The Indian defence ministry said on Saturday that Francois Hollande’s reported statement on the Rafale deal “perhaps needs to be seen in its full context — where the French media has raised issues of conflict of interest involving persons close to the former President”, suggesting it was a domestic issue in France.
But the French media is viewing the fighter jet controversy as essentially an “India story” and has remained lukewarm to it.
Mediapart, which quoted Hollande as saying that India had proposed Anil Ambani’s Reliance group as the offset partner and that his government did not have a choice or say in the matter, is France’s first fully independent, advertisement-free news website. It was launched in March 2008 as an answer to the crisis of independence in the French media, which gets state funding despite being owned by billionaires.
Mediapart’s publishing editor Edwy Plenel thinks there is a similar crisis brewing in India. Signing out of an interview to Brut India, a digital video publisher, on the investigation into conflict of interest in the Rafale deal, Plenel said: “Like in the big press in India, there was a crisis of independence. That’s the reason we created Mediapart.”
Referring to the contents of the report, the defence ministry said “unnecessary controversies are being sought to be created following media reports regarding a statement purportedly made by… Hollande”.
The Rafale issue, however, is not drawing in France the kind of resonance it is finding in India even after Hollande’s disclosure.
While the media in India is often accused by the Congress and other Opposition parties of treating the Narendra Modi dispensation with kid gloves — particularly on the Rafale deal and unanswered questions related to it — for the French media it is essentially an India story.
Whatever coverage there has been about the Rafale deal in the French media has essentially been by French journalists based in Delhi reporting about the politicking over it in India. On Saturday, too, Hollande’s disclosure did not make headlines in France except for a few reports on the Opposition clamour over the issue in India.
A French journalist based in Delhi told The Telegraph: “Ambani is not a big name in France. And, the offset agreement with Reliance is only about 1/16th of the entire deal. So, for the French media it is a technicality involving a company people are not aware of.
“Even in the Mediapart story, the key quote that is being played up in India is buried somewhere in the middle because the website was essentially looking into the conflict of interest in Hollande’s partner Julie Gayet’s company getting money from Reliance to produce a film round about the time the Rafale deal was being struck.”
As for Mediapart, it has earned for itself a formidable reputation of being an independent media house controlled only by its readers who alone can access it fully through subscriptions.
Plenel, the Mediapart editor, had once been the editor of the French daily Le Monde. Mediapart has several investigations to its credit, including the one on deposed Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi paying 50 million euros for Hollande’s predecessor Nicolas Sarkozy’s election campaign.
Without advertising and also zero funding from foundations, Mediapart started out with a loan and a small subscription base that has grown in a decade to over 1.4 lakh.
