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Forwarded message posted for discussion
Bofors re-visited
Editorial
The Free Press
Monday, February 9, 2004
Justice J. D. Kapoor of the Delhi
High Court clearly did not apply his
mind when last week he gave an
omnibus clean chit to Rajiv Gandhi
and other accused in the Bofors case.
He neither offered a cogent ground
nor any justification in law for
quashing the Bofors charges. And most
gratuitously he went on to berate the
media for having allegedly campaigned
against the late prime minister.
Justice Kapoor, it should be noted,
was not the first Delhi High Court
judge do what he did. Before him, at
least two of his equally worthy
colleagues, namely, Justice Sodhi,
who still sits on the bench, and
Justice M K Chawla, since dead, had
gone down the same slippery road but
only to be corrected with strictures
by the Supreme Court. One can be
fairly certain that Justice Kapoor's
headline-making feat a few weeks
before he actually retires and looks
for a post-retirement sinecure would
meet the same fate as did the earlier
orders of his brother judges who too
had quashed the Bofors chargesheet
without in any way offering any
convincing reason as to how and who
had gobbled up the minimum Rs 64
crore bribe in the Swiss howitzer
deal. It was expected that the good
judge would be concerned about the
glaring episode of corruption in high
places and instead of putting a tight
seal on one of the most notorious
scandals of free India would exert
his judicial prowess to bring the
case to successful fruition. Justice
Kapoor, one is afraid, came out on
the side of those who had a deep
interest in prematurely closing this
darkest chapter in the country's
history of defence purchases.
A couple of days after Justice
Kapoor's gratuitous exoneration of
Rajiv Gandhi, a new book, `From Poona
to the Prime Minister's Office A
Cabinet Secretary Looks Back' written
by none other than Rajiv Gandhi's
Cabinet Secretary, B. G. Deshmukh
exposed the hollowness of the claim
that the late PM was innocent in the
matter. He was not. As Deshmukh says,
Gandhi knew who had taken the bribes
but deliberately chose not to do
expose them. And did everything
possible to cover up the scandal. But
we have no doubt in our mind, and
substantive evidence has been
forthcoming in this regard, that
Rajiv Gandhi's convoluted and crude
but vain exertions to put a tight lid
on the pay-offs scam were aimed at
saving his family's Italian friend,
Ottavio Quattorocchi. The Italian
wheeler-dealer, who had wielded
enormous clout during the time Gandhi
was prime minister, thanks to his
proximity to Sonia and her Italian
family, was allowed to flee this
country when the CBI finally got
clinching proof against him. He had
taken a huge chunk of the bribe
amount for his having swung the
howitzer deal in favour of Bofors. To
this day, Sonia Gandhi has refused to
level with the country as to how
Quattorocchi came to have access to
her and through her to her husband.
Indeed, if she were really sincere in
laying the ghosts of Bofors to rest,
and to clear her husband's name, she
ought to have persuaded Quattorocchi
to come back to this country and
submit himself for interrogation to
the CBI. But the manner in which the
Italian friend of the Gandhis had
played a cat and mouse game with the
long hand of the Indian law would
suggest that he had no convincing
explanation for the transfer of huge
funds from the Bofors account to his
own a few days before the contract
was awarded by the Rajiv Gandhi
Government to the Swiss gun-makers.
Now to the post-judgement
celebrations in the Congress Party.
These were premature, rigged and
wholly insincere. For, the country at
large believed a) bribes were taken
in the Rs 1700 crore howitzer deal
against the specific order of the
government which forbade middlemen in
defence deals; b) Rajiv Gandhi knew
not only that the bribes were but
also the identity of the bribe-
takers; and c) the Gandhi Government
fearing exposure of the bribe-takers
who were too close to the Gandhis did
every thing to put a tight lid on the
scam but the more it indulged in
fire-fighting the more it got singed
in the resulting Bofors
conflagration. After Justice Kapoor's
order, the widow of Rajiv Gandhi with
her two children in tow did a cameo
for the benefit of the media but only
the most partisan Congressmen or the
purblind would find the so-called
exoneration of Rajiv Gandhi
convincing.
To say that Rajiv Gandhi was the
victim of a vilification campaign is
to completely ignore the recent
history of the case. He was blamed
for the cover-up as much as for his
compulsions for mounting that cover-
up operation because the main crook
was too close to his family whom he
could have allowed to be caught only
by risking his own arraignment in the
case. The non-Congress leaders did
not feel obliged to suppress the
scandal and quite correctly sought to
get at the bottom of it. It is
therefore all the more ridiculous for
that Mandal hoax, V. P. Singh, to try
and re-write the history books and
assert that he did not blame Rajiv
Gandhi for the Bofors scam. He did,
and benefited from it immensely.
Without Bofors a nondescript
politician like him would not have
become the PM. Instead of denying the
undeniable the least he should do is
to keep quiet when someone ups and
seeks to lay waste the painful
investigations to ferret out the
truth in the bribery scam. Bribe-
takers and their accomplices in high
places or low must be brought to book
in the interest of equity and fair
play. Otherwise crooks will be
emboldened to believe that they are
above the law.
End of forwarded message
Jai Maharaj
http://www.mantra.com/jai
Om Shanti
Panchaang for 19 Maagh 5104, Monday, February 9, 2004:
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