Sting Operation Goes Wrong, Leads To Army Jawan’s Death

“Investigations reveal suicide may be result of series of events which were triggered by media managing to video-graph the deceased by asking leading questions on his duty as a buddy without his knowledge.”

Unless a person is being stung to establish his or her own activities, what happened to protecting the identity of your subject? In this case, the jawan was an oblivious individual who had no idea he was speaking to a journalist, about a topic that was very much part of his world. Stinging a jawan, in my view, is to manipulate a vulnerability with no application of sense or heart. Cynical, unthinking.

Let’s be clear: while the news agency’s conduct and execution of the sting - including editorial checks and balances - must be a large part of any investigation, inter alia for the reasons listed above, it cannot preclude or sidestep the immediate circumstances that led up to the Lance Naik’s suicide.

The Army has rightly said it is conducting an internal inquiry while making itself fully available to civil inquiries by the administration. While the specific circumstances that led up to Lance Naik Roy’s death wait to be revealed, there appears little doubt that the reason for his distress and anguish was the media report. So any investigation will necessarily have to begin there.