There is an old joke about a suspicious Stalin calling upon Churchill shortly before the Normandy invasion, only to find the prime minister in his bath. A naked Churchill beamed at Stalin and said, “I told you England has nothing to hide!” That absurd little encounter, the joke goes, ensured that the right people won the war. The idea of democracy entails transparency in more ways than one. On Tuesday, the people of India were offered a long hard look into Indian democracy’s heart of darkness.

We, the people, have no way of knowing at the moment if the allegation of an attempt to bribe three BJP MPs is true. If true, the issue is serious enough. If untrue, the issue is just as serious. The TV channel, CNN-IBN, claimed that it had the tape. Since then, BJP leaders, including Leader of the Opposition L K Advani, have questioned why the tape wasn’t aired and have made claims about what’s on it which, it seems, cannot be verified by anyone outside the channel’s newsroom. Advani has a right to ask that question — just as the TV channel has the right to say that the tape doesn’t a story make, that its investigation is incomplete, that no clear conclusion was established. So, as the speaker receives the tapes and oversees the inquiry, he will have to take a call on how much he puts in the public domain.

But given the manner in which the controversy is playing out — the Opposition says this has tainted the trust vote — the air gets fouler by the minute. The relationship between sources and reporters is always tricky business and that’s why the need for strong editorial filters. The TV channel made an error of judgment when it claimed, just minutes after the MPs rocked the House, that it had the “tape” of the incident the MPs were allegedly referring to and then argued that it didn’t meet its editorial standards. The channel has the opportunity now — and the responsibility — to take the right call.