I returned from Paris after ten days to find the noise level in media even more high pitched. This is not surprising given the number of scams UPA2 has birthed, the latest involving the redoubtable Robert Vadra. It’s exactly the kind of environment in which journalism flourishes. That’s why it’s important to remember the cardinal rule of good journalism: Never take the eye off the ball. It’s not easy when so much is happening around you and news junkies want even more. But journalists have no choice. They must persist. Or else, the bad guys will quietly pirouette into the sunset while we are busy chasing new scams.

There are always many unfinished stories. Once the noise level diminishes, we set them aside and move on. Does this mean the people we thought guilty were not guilty? Or does it mean, as in the case of Bofors, the first big scam that dropped a Government, that the conspiracy of silence has got the better of justice? Public memory is short. So if you hold out long enough, pull the decibel level down, everyone loses sight of the case. Quattrocchi is a free man today. The Hindujas are happily going about with their business as if nothing ever happened. Bob Wilson has vanished. Martin Ardbo and Win Chaddha are dead. At the end of it all, we are none the wiser about who filched all that money even though we may have a pretty good idea where most of it went.

Bofors is not a lone case. I can cite a hundred more. Remember Abdul Rehman Telgi? There was a time when the Telgi fake stamp paper scam was touted as a Rs 35,000 crore loot, involving many politicians. Over the years, as the case kept being heard, the figures shrank and, when last heard of, it was down to less than Rs 100 crore. Since then there has been absolute silence while Telgi rots in jail. Remember Ketan Parekh and the infamous stock market scams? Parekh spent months behind bars. During that period, quietly and intriguingly, the headlines died down and Parekh, like Alice, vanished into a rabbit hole, never to reappear again. Rumours are he is still active in the markets. What happened to the crores he purloined from the banks? What happened to the cases filed against his guru, Harshad Mehta? The entire might of the political establishment came down on Mehta when he confessed he had bribed Narasimha Rao. The outcome? Rao got away without a taint while Harshad died mysteriously in jail. His cases still drag on a decade later. What happened to the cases against Rajan Pillai? He too died, like Mehta, in custody. Last year, his family got Rs 10 lakh as compensation after 16 years. And the truth remains shrouded in mystery.

Some time back there was so much furore over Hasan Ali, Pune’s infamous stud farm owner who the Government claimed had stashed away $8 billion in Swiss banks. For days on end, he stayed in the headlines. Even his wife Rheema went to jail as an accomplice. He was alleged to be in cahoots with arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi. There was Kashinath Tapuria, his hawala partner from Kolkata. Hundreds of high profile names were supposedly found in a note book with details of amounts sent illegally overseas. Every investigating agency wanted Hasan Ali’s head. He too went to jail and then, suddenly, vanished from the news. Totally.

What happened to Sukh Ram, our first scam-tainted telecom minister, from whose house bags full of cash were recovered? What’s happening on the 2G scam? What happened to Laloo’s Rs 950 crore fodder scam? Where are the Jain diaries? What happened to the cases filed against Jagdish Tytler and Sajjan Kumar for the deaths of so many Sikhs in 1984? What happened to the Rs 10,000 crore UP NRHM scam? And the Rs 200,000 crore Karnataka Wakf Board land scam? Now that Ajit Pawar has resigned, what happens to the Rs 9,500 crore that vanished in the irrigation scam?

Successful journalism is about persistence, not noise. Unless we have the patience to pursue cases even after they vanish from the headlines, we will never get to know what really happened.