On March 14, the Election Commission of India made public the names of the companies that had purchased electoral bonds. Almost immediately, The Hindu data team published the full list of the donors online. Our first electoral bonds story for the print edition was straightforward: it carried information on the companies that had donated the largest funds. But given time constraints, we could do little analysis on the nature of these companies.
The next day, we studied the list and found that many of the companies were unfamiliar. Some of them had sister concerns and all of them had donated to various political parties. We had to find out who owned these companies in order to contextualise the transactions. And there was no dearth of speculation on the data. Hours after the news broke, some said on social media that many of the companies were under the scrutiny of the Enforcement Directorate (ED) and Income Tax (IT) Department. Some said many pharma companies that had been reprimanded by regulators were on the list. Some identified companies that had been given a clean chit by various committees. But where could we get credible information to fact-check these claims?
That is when the grunt work began. We found out when and for what reasons the ED and IT Department were investigating some of these companies and when these companies had purchased bonds. The dateline of old stories in the media helped us find out when companies had come under the scanner of agencies and the new data showed us how they purchased bonds worth crores of rupees just days later. Old stories about some of the companies securing government contracts helped us question whether there was quid pro quo.
Making sense of the electoral bonds data | Complete coverage
While other media outlets were doing similar stories, we found that some of them had included wrongly the name of one pharma company to the list of companies that were under the ED/IT Department scanner and had bought bonds just days later. Our digital archives showed that the investigators were not searching the company but only an employee.
Our search showed that a reporter of The Hindu Group covering the pharma beat had filed a copy saying the house of an employee of a pharma company was being searched by the ED. A photojournalist had clicked photos of officers entering the premises of the employee. An editor had probably asked the right questions – for instance, was it the company or the employee’s house that was being searched? – and edited the story accordingly. Given that the story was filed years ago, when content management systems were still primitive and smaller stories did not always make their way online, it was noteworthy that the story was published on the website. This allowed us to find it easily. We were thankful to the editors who had ensured that such stories went up online and to the tech teams which had made sure that such stories did not get lost when The Hindu migrated to new content management systems or during website redesigns. In short, we realised that a lot of editorial calls, both big and small, taken over the years had made it possible for us to write the electoral bonds story accurately.
In this digital era, reporters are under great pressure. They are tasked with recording podcasts and videos and writing explainers and long-form stories. But they don’t do all this at the cost of filing the so-called run-of-the-mill stories. Reporters, through their everyday stories, the first drafts of history, which are sometimes deemed uninteresting, are the ones who lay the foundation for the big stories.
vignesh.r@thehindu.co.in
