloting system that reduces chances of questions being taken up to something akin to a raffle. Some of the questions were rewritten by the middlemen taking us to the MPs concerned before being put in Parliament, some came nearly verbatim and only certain sections of some were picked up by the Parliament staff. The COBRAPOST team also has in its possession many, original signed forms of MPs, blank as well as filled up, which weren’t submitted but set aside as evidence.From the start it was my assessment that in order for a reportorial team to remain undercover for a long duration it would be prudent to have a woman reporter as the primary asset on the field. Their biggest advantage in undercover situations is that even in an extreme atmosphere of suspicion they have greater chances to evade a search for hidden camera equipment then men and for all the right reasons. Besides Suhasini Raj, the reporter, who was inserted in the field with an alias of “Namita Gokhale”, had a past selling insurance and was a fast talker. Never at a loss for words, she ended up doing an extraordinary job on the field, surviving several anxious moments when many middlemen and even MPs got their antennae up. The fictitious front under whose umbrella the COBRAPOST team operated was NISMA, ostensibly an organization out of Moradabad in Uttar Pradesh, that lobbied and worked for the interests and welfare of Small Scale Industries (SSIs). That was, in a nutshell, our story. Even though on several occasions I was tempted to enter the field much earlier than I actually did, I held back realizing that it wouldn’t be prudent for there was a chance of somebody recognizing me. When I did eventually take the field with an alias of “Navratan Malhotra”, executive director of the ‘fictitious’ NISMA, I was armed with a ludicrous wig and even more ludicrous glasses.There were seven principal middlemen, namely, Harish Badola, Chandrabhan Gupta, M.K. Tripathi (alias Chotiwala), Mohan, Dinesh Chandra, Ravinder Kumar, Vijay, and some others. While Harish was our conduit to three BJP MPs (Anna Saheb M.K. Patil, Y.G. Mahajan and Chhatrapal Singh Lodha), Gupta introduced us to three MPs (Lal Chandra Kol and Narendra Khushwaha of the BSP and Chandra Pratap Singh of the BJP), Mohan Mani lead us to one (BJP MP Pradeep Gandhi), Vijay took us to two MPs (Ramsevak Singh of the Congress and Suresh Chandel of the BJP), and Ravinder Kumar (BSP’s Raja Ram Pal) and Chotiwala (RJD’s Manoj Kumar) to one MP each. Dinesh was the middleman who sent us across to four other middlemen—Gupta, Vijay, Ravinder and Mohan.
Another important sting operation carried out by Star News-Detective Inteligence Guild(DIG)showed a former Goa Chief Minister and Lok Sabha member Churchil Alemao, former Union Minister and BJP MP Fagan Singh Kulaste and one Samajwadi Party MP and another supported by SP involved in accepting money to allot work for the MPLAD (Member of Parliament Local Area Development) Scheme.Alemao, a Congress MP from South Goa, who discussed commisson in two meetings, is asking the undercover reporters in third meeting to open a bag full of money as commission for a project to popularise Konkani language. The former Chief Minister demands an advance of Rs. Two lakh, but on suspicion grew,he threatened the reporters at which the team backed out.The sting operation also shows Yuvraj Siingh, Personal Secretary of Fagan Singh Kulaste, a former Union Minister, taking money on behalf of BJP MP Chandra Pratap Singh, who was also exposed in the sting operation'Operation Duryodhan'.
From these two successful operations,one can understand that deception play a major role in any sting operationn.As I mentioned earlier proper planning and co-ordination between reporters and contacts is a must.An Investigative Reporter should always remember that what happens if his or her cover is blown?So,be prepare for the worst.
