A Sexual Harassment Complaint and the Fallout
| Case Code: BECG149 Case Length: 13 Pages Period: 2013 - 2014 Pub Date: 2017 Teaching Note: Available |
Price: Rs.300 Organization: Tehelka Industry: Media Countries: India Themes: Business Ethics, Gender, Organizational Behavior |
Abstract Case Intro 1 Case Intro 2 Excerpts
About Tehelka and its Founder
In 2000, Tarun Tejpal co-founded Tehelka as an investigative news portal tehelka.com. After its launch, Tehelka broke new ground with its first sting operation called 'Operation Fallen Heroes', which exposed match-fixing and betting in Indian cricket. In 2001, Tehelka was again in the spotlight when its "Operation West End” exposed corruption in the Indian Defense ministry and how several Defense officials and politicians from the then-ruling coalition government had accepted bribes. The sting operation carried out by Tehelka, in which some of its journalists posed as arms dealers, secretly captured senior army officials and bureaucrats accepting bribes in a fake arms deal. This scandal pushed the Indian government to the brink of a crisis and caused the resignations of several officials including the then Defense Minister and the presidents of two of the parties of the ruling coalition. According to media analysts, this exposé gave Tehelka and Tarun a larger than life image.
The aftermath of the scandal saw the Indian government launching an inquiry into the exposé as it questioned the methods adopted by Tehelka while making this exposé. Some reports alleged that Tehelka had resorted to unethical means such as using its women staff as prostitutes to lure army officials in the sting operation. It was also rumored that as a backlash, the Indian government had subjected Tehelka to tax raids and judicial investigations and filed cases against it. Tehelka was forced to lay off all but four of its 120 staff. The magazine's main financial backer and the reporters who carried out the sting were jailed. The website became virtually defunct and was forced to shut down in 2003...
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