By Girish Nikam
The enormity of the fraud perpetrated by the Satyam Computers Boss, B.Ramalinga Raju is still unfurling. What has however unfolded so far has been described in the most colourful epithets already, and it is difficult to find new ones to describe it any better. Now that the bespectacled mild mannered Prince of Cyberabad, as he was known until recently, has himself come clean, more skeletons are bound to tumble out of the cupboards of the fourth largest InfoTech Company of India, very soon.

Whether one can term it as his genius that he managed to project his company the way he did, and hid from the world the rot within his company so successfully for so long, and that he finally had to act as his own whistleblower, speaks volumes of the state of business and corporate scrutiny in this country.

As the drama unfolded on Wednesday on the TV screens through the day, many a hearts were aflutter, not the least that of the 53,000 employees and their families and lakhs of investors who had put faith in the company, which was over the years described in glowing terms. Surely all those people who had showered encomiums for his corporate genius and what not and had even bestowed him with awards must have felt like hiding their faces from the world. Big names of the industry and corporate world like K.V.Kamath, Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, Kumarmangalam Birla, and S.Ramadorai had been on a jury last year which named him as the Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the year award. The previous awardees included, Ratan Tata, Narayana Murthy, Sunil Mittal and Mukesh Ambani, indicating its prestige value.

For all of them more than anything it is the sense of being cheated which must have left the bitterest taste in their mouth, which was evident from the shocked remarks of people like Narayana Murthy and Anand Mahindra to name a few. All of them had to put up a brave face to convince the world that Satyam was an aberration and not the rule in Indian corporate and technology world. How far they have succeeded time will tell.

How and why do people like Ramalinga Raju flourish in this world? How do they escape the scrutiny for so long and manage to gain so much power and respectability? To understand this, even after the Maytas disaster, which originally brought out a glimpse of the rot in the Satyam world, everyone including the media was unwilling to see this billionaire in real light. Reports since Maytas fiasco, a real estate arm of the Raju family, which was sought to be merged with Satyam, also gave no indication of the extent of fraud which had been perpetrated.

Here lies the role of the media, which in the last couple of decades and more so in the last decade or so, has been completely controlled by the corporate interests. These corporate entities, some of the most powerful in the world dictate virtually what is reported or not reported when it comes to business. The most recent example of the way in which the media virtually closed its eyes to one of the biggest scandals of corporate history, which in fact is yet to unfold , was the Ambani brothers feud. That we still don’t know anything about the allegations made by the brothers against each other of the wrong doings in their respective corporate businesses, and that media only touched the periphery before it mysteriously clamped up, is an indication of the power wielded by these houses.
The media was of course used by both brothers to their respective advantage and when they decided to bury the hatchet, the media also played ball. Everyday in the newsrooms of newspapers and magazines and TV channels, hundreds of journalists face this frustration of their stories being killed.

Ever since the opening up of the economy in this country in the early nineties most of the media has been eating out of the hands of the corporate brand builders. These johny-come-latelys, who are the most sought after by the pink media and their counterparts in the increasingly pinkish general media, have made it an art to sell anyone to the world. Overnight a grape farmer or a real estate dealer can be polished and presented as the next best thing of the corporate world, and the media is too eager to lap it up. The puffed up stories on these so-called geniuses of the business and corporate world are consistently sold across the media and in no time the brand managers are laughing all their way to the bank. Not to talk of their clients who climb a few steps up towards their goal of being the richest, the most powerful etc.

The eager cooperation of the media is sufficiently compensated by the ads and paid editorial pages and programmes on TV. Any reporter or correspondent in the media is aware or if not, made aware pretty early, of the holy cows in the corporate and business world , and how they are off limits for any scrutiny. No wonder the Rajus of this world flourish.

With Mammon worshipping having become the mantra in the media, it is easy for those who are out to manipulate the media, to succeed without much resistance. The breathless worshippers of the mammon and power in the media who flourish on the lists of the richest 10 or 50 corporate honchos, the most powerful and the best dressed, cannot escape blame for creating the Rajus of the world, who desperately want to be on those lists.

Instead of mindless pursuit of those listed through such barometers, the media and the society will be well served if instead it raises its eyebrow about how they got there. It is no coincidence that the media scrutiny of the business and corporates has declined in inverse proportion to the enthusiasm displayed by the journalists and editors to be seen close to these powers that be. It is this incestuous relationship which has hindered any business journalist from scrutinizing the balance sheet of the Satyam and possibly many many more corporate and business houses, which may just be following the “Raju mantra”, but is yet to be exposed.

Hopefully this humongous fraud will wake up not just the regulators and the Government, but also the media towards its responsibility. Pin stripes and Armanis are fine, but how they came to acquire it, cannot be wished away. What is most shameful and should not be forgotten by the regulators, the independent directors, and all those whiz kids in the business media about this fraud is that the perpetrator had to blow the whistle himself. Hopefully all of them will not wait for another perpetrator to blow the whistle, next time we hear of another corporate fraud.