This turned out to be more difficult than I had anticipated.

Having made my position clear, I looked for ways to prove that the tapes had been doctored.

I repeated this in the Hindustan Times and I told everybody who would listen (interviewers, the Public Accounts committee, the Press Council, etc.) that the tapes were not authentic. I immediately wrote out a response on my website stating this. Obviously, it had been edited, doctored and manipulated. The problem was that while I did indeed speak to Radia, the tape that was published differed significantly from my recollection of the conversation. I spoke to several sources, including Radia, during that time, extracting information about what was happening by probing and stringing them along. They occurred in the period just after the UPA had won its second term and the Congress and the DMK were squabbling. My conversations with Radia were not about telecom, despite packaging that suggested the contrary. Though there were at least 25 journalists on the tapes – which you would expect given that Radia’s job was to do PR for her clients – the first set of leaks prominently featured three editors, all of whom duly had their faces plastered on the cover of Outlook. But the leakers had organised them well, providing transcripts and arranging the tapes so that Radia’s conversations with relatively well-known people were bunched together and featured prominently.

Though there were said to be over 5000 conversations, only a tiny fraction were leaked. These tapes had apparently been made by the income-tax department which had tapped Radia’s phone. These were conversations that Niira Radia, head of India’s largest PR company, whose clients include the Tatas and Reliance, had with several individuals over six months in 2009.Īt around the same time, CDs and pen drives containing recordings of these conversations were delivered anonymously to newspapers, magazines and TV channels all over the country. Last November, Outlook published extracts from the Radia tapes.

Nira radia tapes audio