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PMO in no hurry to prosecute

George Iype in New Delhi

Three months after he was sworn in as prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee is yet to take some hard decisions on some of the controversial scandals that rocked the country, which were left unresolved by previous governments.

The bestknown of the cases pending before the Vajpayee government is the 11-year-old Bofors gun scandal. Soon after he took office, Vajpayee had announced that the Bofors investigation would be completed and follow-up action taken. Most of the 18-party partners in the BJP-led government had asked the prime minister to table the Bofors report in Parliament.

But Vajpayee has neither asked the Central Bureau of Investigation to speed up the Bofors probe, nor has the exhaustive report from the CBI's special investigation team been submitted to Parliament.

"We feel no urgency on the Vajpayee government's part to quicken the probe into the Bofors scandal. Similarly, investigations into many such scandals are pending with us. The Prime Minister's Office seems to have lost its resolve to deal with these cases," a CBI official told Rediff On The NeT.

The SIT report on Bofors submitted in May last year to then prime minister Inder Kumar Gujral has been gathering dust in the PMO though it reportedly contains enough evidence to prove the culpability of former external affairs minister Madhavsinh Solanki, former defence secretary S K Bhatnagar and former PMO official Gopi Arora.

The report had named the late Congress president Rajiv Gandhi as one of the accused, stating that the former prime minister was part of the cover-up operation hatched in the PMO to protect Italian businessman Ottavio Quattrocchi, one of the alleged recipients of the kickbacks in the multi-million dollar defence deal.

Though Rajiv's widow Sonia Gandhi launched the Congress election campaign challenging the government to release the Bofors papers, many believe that Vajpayee would not create a political storm by raking up the Bofors issue.

"The prime minister knows he is on insecure political ground. Therefore, he will not touch the Congress with the Bofors stick," a senior Congress leader told Rediff On The NeT.

CBI sources claim the government has shown no interest when an official team will visit Switzerland to receive the second set of secret bank documents related to the Bofors deal. The CBI investigation revealed that US $ 9.2 million was transferred from the Geneva account of the Union Bank of Switzerland to Inter Investment Co, a company allegedly promoted by Quattrocchi.

"The Vajpayee government is not in a mood to set the Bofors ball rolling. We are still awaiting an order from the PMO to unravel the Bofors scandal," a CBI official said.

Similarly, the BJP government has shown little interest in prosecuting former telecom minister Sukh Ram, former petroleum minister Satish Sharma, former housing ministers Sheila Kaul and P K Thungon and Chandra Swami against all of whom cases have been registered in different cases.

Sources said the government is going slow in a number of cases against the controversial tantrik "for politically convenient reasons." Chandra Swami has a good relationship with a number of influential BJP leaders including Human Resource Development Minister Dr Murli Manohar Joshi. He is reported to be willing to help the BJP contain his friend, Janata Party president Subramanian Swamy who has announced his determination to bring down the Vajpayee government.

The Enforcement Directorate had registered cases against large corporate houses like ITC and Shaw Wallace and well connected individuals like Bennett Coleman and Co chairman Ashok Jain, former Congress president Sitaram Kesri, former prime minister P V Narasimha Rao's son Prabhakar Rao and some close friends and relatives of AIADMK leader J Jayalalitha. But the Vajapyee government is yet to act in these cases.

Investigations are also pending against Congress leaders like Ghulam Nabi Azad, Santosh Mohan Deb and Jagdish Tytler for their conduct as ministers in the Narasimha Rao government.

Likewise, the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence has been awaiting a nod from the PMO to pursue sensitive cases like the VABAL scam where export firms are accused of evading payment of customs duties estimated at more than Rs 100 billion.

Some of the other cases which require the Vajpayee government's attention are the HDW submarine deal, the Nagaland Lottery scam, the Mukta Panna Oil Fields, the bitumen scandal and the Indian Bank scam.

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