Sri Lanka’s ruling establishment has become increasingly intolerant towards the island country’s independent media, even as President Mahinda Rajapakse’s government steps up its military offensive against separatist Tamil militants in the north.

Whereas the government has accused certain media personnel of favouring the outlawed Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), in recent weeks, prominent journalists have been killed or threatened apparently because they exposed corruption and nepotism in high places.

On Jan. 8, Lasantha Wickrematunge, one of Sri Lanka’s leading journalists, was shot dead by two gunmen on motorcycles in broad daylight as he was travelling to work in the capital city.

Wickrematunge had anticipated his death. In an obituary published posthumously in the weekly he edited for 15 years, ‘The Sunday Leader’, he said: ‘’No other profession calls on its practitioners to lay down their lives for their art save the armed forces and, in Sri Lanka, journalism.”

As in life, in death too, he was categorical: “It is well known that I was on two occasions brutally assaulted, while on another my house was sprayed with machine-gun fire. Despite the government’s sanctimonious assurances, there was never a serious police inquiry into the perpetrators of these attacks, and the attackers were never apprehended. In all these cases, I have reason to believe the attacks were inspired by the government. When finally I am killed, it will be the government that kills me.”

Addressing the President by his first name, Wickrematunge added that it was ironical that “Mahinda and I have been friends for more than a quarter century” and went on to state: “In the wake of my death I know you will make all the usual… noises and call upon the police to hold a swift and thorough inquiry. But like all the inquiries you have ordered in the past, nothing will come of this one, too. For truth be told, we both know who will be behind my death, but dare not call his name. Not just my life, but yours too, depends on it.”

Wickrematunge’s death aroused the conscience of the media the world over. At his funeral, more than 4,000 people turned up. But Rajapakse’s government is yet to identify his killers.

On Jan. 9, the Sinhala radio service of the British Broadcasting Service was censored for airing the views of opposition leaders and others critical of the government’s inability to prevent attacks on journalists. That day, a website www.lankadissent.com “voluntarily” shut down.

In the days that followed, government spokespersons continued their attacks on “irresponsible” journalists who were allegedly sympathetic to the LTTE. A senior journalist Upali Tennakoon was assaulted on Jan. 22, again by unknown people on motorcycles. The same day, a freelance Tamil journalist Prakash Shakthi Velupillai was arrested at Colombo airport and described as a “prominent LTTE supporter”.

Other journalists were summoned by government officials and accused of not following media guidelines while reporting the Sri Lankan army’s operations. (More than 65,000 people are estimated to have died in the civil war in the country that has been going on for two and a half decades.)

It has been estimated that at least 30 journalists have died under mysterious circumstances in Sri Lanka over the last fifteen years. On Feb. 2, BBC correspondent Chris Morris left the country soon after he was named by Defence Secretary Gotabaya Rajapakse (who also happens to be the younger brother of President Rajapakse) as a supporter of the LTTE.

This correspondent found even ordinary citizens reluctant to be quoted on the government’s inaction while journalists are being attacked. As for journalists themselves, many were worried about the repercussions that could follow an on-the-record conversation with a visiting foreign journalist. “We are worried about our families and not just ourselves,” said a senior journalist.

A businessman, speaking on condition of anonymity, remarked: “In the name of conducting a war against the LTTE, the government has cracked down on any and every form of dissent. Past governments too had displayed their intolerance but never as brazenly as this one.”

‘’Lasantha Wickrematunge,” said the businessman, ‘’was less of a critic of the government’s military operations in the north and certainly not a sympathiser of the LTTE. He was targeted because he was exposing the corruption of ministers and bureaucrats.”

The Leader is locked in legal battles with Gotabaya Rajapakse, who has sued the newspaper for defamation following its exposes on alleged kickbacks in the purchase of Mig-27 fighter planes from the Ukraine.

After Wickremantunge’s death, more than a dozen independent journalists have left Sri Lanka. Groups of journalists have received financial support from international non-government organisations (NGOs) to help them leave the country and also provide funds to their families.

Despite the atmosphere of fear prevailing, a few brave journalists did speak exclusively to IPS on the record.

“Media freedom has been under serious threat in Sri Lanka for the last 20 years under successive regimes,” says Lakshman F.B. Gunasekara, founder president of the Sri Lanka chapter of the South Asia Free Media Association and former editor of the “Sunday Observer” weekly.

“While journalists who have been attacked or killed are presumed to be victims of anti-government or non-government armed groups, in the case of most of the assassinations, the finger of suspicion points towards groups linked with, or supportive of, the government or the political party in power,” he added.

Gunasekara is of the view that “attacks on the media seem to be a malaise of Sri Lankan political society as a whole and reflects the gradual collapse of civilian, institutional political practices that are, in turn, reflective of a generic weakness of post-colonial democracy in the country”.

Wickremantunge’s killing, according to Gunasekara, is a manifestation of the “depths and extremities of this malaise”.

“Officially, there is no censorship. But the repeated attacks on journalists, including the killing of some, have created a sense of panic and fear among independent-minded journalists who want to expose corruption and abuse of power in the public interest,” leading Sri Lankan journalist Zacki Jabbar said.

The “end result”, Jabbar added, “is that the people’s right to information has been drastically curtailed”.

“At least 12 journalists were killed in 2008. However, until a senior journalist working for the English language ‘The Nation’ newspaper, Keith Noyhar, was abducted and tortured, even the mainstream media here had not been taking much notice of Tamil journalists who were getting bumped off in Jaffna and other places in the north,” observed Manik De Silva, editor of the ‘Sunday Island’ weekly.

‘’Noyhar has left the country, refused to make a statement to the police and fears for his extended family,” said De Silva.

De Silva, however, was optimistic: “Despite this bloody phase, I believe that, next to India, Sri Lanka’s media is one of the most independent and free in the whole of South Asia and that’s the way it will remain. The truth will be revealed and even if certain publications exercise self-censorship, stories will get published in one paper or the other.”

(*Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, independent journalist and media educator, was in Colombo recently. He is a member of the Press Council of India, a respected, regulatory body in that country).

India’s government, its corporate sector and its people are stunned after the founder-chairman of one of the country’s largest information technology (IT) services companies admitted to years of falsified profits and an audacious financial fraud worth 1.5 billion dollars.

The founding promoter of Satyam Computer Services Limited, Ramalinga Raju, resigned as the company’s chairman on Wednesday, putting out a confessional statement admitting that roughly 1.5 billion US dollars (or the equivalent of 70 billion Indian rupees) of the firm’s past funds were “non-existent”.

What has shocked analysts is that the money, that is now supposed to be fictitious, had been recorded in Satyam’s balance sheets and books of account that had been audited by the internationally reputed firm of auditors, PriceWaterhouseCoopers.

Raju, who is politically influential, disclosed details of the fraud in a resignation letter to the company’s board of directors forwarded to stock exchange authorities as well as the regulator of the country’s capital markets, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI).

Of the revenue reported as of Sep.30, 2008, the letter said, almost 1.03 billion dollars, or 95 percent, never existed.

SEBI’s chairman C.B. Bhave described the financial wrongdoing in Satyam as an event of “horrifying magnitude”.

The scam has dominated the India media and what is ironical is that the Indian word “Satyam” translates as “truth”.

A most alarming aspect of the episode was that Raju acknowledged that his company’s financial records had been fudged and manipulated for the “last several years”.

“It was like riding a tiger, not knowing how to get off without being eaten,” wrote the disgraced Raju in his letter.

While there were rumours that Raju had fled India, his lawyer has said he is in Hyderabad, the capital of the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, where the Satyam is headquartered.

On Wednesday, Raju’s announcement had knocked the company’s stock down a crippling 78 percent and sent the sensitive index of the stock exchange at Mumbai, India’s financial capital, plummeting by a substantial 7.3 percent. The share price came down further on Friday.

This scandal came barely a week after the government in New Delhi announced an economic stimulus package to revive the markets that have been adversely impacted by the ongoing worldwide recession.

Until recently, Satyam used to be India’s fourth-largest IT company, specialising in developing computer software and business process outsourcing.

Satyam’s stock is listed on the New York Stock Exchange, it had business operations in 66 countries and counted 185 companies in the Fortune 500 list as its clients and customers.

“It’s a wake-up call for the Indian corporate sector,” said Ashok Kumar Bhattacharaya, national managing editor of Business Standard newspaper in an exclusive interview to IPS. “Companies have to stick to the rule-book,” he added.

Investors, along with Indian government agencies, are now demanding answers to why the value of their stock came down by more than 1.9 billion dollars in one day on account of a scandal that is being described as “India’s Enron” in reference to the U.S. energy company that filed for bankruptcy in 2001, leaving 5,000 people jobless and eliminating one billion dollars in employee retirement funds.

Many of Satyam’s 53,000 employees are expecting unemployment as the dimensions of the scandal unfold, investors withdraw and it is discovered how the company’s coffers are almost empty. The 1.5 billion dollar fraud outweighs the company’s entire salary bill for the last year of a little over one billion dollars.

The downfall of Raju, a 54-year old software industry veteran, began nearly one month ago when Satyam attempted to acquire two companies controlled by his sons – Maytas (Satyam spelled backwards) Properties and Maytas Infra – for 1.6 billion dollars in order to compensate for the holes in his books of account.

The deal was abandoned 12 hours after it was announced when investors objected, claiming it was an irresponsible misuse of funds and an instance of nepotism.

The Maytas deals acted as a red flag for international investors, with a host of companies like Unpaid Systems of Britain accusing Satyam of fraud, forgery and breach of contract.

Shortly thereafter, on Dec. 23, the World Bank barred Satyam from offering its computer services for eight years citing a potential trail of corruption – data theft and bribery – that led to Raju.

The last straw perhaps came on Tuesday when an Indian associate of Merrill Lynch terminated an agreement on grounds of “material accounting irregularities”.

Satyam’s worth estimated at seven billion dollars, barely six months ago, is now worth less thatn 330 million dollars.

In an IPS interview, Arun Kumar, professor of economics at New Delhi’s prestigious Jawaharlal Nehru University, said the so-called “independent” directors on the Satyam board were not truly independent and added that auditors often acted in collusion with corrupt company managers.

“I’m not at all surprised that the auditors played along with the top management of this company and allowed executives to cook books of account,” said Kumar who has authored a book on India’s illegal – or “black” – economy.

“The government is not looking to take over the companies. The corporate world must respond to this,” Kamal Nath, India’s industry and commerce minister was quoted as saying. “The government should only look at the regulatory part of it,” he added.

The government has stepped in to investigate all important directors and employees associated with Satyam who could be involved in the fraud. All those found guilty could face up to ten years in prison. The auditing licences of the partners of PricewaterhouseCoopers could also be revoked.

“The system has to be strong, but individuals make the system. The rules were in place but individuals broke these rules and threatened the system,” says Bhattacharya.

Though Raju’s resignation letter attempts to accept personal responsibility for the misdemeanours, there is a view that many others were involved and complicit.

Kumar said it was “near-impossibile that those close to the inner workings of Satyam were completely unaware of what was going on”.

Whereas some argue that the Satyam scandal will not have a long-term negative impact on the working of India’s reputed information technology (IT) industry, others say it could negatively impact India’s booming IT services which chalked up overall sales worth 52 billion dollars in 2007-2008.

Anand Mahindra, vice chairman and managing director of M&M, a leading commercial vehicles manufacturing company, went on record stating: “This development has resulted in incalculable and unjustifiable damage to Brand India and Brand IT in particular”. He added that the “whole of Indian industry should not be tarred with the same brush”.

But other corporate managers see positive fallouts to the Satyam episode. ‘’After what happened there is bound to better self-regulation among Indian IT companies,” said Puneet Kumar, a top manager at WIPRO, a globally respected, Bangalore-based IT company.

‘’Satyam was an aberration,” Puneet Kumar said. ‘’The fact is that the IT industry thrives on good reputation and every major in the business lays great emphasis on maintaining global standards of corporate governance.”