Justice S N Dhingra ruled sting good to unearth corruption

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The legality of sting as a last-resort investigative journalistic tool to unearth corruption in the larger public interest was clarified by Justice S. N. Dhingra of Delhi High Court in 2010, when he said every citizen had the right to expose corruption. Justice Dhingra quashed the charge sheet and the summons against two journalists, Aniruddha Bahal and Suhasini Raj, who carried out a sting in 2005 on MPs to expose their taking money for questions in Parliament. Strangely, the police charged Bahal and Suhasini Raj under the Prevention of Corruption Act (PCA), for seeking to bribe the MPs, but spared the MPs.

Sting involves a journalist or public-spirited person using a disguise and creating a situation for his/her target to commit an offence, which is recorded.  This is subterfuge employed for ultimate public good but can fall afoul of the law. It also invades the privacy of the official being exposed. And it is for the judge to opine whether the means justified the larger public interest. Bahal and Suhasini Raj exposed MPs taking cash with documentary proof and channels broadcast the sting footage on December 12, 2005.  The police blamed muckrakers.

Justice Dhingra posed the question, “Whether a citizen of this country has a right to conduct such sting operation to expose corruption by using agents provocateurs and to bring to the knowledge of the common man corruption at high strata of society?” He observed the right was embedded in fundamental duties of citizens under Article 51A (b) of the Constitution: Duty of every citizen to cherish and follow the noble ideals that inspired the national struggle for freedom. Justice Dhingra reasoned that one of the noble ideals is to have an independent and corruption-free India, and it is ideal to remove corruption to fulfil another fundamental duty in the Constitution, to protect the sovereignty, unity, and integrity of the country. The judgment equated journalists with other citizens with a duty to expose corruption.

“In order to expose corruption at higher level and to show to what extent the state managers are corrupt, acting as agent provocateur does not amount to committing a crime. The intention of the person involved is to be seen and the intention in this case is clear from the fact that the petitioners, after conducting this operation, did not ask police to register a case against the MPs involved but gave information to people at large as to what was happening”, Justice Dhingra observed. “The police seem to have acted again as ‘his master's voice' of the persons in power when it registered an FIR only against the middlemen and the petitioners and one or two other persons, sparing a large number of MPs whose names were figured out in the tapes,” he ruled.