A ghost that refuses to go away

BRP Bhaskae
Gulf Todayhttp://gulftoday.ae/portal/838cf8e2-ab6a-40f0-bfbd-42b9fd087e6c.aspx

The Supreme Court last week rebuffed a belated attempt by the Central Bureau of Investigation to breathe new life into the three-decade-old Bofors scandal.

The scandal broke in 1987 when a Swedish radio reported that arms maker AB Bofors had bribed Indian politicians and officials to get the Rs 14.37 billion contract for the supply of 35 mm field guns the previous year. It had cast a shadow over Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s Mr Clean image.

The government conceded the Opposition’s demand for a parliamentary probe. The joint parliamentary committee in which the ruling Congress had a majority cleared the Prime Minister’s name but an Opposition member appended a strong dissenting report.

A sustained Opposition campaign built around the scandal did immense damage to Rajiv Gandhi and to his party. When a little boy, participating in a children’s programme broadcast live from an All India Radio station, was asked to sing a song he broke into a ditty in Hindi which ran like this: “In every lane, they are screaming Rajiv Gandhi is a thief!” 

The names of some friends of Rajiv Gandhi cropped up in media speculation on the middlemen who got the kickback but there was no material with which to pin anything on them.   

Later Indian mediapersons, following up the Swedish radio report, obtained documents which helped track the flow of funds from Bofors to suspected beneficiaries.  They won laurels for their labours but the material they unearthed was not sufficient to drag anyone to court.

The government had claimed that no Indian or foreign middlemen were involved in the deal. This turned out to be untrue.

Win Chadda, who had worked earlier for Bofors and some other arms manufacturers, was apparently involved in this deal too.

Bofors documents showed that in the closing stages of the negotiations, a London-based company AE Services Ltd suddenly entered the picture. It was not clear what role it played but Bofors rewarded it handsomely.

The money paid to AE Services travelled swiftly through several bank accounts before disappearing without leaving a trace.

The identities of those behind AE Services were never established but media reports linked it to Ottavio Quattrocchi, an Italian who came to India as a representative of Snam Pragotti, a fertiliser firm, and became a family friend of Rajiv Gandhi and his Italian-born wife Sonia.

Presuming that the kickback may have gone to Sonia Gandhi’s parents, a Delhi newspaper sent a reporter to Italy. Its hopes of finding signs of her parents living in opulence did not materialise. It found them living middle class lives.

The Bofors scandal played a part in the Congress party’s defeat in the Lok Sabha elections of 1989. A coalition government headed by VP Singh and supported from outside by the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Communist Party of India (Marxist) took office.

Singh, who was Defence Minister in Rajiv Gandhi’s government, had fallen out with him over a probe into kickbacks in the purchase of submarines from Germany. In his time, the CBI registered a complaint on the Bofors payoffs but the agency could make little headway in the investigation.

On a plea by one of the persons named in the complaint the Delhi High Court quashed it. However, the Supreme Court overruled the decision and restored the complaint.  

In 1997 after Swiss authorities furnished some secret documents relating to bank accounts of suspected Bofors payoff beneficiaries the CBI constituted a special investigative term for the probe.

While the investigations were on, Rajiv Gandhi was killed by a suicide bomber sent by the Sri Lankan outfit, Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, and a few other accused died of natural causes.

The CBI’s sporadic efforts collapsed when the Delhi High Court quashed the charges against Rajiv Gandhi in 2004 and acquitted all the other accused the following year.

The agency’s readiness to act in the interests of the government of the day in politically sensitive matters is well-known. But, then, even during the six years under BJP Prime Minister AB Vajpayee it could not conduct a successful prosecution.

The High Court verdict came early in the first term of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. However, the CBI appealed to the Supreme Court only this year at the instance of the Modi government, against the advice of Attorney General KK Venugopal.

The Supreme Court’s rejection of the appeal does not mean the ghost of Bofors has been finally laid to rest. The apex court still has before it a partly-heard appeal filed by Anil Agarwal, a BJP leader. --Gulf Today, Sharjah, November 6, 2016.

Final call for Congress party

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who led the Bharatiya Janata Party to a sensational victory in last year’s parliamentary elections, frequently talks of a Congress-free India. Since the Congress, which the BJP has pushed down to the second place, still has the widest national reach, its disappearance may weaken the democratic character of the polity.

The standard bearer of the freedom movement, the Congress was in power at the Centre and in the states, at the dawn of Independence. It has been going downhill for several decades now. Unless it reinvents itself and regains lost ground, it may soon be a party of the past.

Of the 10 largest states, which together account for nearly three-fourths of the population, only one, Karnataka, is under Congress rule now. The BJP wields power in four – on its own in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Gujarat and in alliance with the Shiv Sena in Maharashtra.

Regional or state parties are in power in the remaining five states – Samajwadi Party in Uttar Pradesh, Janata Dal (United) in Bihar, Trinamool Congress in West Bengal , Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam in Tamil Nadu and the Telugu Desam Party in Andhra Pradesh.

The Congress has not been in power in Tamil Nadu since 1967, in West Bengal since 1977, in Uttar Pradesh since 1989, in Bihar since 1990 and in Gujarat since 1995. In all of them, except Gujarat, it has slid to the third or fourth position, with no sign of recovery.

After 1990, the Congress has formed the government in Madhya Pradesh only once and in Rajasthan twice.

The BJP and the Congress are the main contenders for power in these states. With Modi breathing new life into his party, the Congress’s prospects appear bleak.

In the Delhi assembly elections, the fledgling Aam Admi Party showed that the BJP is beatable. But, then, it also showed that the Congress is more vulnerable to attack than the BJP.

Political pundits attribute the Congress’s plight to its dependence on the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty. Dynastic succession was broken when former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s Italian-born wife Sonia refused the party’s nomination as his successor on his assassination. She stepped in several years later under pressure from leaders to rescue the party from the mess in which Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao and Congress President Sitaram Kesri had landed it. The party needed the family more than the family needed it.

Aided by the sympathy wave generated by Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination, the Congress mopped up 47.6% votes and came to power in 1991. Narasimha Rao’s scandal-ridden regime pulled its vote share down to 28.8% in 1996. In the next elections in 1998, it fell further to 25.8%. With 25.6% votes, the BJP secured more seats than the Congress, and the National Democratic Alliance, which it led, came to power.

After the NDA’s five-year stint, Sonia Gandhi led the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance to power, and nominated Manmohan Singh as Prime Minister in deference to the sentiments whipped up by the BJP against a person of foreign origin assuming the top post. She held the party together but failed to revitalise it and shore up its base. Most of her advisers were leaders with no popular support.

Her son, Rahul Gandhi, who entered the Lok Sabha in 2004 and was made party general secretary in 2007 and vice-president in 2013, was initially a reluctant heir. He has been widely derided as a lacklustre leader but party men who have known him well affirm he has leadership qualities and sound understanding of issues. Last week he went on two weeks’ leave, leading to speculation that he is sore at having to share the blame for the party’s reverses even though effective control over still vests in his mother.

The Congress’s vote share, which hovered between 25% and 29% in the five Lok Sabha elections held between 1996 and 2009, fell to 19.3% last year and the party’s strength in the house dropped to 44. It is clearly on the edge of the precipice. When its votes in the Delhi assembly elections fell from 40.3% to 24.6% in 2013 it was reduced to the third position in the house and when it fell further to 9.8% it was wiped out altogether.

Since Sonia Gandhi has had health problems lately, the Congress will do well to settle the succession issue early. Whatever Rahul Gandhi’s weaknesses, at present there is no one in the Congress who has a wider national appeal than him. There are Congressmen who consider his sister Priyanka Vadra more charismatic than him but her entry is bound to raise questions about her husband’s reported land deals which the party, already seen as corrupt, will find highly embarrassing. -- Gulf Today, Sharjah, March 3, 2015.

Control over levers of economy

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

Months of uncertainty over the future of planning ended last week with the government deciding to set up a National Institution for Transforning India (NITI) Aayog.

Like the Planning Commission which it replaces, NITIAayog will have the Prime Minister as its chairman. Unlike it, the new body will have a governing council comprising the chief ministers of the states and the lieutenant governors of the union territories.

A brainchild of the first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, who was an admirer of both Soviet planning and post-war Japanese reconstruction, the Planning Commission was established in 1950.

Finance Minister John Mathai, who was inducted into the Cabinet from the business house of Tatas, announced the decision to set up the Commission in his budget speech. As it happened, he quit shortly afterwards saying the Commission was ill-timed and its working and set-up ill-conceived. He feared that it would take away the finance ministry’s powers.

High inflation, steep capital costs and low savings rates were factors that demanded governmental intervention to determine the course of the economy. Nehru expected the Planning Commission’s labours to result in improvement of living standards of the people through efficient exploitation of resources, stepping up of production and expansion of employment opportunities.

The Commission’s main task was to formulate five-year plans for economic development and apportion funds for implementation of plan projects. Unusual circumstances interrupted formulation of five-year plans. On both occasions planning was continued on an annual basis. The fate of the 12th five-year plan, which is due to run till 2017, now hangs in the balance.

It is wrong to suggest, as some critics have done, that planning was a failure. The public sector undertakings, the ownership of which is now being divested to find money for new projects, were the products of the first eight five-year plans. Just as Deng Ziaoping’s reforms could not have succeeded without the modest achievements of the Mao period, the accelerated development of the Indian economy in the period of globalisation would not have been possible without the limited growth of the period of five-year plans.

Centralised planning was a failure inasmuch as the fruits of development did not reach the poor. Not long after the process began it became clear that intermediaries were siphoning off benefits that should flow to those at the bottom. The administration could not fashion measures to redress the situation.

As early as the 1970s Sukhmoy Chakravarty, a leading economist who was associated with the Commission for long, said it was not functioning the way it should. He suggested that it was suffering from “plan weariness”. But Prime Minister Indira Gandhi ignored the criticism. Her son and successor, Rajiv Gandhi, referred to the Commission members as “a bunch of jokers.” He too made no effort to reform the body.

The globalisation project, which led to further growth of inequality, brought the Commission’s failure into sharp focus. Large-scale suicide by impoverished farmers cried for immediate action. Initially the Commission and the government remained impassive. Later they sought to mitigate the situation by laying emphasis on inclusive growth.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, himself an economist, started talking about the inadequacies of the Commission as he began his second term in 2009. But he too failed to act. Just before laying down office, he was still voicing doubts about the Commission’s role. “Are we using tools and approaches which were designed for a different era?” he asked at the Commission’s last meeting he addressed as its chairman.

Within days of assuming office Prime Minister Narendra Modi received a report from the Independent Evaluation Office, which the Planning Commission itself had set up to study its working and recommend measures for reform. It said, “It is clear that the Planning Commission, in its current form and function, is a hindrance and not a help to India’s development.” It proposed that a think tank be constituted in its place.

While the Planning Commission was dominated by economists, the composition of the NITIAayog indicates that control of the levers of the economy will now be fully in the hands of politicians. It remains to be seen if this will improve the quality of developmental activity. -- Gulf Today, Sharjah, January 6, 2015

Probes that get nowhere

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

Just as the Congress party, which heads the ruling United Progressive Alliance, thought the Bofors scandal, which brought down the Rajiv Gandhi government more than two decades ago, had been finally laid to rest, it has come back to haunt it and its head.

The scandal relates to kickbacks paid by the Swedish arms maker Bofors to secure its biggest ever deal of $1.3 billion for the supply of 410 howitzers to India and a supply contract for almost twice that amount.

Led by the Bharatiya Janata Party, the opposition rushed in to make the most out of the Congress party’s discomfiture. But a worse embarrassment was in store for the BJP. A court slapped a four-year jail term on its former president, Bangaru Laxman, in another corruption case.

The Bofors scandal was broken by the Swedish radio which said the company had bribed Indian politicians. The names of Rajiv Gandhi and Italian businessman Ottavio Quattrocchi, a friend of the Gandhi family, came up in later media reports. VP Singh, who became prime minister following the Congress party’s defeat, referred the matter to the Central Bureau of Investigation, which registered a corruption case.

In 2004, long after Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination, the courts exonerated him but the continuing proceedings against Quattrocchi remained a source of worry for the party, now headed by his Italian-born wife, Sonia Gandhi. Last year the courts granted the CBI’s request to drop the proceedings against Quattrocchi as he could not be brought to India.

Former Swedish police chief Sten Lindstrom, who had leaked a large number of documents relating to the kickback payments to Geneva-based Indian journalist Chitra Subramaniam-Duella, leading to a series of investigative stories in The Hindu, rekindled memories of the scandal last week with an interview to her to mark its silver jubilee. 

Lindstrom said he had turned whistleblower as he could not count on Bofors or the Swedish and Indian governments to get to the bottom of the deal in which rules were flouted, institutions bypassed and honest Swedish officials and politicians kept in the dark.

Lindstrom’s leaks did not yield expected results as there was no one in the Indian government or investigating team who shared his passionate desire to get to the bottom of the matter.

The CBI, which is directly under the Prime Minister, has a fair record of successful prosecution of offenders in ordinary crimes. However, its performance in cases involving top politicians, senior bureaucrats and high police officials is generally poor.

Recognising that the agency is susceptible to political influence, the higher courts have taken upon themselves the task of overseeing investigation of some sensational cases and asked it to report directly to them. The 2G spectrum cases in which two former ministers, a member of parliament and several high officials figure among the accused are among them.

The CBI’s failure to pursue the Bofors investigation vigorously even under non-Congress governments shows the issue of political control is not a simple one. The BJP-led National Democratic Alliance government, which served a full five-year term, too could not get to the bottom of the matter.

Lindstrom, in his interview, made two significant revelations. Fearing the media campaign might force India to cancel the contract, Bofors had sent its top executives to disclose the names of beneficiaries of kickbacks but no one of consequence received them. Politicians who met him and vowed to unravel the truth if they came to power did nothing when they had the opportunity.

Lindstrom has raised the Bofors issue again without high expectation. “Maybe we will get nowhere,” he said, “but silence cannot be the answer.”

The moral of the Bofors story is that politicians tend to view cases of corruption as grist to the mill of election propaganda rather than as acts of misdemeanour that call for punishment.

Ironically, while those involved in the Bofors affair, a real scandal, have got away, Bangaru Laxman has been convicted in a spurious arms deal. He took bribe not from an arms dealer but from a journalist posing as one in a sting operation conducted while the NDA was in power. Since there are two higher courts to which he can appeal, the present verdict cannot be taken as the last word. Eleven other cases filed on the basis of the same sting operation are still before the trial court. --Gulf Today, Sharjah, April 30, 2012.