Between the lines
The Smoking Gun
"It became clear to me more than ever that Rajiv Gandhi was not naive and impetuous as I had thought him to be when he made that stupid telephone call to Swedish Prime Minister Ingvar Carlsson asking for the cancellation of investigation. But he had a vested interest in blocking any investigation in the matter. He was not a trusting fool as I thought he was when he believed that Bofors management was telling the truth in its report submitted to me in late April 1987. But he was engaged in a cunning cover-up. What for? The most common sense explanation was that he was involved in receiving the bribes and he wanted to save his own skin by operation cover-up".
So says B M Oza, who was India's ambassador to Sweden, when the Bofors gun deal was struck. The report he referred to is the explanation he was given on 'commissions'. The Bofors management told him that 'commissions' was a generic term used by Swedish companies and banks to describe many kinds of transactions. Oza says he was fooled.
But Sonia Gandhi knows the truth. She should explain her husband's conduct. Sten Lindstrom, head of Sweden's National Bureau of Investigation, has said in a press interview that all information before his government's investigation was stopped pointed to "the Gandhi link". He says that "Sonia Gandhi should place her cards on the table."
In fact, Oza recalls his conversation with the then Foreign Secretary K P S Menon who, when asked why the Ministry of External Affairs did not handle the Bofors matter, said: "because the Prime Minister's Office wanted to handle it." The Foreign Secretary added on second thought: "Maybe Rajiv Gandhi was personally involved in it."
"If Bofors was the villain of the piece," Oza says, "India or, more precisely, Rajiv Gandhi was a willing accomplice." He says: "In diplomatic circles, my ambassador colleagues used to jokingly ask me, 'Ambassador, how much did you get from Bofors?' I used to reply in the same vein, 'Only a handkerchief to wipe my tears' pointing to my monogrammed handkerchief displaying 'B', the first letter of my initials and the first letter of 'Bofors'".
Sonia's demand that the Bofors papers be placed before the public is fair. The reason why this may not happen is the same one which influenced the previous governments to withhold them. The VP Singh government could not have done it because of deference to Arun Nehru, Rajiv Gandhi's close relation, who was then in the cabinet. The Chandra Shekhar government was in office with the support of Congress and so it could not do anything. If at all, it helped Rajiv Gandhi in the cover up.
Then came the Narsimha Rao government. This was that of Congress. He, in fact, tried to stop investigation through the then Foreign Minister Madhav Singh Solanki, who requested to slow down the investigation in an unsigned and undated letter to his counterpart, Rene Felber. Fresh elections returned the BJP as the largest single party, followed by Congress. The 13-day government of Atal Bihari Vajpayee could not have got hold of the papers, although the then Law Minister Ram Jethamalani is said to have tried it. He should speak out.
The two coalitions, following the BJP government's exit, were too dependent on the Congress support to have dared to expose the Bofor deal. The Gujral government's problem is that Sweden has threatened it that it would withhold the names if any more information was made public on the Bofors gun kickbacks.
If Sonia Gandhi has nothing to hide, she should volunteer herself to give the entire information. Doordarshan even blacked out the news when Sweden ordered a probe into the Bofors gun deal. Subsequently, the probe was stalled on Rajiv Gandhi's order. The Swedish team coming to India was stopped on its way to Stockholm airport. All efforts were made to cover up the deal. A bit of hope flickered when at that time over 100 non-Congress MPs sent a telegram to the Swedish prime minister, followed by the opposition leader's call on the Swedish ambassador in New Delhi. It turns out now that the public prosecutor, Lars Ringberg, who ordered the inquiry, was impressed by the pressure that the opposition party members exerted and thousands of letters sent from India to Sweden on the deal. But Rajiv Gandhi sabotaged every effort. How does Sonia Gandhi's mere denial can efface everything?
Lack of guts on the part of governments to place the entire material before the public does not mean that Rajiv Gandhi was not involved. It has something to do with courage, not information. Rajiv Gandhi's close friend, Arun Singh, as quoted by General Sundarji, was "pretty upset about what he saw as a fairly massive cover-up plan."
Sonia Gandhi herself is not an innocent party. Sten Lindostrom has said that she should lead the way and tell what she knew about the Bofors kickbacks. He says that she should also speak about Quattrochi, an Italian businessman who ran away from India before arrest. He has been proved to be the middleman. Some $7 million reportedly found its way to the Quattrochi account.
New Delhi has, in fact, never made a serious investigation into the Bofors bribes. The VP Singh government did a bit - only a bit. When Narasimha Rao assumed power in June 1991, he assured parliament that investigations into the Bofors kickbacks would continue. Sharad Pawar, defence minister at that time, said that "there was no let up in the inquiry" which, he said, the CBI "continued to pursue actively." That was a lie. Except for certain formal noises, every bit of probe had been stopped.
Rao said in the Lok Sabha in April 1992 that the government was committed to get at the bottom of the truth in the Bofors pay-off scandal "without hindrance." He went on to add: "I don't want this government to function under a shadow." This was for public consumption because through Solanki he had already persuaded the Swiss authorities to go slow. This explains the inordinate delay in the pursuit of the case. Rao paid Sonia Gandhi, once threatening to go against him, the price for jettisoning the then Arjun Singh-ND Tewari Congress.
The bureaucrats, too, have been engaged in white-washing the whole matter. They were worried about their position or promotion. It is an open secret that a team of officers - Gopi Arora, then Rajiv Gandhi's secretary, NN Vohra, at present Prime Minister's Secretary, S K Bhatnagar, then Defence Secretary - met Bofors officials in Sweden to tell them how to depose before the Joint Parliamentary Committee. At one time the CBI looked serious but later it kept quiet. It did not want to stick its neck out.
Again, Sonia Gandhi did not tell the truth when she said at Hyderabad that "a month before his assassination Rajiv Gandhi had said to me that if there was an attempt to demolish the Babri Masjid he would stand in front of it to defend it." The record of Rajiv Gandhi does not support such a commitment. He had the locks of Babri Masjid opened to placate the Hindus, who were angry over the constitutional amendment on the Shah Bano maintenance judgement. It was Rajiv Gandhi who allowed the Shilanyas of the Ram temple at Ayodhya.
Rajiv Gandhi's communal attitude was reflected in the slogans he coined for the polls after Mrs Indira Gandhi's assassination. He depicted Sikhs as anti-national. He even rationalised the killings of 3,000 Sikhs in Delhi in 1984 as an evidence of the earth-shaking following the uprooting of a big tree.
What Sonia Gandhi's speeches, more than the content, signify is that she is laying down the agenda. The BJP or other non-Congress parties are only reacting to her. They are losing the initiative. Her secretariat is so well organised that it faxes the text of her speeches to news agencies and papers within no time. Parties and persons engaged in campaign against Congress will have to hit hard and expose her - and her rhetorics - fully if they want to correct her mis-statements. Their reply is cursory and half-hearted.
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