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The Bofors booms again -- now, at the BJP

Onkar Singh in New Delhi

The Kargil war and the forthcoming general election have returned the Bofors gun to the centrestage.

Congressmen, expectedly, are singing paeans about the gun, which undoubtedly saved the day for the Indian armed forces in Jammu and Kashmir. As for the Bharatiya Janata Party and the rest, who have been trying to pin down the Congress on the issue, they find themselves with no leg to stand on.

Thus, if Mani Shankar Aiyar's happiness knows no bound, the BJP's Vijay Kumar Malhotra says the quality of the gun was not in question.

"That was never in doubt," he claims.

'If the BJP and the others then in Opposition been listened to 12 years ago,' counters Aiyar in one of his columns, 'we would have been saddled with inferior artillery. The country needs to ask itself why it sneered when the prime minister of the time, Rajiv Gandhi, fated to fall over the gun, warned his school-friend Arjun Singh, the minister of state for defence, not to be tempted by knee-jerk reaction.'

Though Presidential sanction to prosecute S K Bhatnagar, the then defence secretary, and Madhavsinh Solanki, foreign minister in the P V Narasimha Rao Cabinet, was granted almost five months ago, the Central Bureau of Investigation is still struggling to finalise its chargesheet.

Others who face prosecution include businessman Win Chadha, his son Harsh, Ottavio Quattrochhi and his wife Maria.

"Because of the huge amount of paper work (involved), the progress has been a bit slow. Then, we are still to get one set of documents from the Swiss court and we don't know whose name is involved in that case. I guess we will have to wait until the last set of the papers are received," CBI deputy principal information officer S M Khan told rediff.com

Though a section in the BJP shows impatience about the chargesheet, there are others who understand the delay. "The Hindujas are fighting a legal battle in the Swiss courts. The Swiss had rejected their plea in June, but the defendants have gone to the federal court. Now the matter is pending there. So we cannot do anything. We got to wait," says Arun Jaitley, senior Supreme Court advocate and BJP national executive member.

"He is a legal hand who understand things but we are the grass-root workers. How do we explain to our supporters the delay in filing the chargesheet? We have been so long carping on the Bofors issue and suddenly we have no issue," laments a junior BJP leader.

Meanwhile, BJP leader Narendra Modi denied the allegation in a leading Hindi newspaper that Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee is shielding the Hindujas and has told the CBI to go slow on the matter.

"I don't give credence to this kind of falsehood. To spread this kind of canard against Atalji is malicious propaganda. Atalji is the first prime minister who has brought the prime minister's office under the Lok Pal's purview and still people say things like this about him," says a disgusted Modi.

He also rejected a suggestion that N R Wasan, a CBI deputy director investigating the gun scandal, was transferred to Andhra Pradesh because he had objected to Rajiv Gandhi's inclusion in the list of accused.

"Nothing can be farther from the truth. I am told Wasan had completed his tenure in the CBI and hence was sent back to his parent cadre," is Modi's version.

Khan confirmed Modi's view. "Mr Wasan had been in the CBI for the last 10 years and his tenure was over. In any case the main people who are investigating the case are still there. R K Raghavan, the director, is personally looking after the investigation. P C Sharma, the special director, is another important officer. The transfer of a deputy director does not make any difference," he says.

The initial investigations into the scandal were done by K Madhavan, the then deputy inspector general, who later took voluntary retirement from the Bureau. Over a period of 12 years, four different teams have investigated it.

"Before I took over, only three witnesses had been questioned. The CBI officers had been globetrotting, and this is perhaps the costliest case the agency has ever investigated. I think over Rs 20 million have been spent so far," says former CBI director Joginder Singh.

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