According to the British newspaper The Independent, the Tehelka was founded by Tarun Tejpal, Aniruddha Bahal and another colleague who worked together at the Outlook magazine after "an investor with deep pockets" agreed to underwrite their startup.
Tehelka had cumulative losses of ₹66 crore (US$7.6 million) till 2013, while being majority owned and financed by Kanwar Deep Singh – an industrialist, a politician and a member of Indian parliament (Rajya Sabha).
This 2001 undercover operation recorded and released footage of government officials accepting prostitutes and bribes in a fake arms deal.
The report, called "The Truth: Gujarat 2002", was based on a six-month sting operation with video footage of the members admitting their role in the violence, along with claims that later proved to be "boastful lies".
Tarun Tejpal, Aniruddha Bahal and a colleague quit their jobs from Outlook magazine and started Tehelka in New Delhi as a website in 2000.
[5][6] Tehelka gained national fame when Aniruddha Bahal and Matthew Samuel completed and published undercover videotapes about corruption in a fake arms deal through the sting – "Operation West End" – in 2001.
[7][8] Politicians from various parties called for action against Tehelka journalists for its unethical methods such as procuring and providing prostitutes for its undercover sting.
[12] In 2004, after more than 200 writers, lawyers, business people and activists became founder-subscribers, Tehelka was relaunched as a reader-financed weekly newspaper in tabloid format.
[8] Tehelka had cumulative losses of ₹66 crore (US$7.6 million) through 2013, while being majority owned and financed by Kanwar Deep Singh – an industrialist, a politician and a member of Indian parliament (Rajya Sabha) initially elected by Jharkhand Mukti Morcha, later All India Trinamool Congress.
[3][4] Tejpal changed Tehelka from tabloid to magazine in September 2007 to encourage more potential advertisers, but found it difficult because of their sting operations.
In an interview to The New York Times, Tejpal stated that he covered the losses at Tehelka by soliciting funds from his personal contacts.
[8] "THiNK Fest" was started in 2011 as an annual literary festival and promoted as an event of Tehelka, though the program was run by an organisation called Thinkworks Pvt Ltd, a company owned by Tejpal, his sister Neena and managing editor Shoma Chaudhury.
[21] The documentary Fallen Heroes: The Betrayal of a Nation, which was released in May of the same year, showed Prabhakar's work and Bahal published his report on Tehelka.com.
It involved Mathew Samuel and Bahal, filming how they bribed several defence officials and politicians from the then-ruling NDA-led (National Democratic Alliance) Indian government, posing as arms dealers.
They printed business cards and photographs of particular camera models in Tehelka's office in suburban Delhi and Samuel did the main dealings.
[23] After bribing other officials, they were introduced to the then Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP) President Bangaru Laxman who accepted ₹150,000 (US$1,700) as a "small new year's gift".
[7] Laxman recommended they meet Brajesh Mishra, who was the National Security Advisor to Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee.
According to Uday Mahurkar writing in the India Today, it showed "VHP activists, actual perpetrators of the crimes as well as government counsel boasting" they had a role in attacking the Muslim community during the 2002 Gujarat violence.
[35] Similarly, another VHP activist stated in the Tehelka report that a police superintendent named Gadhvi was on duty and killed five Muslims in Dariapur during the riots.
[45] Similarly, the conflict of interest in the operations at Tehelka has been questioned because the magazine accepted money from Congress party's Kapil Sibal when he was a Union Minister.
[43] The former employees and journalists of Tehelka have criticized its founders and management for "lack of transparency" about the magazine's ownership, finances and who had been bankrolling their substantial annual losses.
[43] The sexual assault allegations against Tejpal in November 2013 received intense public attention and invited the media scrutiny of Tehelka.
Tejpal's and Shoma Chaudhury's behavior immediately after the allegations emerged were seen as hypocrisy given Tehelka had previously published a special issue on sexual violence in India and highlighted victim's rights in February 2013.
[49][50] Both Singh – the once majority shareholder of Tehelka – and his companies remain a target of serious fraud investigations including a ponzi scheme in West Bengal.
[54] Inspired by Tehelka's method and the resulting national fame, a flood of sting and entrapment operations were increasingly "routinized as the corporeal edge of public life" in India, states Ravi Sundaram.
[55] False claims, careless lies, speculative hearsay and doctored tapes purportedly in "public interest" were created and published to misrepresent the reality and to target opponents and innocent lives.
[56] Unlike other countries such as the USA where 'sting journalism' is illegal, in India it is legal and has increasing led to "aims and means" where a sting journalist team presumes a group or ideology as corrupt, targets them through undercover operation to show them to be corrupt, and then plies them with promise of large bribes (financial reward) or social pressure till the resistance of the target cracks.