IN THE NEWS: (From top) Justice R.S. Pathak; K. Natwar Singh with his son Jagat Singh; CNN-IBN’s editor-in-chief, Rajdeep Sardesai, who chased the Natwar probe story for six months

On August 10, at 2 pm, when Rajya Sabha chairperson Bhairon Singh Shekhawat dismissed a privilege notice filed by K. Natwar Singh against the Prime Minister for allegedly leaking the Justice R.S. Pathak Inquiry Authority’s report to the media before it was tabled in Parliament, guess who was the happiest? It was not Manmohan Singh because the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) steadfastly maintained it had nothing to do with the leak. It was not the two senior Union ministers who Natwar Singh’s son, Jagat Singh, insinuated were behind the “plot”. It was Priya Ranjan Das Munshi, the information and broadcasting minister.

Not because anybody — including the conspiracy theorists in the capital’s media — suspected his hand. Das Munshi was relieved because the government would not have to pursue an inquiry into how the report found its way into the plush office of the CNN-IBN news channel at around the same time that Justice Pathak handed it over to the Prime Minister at his residence.

Sources close to the I&B minister said he wanted to have nothing to do with the private media, especially after the flak he got for trying to “gag” the media under the ruse of “defending national security” through the draft Broadcast Regulatory bill. Das Munshi was earlier accused of virtually playing Pope when he announced a ban on the release of The Da Vinci Code.

Not that Shekhawat was silent on a probe when he read out his ruling on Natwar’s privilege notice. “It is sad as well as unfortunate that some contents of the report came to be known to the media...No part of the report should have become public before the report was presented to Parliament. This is definitely a serious matter which needs to be looked into and investigated,” he stated. Two hours later, Das Munshi shared with the journalists, crammed into his ante chamber in Parliament, that, “As the I&B minister, I cannot really think of anything to hurt the media,” when asked if Parliament could move a contempt motion against the concerned news channel. “If there is no breach (of privilege), where’s the need for an inquiry,” he asked.

The “leakage” and the controversy it triggered may have ended happily for Das Munshi and, by implication, the UPA government. But for independent observers, it raised larger questions which impinged on the historically antagonistic relationship between the media and politicians, the sanctity associated with judicial investigations and the changing dynamics of news gathering and “news breaks” induced by the excessively competitive 24-hour news channels. But the basic question of how the report landed with CNN-IBN will perhaps never be answered.

On August 3, minutes after the channel flashed the salient points of the report, stressing how the Congress was let off while Natwar, Jagat and their relatives were indicted for “misusing” their positions to siphon off Iraqi contracts, journalists from rival channels began calling their colleagues in print to “spill the beans”. One of Justice Pathak’s counsels was married to a CNN-IBN anchorperson while another counsel was “close” to the BJP and had been an additional solicitor-general in the NDA government. The first nugget sounded credible enough except that on hindsight, one wondered if the bosses would have given the game away so easily by posting the anchorperson outside Natwar’s house to grab his reaction. It sounded too pat.

Although the CNN-IBN’s editor-in-chief Rajdeep Sardesai could not be reached for comment, a source close to him maintained Sardesai himself had “doggedly” chased the Natwar probe story for six months. “Given how involved he was in the whole thing, is it surprising he was the first to get hold of the report and thanks to his diligence,” the source asked.

Sardesai, this source said, could as well have started putting out excerpts after getting hold of the report on the morning of August 3. But he chose to be “decorous” and waited for Justice Pathak to hand it over to the Prime Minister.

So far, so “credible”, if one were to give the benefit of doubt to CNN-IBN’s professionalism. But how is it that a premier news agency began to put out substantive chunks of the report almost simultaneously? The CNN-IBN source denied “news sharing” and emphasised the channel’s “exclusivity”.

Over to the Congress’s “intriguers” and there’s no dearth of them. Given the perception that Natwar has a following of silent sympathisers in the party, sharing his views against US unilateralism and the Prime Minister’s “comfortable level” with George W. Bush, one theory was that Manmohan Singh’s supporters must have got on the job. Why? “To divert attention from the report’s contents and deny Natwar the opportunity to shout and say he was fixed to save the Congress. They cleverly chose a TV channel and the wire,” said one of them. According to the“intriguers”, the “needle of suspicion” pointed to two ministers, both of them lawyers, who were seen as close to the Prime Minister and by extension, against Natwar.

Unfortunately, this “theory” was not bought by many, within and outside the Congress. Not after Natwar actively hobnobbed with the Samajwadi Party and the NDA. And certainly not after the three incriminating letters published in the report which proved he had signed them to promote the business interests of his relatives, Andaleeb Sehgal and Aditya Khanna. The inference was the Natwar versus Manmohan “battle” was an unequal one and if Sonia Gandhi were to be an arbiter, no prizes for guessing whom she’d back.

But with the cloud of suspicion hanging heavily over the government and the Congress, finance minister P. Chidambaram took great care to safeguard the “action taken report” (ATR) which was prepared in two days by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) so that it could be tabled simultaneously with the Pathak committee report on August 7. Over the weekend, he locked himself in a room with the ED officials and nobody had a clue of what the ATR would say —whether it would partially exonerate Natwar and Jagat or advocate more action against them. It was a combination of both.

Now for the last big link in the chain of events — Justice Pathak’s secretariat of Supreme Court lawyers. He was assisted by five counsels who, between them, were supposed to combine age, experience, sagacity and dynamism. The most senior of them was T.R. Andhyarujina, a Parsi from Mumbai,who started his career with the legendary H.M. Seervai and went on to become the advocate-general of Maharashtra and an additional solicitor-general in the Deve Gowda government.

Dipankar Gupta was the advocate-general for the West Bengal government under Siddhartha Shankar Ray and a solicitor general for the Narasimha Rao government. Raju Ramachandran was an additional solicitor general for the Vajpayee government while the remaining two, Siddhartha Dave and Parag Tripathi, never held a senior position. Dave began as a junior of Union minister Kapil Sibal, while Tripathi was attached to constitutional lawyer K.K. Venugopal.

As evidence of how “objective and fair” all of them were, one of them said Justice Pathak was fully in the know of the constitutional positions they had earlier held. He was even informed of the counsel who was married to the CNN-IBN employee. “In any case, our job ended with examining the witnesses. The report was written wholly and solely by Justice Pathak,” he said. So where does the answer to the leakage conundrum lie?