 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. I am Paranjoy Gohar Thakurtha. What we are going to discuss now is an article which was put out by the news agency IANS, earlier known as Indo-Asian News Service. It's Bombay Bureau head, Kaid Najmi, and the afternoon of the 21st of June 2018, put out an article which was about the Ahmadabad District Cooperative Bank and how this bank had secured deposits of over 745 crore of currency that had been banned. This was just after demonetization took place on the 8th of November 2016 and five days after this happened, this money came in and just before all district cooperative banks were banned from accepting deposits of banned currency notes, this bank, the Ahmadabad District Cooperative Bank, put the money which was the highest in the country. Now none of that would have made the kind of news it had if it hadn't been for the fact that a director of the bank and a former chairman of the bank happens to be the president of the Bharatiya Janta Party, Amit Shah. Now what has happened is after this article came out, it was put up on a number of websites but curiously certain websites such as Network 18 which is owned by the Reliance Group, the New Indian Express, Times Now, they took this after they had put it up and more recently the NABAD, that is the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development and this article was based on a reply to a question raised under the Right to Information Act and the answer was given by a spokesperson, the Chief General Manager and Appellate Authority of NABAD, Mr. S. Saravanavell. Now why did all this happen? Why did these websites put out the article and then take it down? To try and understand what happened and what went into the making of this article, I'm very happy to have with me here in the studio of NewsClick, somebody I've known for many years, Hardev Sanothra. Thank you Hardev for coming here, Hardev, for the benefit of our viewers, you're the managing editor of INS. Tell me, once you put out the agency, put out the story, did you expect this kind of a reaction? How do you see the whole situation? Well, in the beginning we didn't expect it to have so much play in the market basically because stories come and go but you see it got into the politics of it, Congress Party then made statements. Rao Gandhi sent tweets. Yes, we were a bit surprised by the reactions but since, as you mentioned, the President's name came up, BJP President's name came up, it probably had a much wider play than would normally have happened. You know, right up front in the article, which is written by Kaidnajmi, you also mentioned that right behind the building where the Amitabh district cooperative bank is situated, you have the Rajkot district cooperative bank and the chairman of this bank is Jayeshbhai Vithalbhai Radhadya who happens to be minister in the Gujarat government, in the cabinet, the cabinet of the Gujarat government headed by Chief Minister Vijay Rupani and this got deposits of over its 693 crore. Now, it's interesting that this is based on information, based on an RTI query. Why the controversy? There should not have been a controversy like this but because these notes were deposited within five days, the amount is huge and people wonder where this money came from but as you know, Nabhad has issued a statement just now, just a little while ago, saying that there was nothing wrong. There were a large number of people who came to the bank to deposit it. So, that's their explanation. You know, Hardev, the so-called rejoinder, if you like, put out by Nabhad, I mean, in the press trust of India has reproduced it. It mentioned that there was nothing unusual about these deposits, that these deposits were in line with the size of the bank and it did meet all the KYC norms, the Know Your Customer norms. My colleague said that if 750 crores were deposited in five days and the bank was open for 12 hours a day, each day, then on an average there would be deposits of 12.5 crore per hour. And if you assume that each customer was allowed to deposit, say, 1 lakh rupees, then the bank dealt with 1,250 customers per hour on an average. So, the question is, how credible, therefore, is Nabhad's clarification? You see, there are a number of branches that this bank has about 190 plus 2 counters. So, if you probably have to calculate according to that, what they are saying is so many, they have 16 lakh customers and out of which less than 10% deposited this. So, I think mathematically it's not something which is out of the way. But we just focused on the facts of the matter. We based our story on the RTI replies, which actually, there's an activist called Mano Ranjan Roy in Bombay who does a lot of story. We have earlier done stories by him also. So, he put out this query. He put out several queries to several banks. Many of the public sector's bank did not respond to it. Seven of them did respond. And of course, all the district cooperatives and the state cooperative banks responded. And some post offices, very few of them. Now, he collated this information from all these replies and then came up with a figure of 745 crores for ADC, the Amdabad district cooperative bank and also the Rajkot bank. Yeah, and you pointed out in your article that the Rajkot is like a hub of... It's a political hub. Yeah, it's a political hub in a way. Because that's just by the way to explain the... Narendra Modi was first elected as a legislator in 2001 from Rajkot. But we are not making any correlation between that. We are not saying that anybody is directly responsible or responsible for this. We are just keeping... As you know, as a news agency, we often tend to do stories which are straightforward. They are not speculative. We have to, as a news agency, keep to the journalistic norm of verifying everything before we put out. We avoid speculation in our stories. And this article is based on facts. On facts. We have not speculated about any culpability of anybody in this thing. That, of course, the political parties have done it. That's a different issue. We are not involved in that. Nabad took its time responding, isn't it? It took about more than 24 hours, if I'm not mistaken. Yeah, I presume they must be collating all the information. I see. Because they have come out with a detailed reply about how many KYCs were done and whether Reserve Bank accepted the KYC. That's their stand. Whereas the RTI activist Manoranjan Roy found it astounding. What is your view? Was it truly astounding that such a lot of money... We didn't... I didn't look at it from that point of view. What I looked at it when a reporter files a story to us, whether it's factually correct, whether we have done the due diligence for it and whether we can back it up, we can stand by our story. And that's what we did only. Okay. Now, if you recall, this is when the WIRE website put out an article a short while ago as we were talking. It said that a number of websites, news18.com, first post, both are part of the Reliance Group. Over and above that, Times Now, which is part of the Times Group and the New Indian Express, they all put out this article and then took it down. In fact, the Economic Times also put out this article and then took it down but removed the name of Mr. Amit Shah from the article. But it didn't remove the name curiously from the tags. At least that's what we found. So that was a little unusual. And Mr. G.S. Vasu of the New Indian Express was the only person who had reacted to the WIRE and he said that the editor of the newspaper takes a final call on all editorial matters. Why do you think these websites put the story up and then took it down? I have no idea why they did it. You see, it's their prerogative. Of course. Eventually, the editor decides now he must have had his reasons. I have no way of knowing what these reasons are. As a journalist, I say stories should be debated in the public domain and whatever is the truth should come out. The WIRE also mentions in its article that in July 2017 that the Times of India's Ahmadabad edition had carried an article again, based on factual information, after it was given to the Election Commission of India that Mr. Amit Shah's assets had gone up three times over a period of five years and then this article was removed from the paper's website. Is there any similarity? Again, it's up to the papers or others. They are responsible for it. In fact, you should be questioning them about this matter because I have nothing to add to that. Well, anything else you would like to add to what your agency has put out by way of a story and this reaction it's had? No, basically, like I said, our main purpose is to make sure that what we put out and we put out a large number of stories, more than 350 every day, and it goes through a due diligence process. We have checks and balances at every level, which I suppose every newspaper has. So based on that, we try and make sure that stories which may be deemed to have a little more impact than others go through an even stronger process of due diligence. And this particular story did go through that. It did go through. In fact, I personally looked at it and checked all the documents and spoke to a correspondent, Kaid Nazmi in Bombay, who has done a large number of stories based on RTI replies. So when everything checked and everything was correct, we looked at the websites, we looked at the history of the websites also and when everything checked, we put out the story. So that's it. Basically, the story has made some reaction outside, so which is well and good. Thank you so much, Hardev, for giving us your time and for explaining the situation and the circumstances under which IANS put out this story. Thank you for taking it. Thank you. You've just heard Hardev Sanotra, managing editor of IANS, explaining the circumstances and what went into the publication of an article by his colleague in Mumbai, Kaid Nazmi, which talked about how the Amitabhath District Co-operative Bank, in which the Bharati Janthabadi president, Mr. Mith Shah, is a director, how this particular bank secured deposits of over 745 crores in a five-day period after demonetization. And this particular article has been put down by a number of websites after having put it up. So clearly, the article, though it was absolutely fact-based, may have touched on more than a few raw nerves. Thank you for being with us.