On May 31, President Pranab Mukherjee begins a three-day vis-it to Sweden. This is important for several reasons. Ever since the Bofors gun deal of the late 1980s, there has been a cloud over the New Delhi-Stockholm relationship. There is no question that the Bofors gun was of excellent quality. The problem arose in a kickbacks scandal that claimed a political price in both countries. A quarter-century has passed and it is time to move on.
Yet, does all this mean the Bofors saga was a monumental myth? Was it only a “media trial”, as has been suggested? Memories have faded. The legal case is dead. Many of the people involved, including key Bofors officials who paid the bribes, are gone. There have been no convictions in court. The President made this point in his interview to a Swedish newspaper. Congress spokespersons jumped in to claim vindication for Rajiv Gan-dhi and his government (1984-89). A former Con-gress minister lamented in a television discussion that “Rajiv was crucified”.
Is this true? What were the facts and what was Bofors about? Did investigation genuinely fail or was it systematically sabotaged? Are such claims paranoiac or are they borne out by the manner in which events unfolded? Decide for yourself. It was only after the V.P. Singh government came to office in 1989 that a case was registered. A year later, the government fell and Chandrashekhar’s rump group formed a short-lived government supported by the Congress. Strange developments now took place. In court, the Central Bureau of Investigation’s lawyer in the Bofors case began arguing against his own client.
It was so bizarre that the designated CBI official, a very well-regarded officer and a legend in the agency, had to interrupt and shout down the lawyer in court. The lawyer had been compromised by the Chandrashekhar government, with a particular minister giving him contrary instructions following a deal with the Congress. That lawyer is now a Congress-backed MP. That minister is now in the Bharatiya Janata Party.
The wrecking-ball attempt of December 1990 was thwarted. A few months later, in the summer of 1991, P.V. Narasimha Rao came to power. By then it was apparent the Bofors bribe money had ended up in an identified set of accounts in Switzerland. Unknown individuals/entities went to court in Geneva and asked Swiss authorities not to tell the Indian government who the accounts belonged to. Clearly, these were the holders of the accounts and recipients of the bribes or kickbacks.
What did the Rao government do? In 1992, Madhavsinh Solanki, the then foreign minister, visited Davos to attend the World Economic Forum. He met the Swiss foreign minister and handed him a note saying the Bofors case was politically motivated. He asked the Swiss government not to cooperate with Indian investigators and to ignore requests made by other departments of the Rao government. When this became public, Mr Solanki had to resign.
In July 1993, International Criminal Police Organisation (Interpol) told India that Italian businessman Ottavio Quattrocchi was among the parties appealing against the transfer of the Swiss bank documents. Within days, Quattrocchi flew out of India. His departure was facilitated by a senior Congress politician from Karnataka. This person was to become a governor in the United Progressive Alliance era. Quattrocchi never returned; he died in 2013, still a fugitive from the Indian people.
In 1997, when H.D. Deve Gowda was Prime Minister, the documents from Switzerland finally arrived. They were brought to India by then CBI chief Joginder Singh. Within weeks the Congress withdrew support to Mr Gowda. The documents revealed money paid by Bofors to an entity called A.E. Services finally made it to Quattrocchi’s bank account — in the name of Colbar Investments, a Panama-registered company of which he was described as “the economical owner”. From there, the money had been transferred to other accounts controlled by Quattrocchi.
By then Quattrocchi was living in Malaysia. In 1998, the National Democratic Alliance won power. Its government tried to extradite Quattrocchi. It lost in a lower court on a Friday and appealed to the higher court on Monday. Over the weekend, Quattrocchi had flown out of Malaysia. In May 2004, the Congress came back to office. In December 2005, Quattrocchi’s bank accounts in London, where the bribes had turned up, were de-frozen under instructions from the CBI and the Italian was allowed to have his money. In 2007, thanks to an old Interpol alert, police authorities in Argentina detained Quattrocchi. The UPA government went slow. At one point it said it did not have adequate Spanish-English translators.
Meanwhile, in India an unfavourable Delhi high court verdict of February 2004 — which had quashed the bribery charges — was not appealed against. In May 2005, the Delhi high court ended the case against the Hindujas — who also held one of the Swiss accounts information for which had been sought in the early 1990s — on the grounds that papers presented before the court were not originals but only authenticated photocopies.
The UPA government allowed all this to go unchallenged and let the case just wither away. Astonishingly, the May 2005 verdict judge was to later appear before the media and defend his judgment, claiming people needed to know “the truth”. Was Quattrocchi keeping the money for himself or was he holding it on behalf of others? This would be a logical question. Quattrocchi was a commercial agent. His wife and he were close friends of Sonia and Rajiv Gandhi. Senior civil servants from the 1980s recall the Italian fixer barging into rooms of ministers and secretaries and using the RAX phone — a privilege available only to senior government officials in New Delhi.
In the 1980s — following Indira Gandhi’s comeback in January 1980 and roughly coinciding with Rajiv Gandhi’s political career — Quattrocchi won his nominal employer, Snamprogetti, some 60 projects from the Indian government. No deal was denied to him, especially in the fertiliser space. Those who stood up to him — opposing him on grounds of technology (Thal Vaishet project, 1980) or price (Hazira-Bijapur-Jagdishpur pipeline, 1985) were humiliated. HBJ destroyed several careers. Nawal Kishore Sharma lost his job as petroleum minister. P.K. Kaul was sacked as Cabinet Secretary. G.V. Rama-krishna and A.S. Gill, two outstanding petroleum secretaries, were not considered for Cabinet Secretary-ship. In the case of Thal Vaishet, K.V. Ramananthan, then secretary for chemicals and fertilisers and frontrunner for the Cabinet Secretary’s post, was shunted out to the Planning Commission.
Was all this an invention by the media and evil anti-Congress politicians? Did Quattrocchi take money from Bofors in relation to a deal with the Indian government, with his friends in decision-making positions in the very same government innocent and ignorant of the transaction? Does Santa Claus live near Sweden?
The writer can be contacted at malikashok@gmail.com
