In New Delhi, since 2004, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his cabinet were reeling from some of the biggest security scandals to erupt in the country. Rabinder Singh, a former army officer who rose to become a joint secretary with R&AW, had staged a dramatic defection to the US in May 2004 after supplying the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) with Indian secrets for years. Despite being under surveillance, Rabinder Singh was able to escape via Nepal to the US.

That was not the only challenge for the government, though. After a trail of unsolved attacks from Uttar Pradesh to Bengaluru, agencies had no true leads and only came up with the usual accusations against Pakistan. The Kargil conflict of 1999 had triggered a series of reforms in the security establishment, but they were not paying off.

On 15 August 2004, within weeks of the new government taking charge, Assam witnessed one of its deadliest terror strikes in recent memory. Eighteen people, many of them children, were killed when a bomb went off in the premises of a college during Independence Day celebrations. The next year was worse.

There are serious structural flaws in the way the security establishment deals with the media and other stakeholders. Confident that they are beyond accountability, these agencies feed journalists information that cannot be verified. Reporters are briefed in informal meetings and occasionally handed typed-out notes on A4 sheets without any file number notings or guarantees of authenticity. Instead of interrogating these officials and verifying the information through other means, reporters often carry that fog of secrecy back to their offices.

Occasionally, the police would produce someone as a suspected terrorist. Even if no one actually believed their claims, faced with deadline challenges and the need to fill news columns, most of us had to run the propaganda. Media reporting during that phase was mostly disgraceful, and the editorial leadership at every media organisation, including the liberal media, failed the public.