Author: Sudheendra Kulkarni
Publication: The Indian Express
Date: January 22, 2006
URL: http://www.indianexpress.com/archive_full_story.php?content_id=86385
Introduction: Rs 21 crore that lay in Mr Q's
account is peanuts these days for well-connected individuals… Far more
tantalising for Mr Q was the real possibility of getting discharged from the
case without even having to enter India and appear before Indian courts.
''If Abu Salem had a political godfather,
CBI would have argued he should stay in Lisbon.'' The Indian Express wrote
this in a caustic editorial last Wednesday on how the UPA Government enabled
defreezing of Mr Q's frozen bank account in London by conveying to the UK's
Crown Prosecution Service that the case against him in the Bofors scam is
as good as over. In an equally acerbic editorial the previous day, it asked
the reckless Law Minister, H R Bharadwaj, to ''join the exit Q''. However,
those with even a rudimentary understanding of the Bofors scam know that Bharadwaj
cannot be Mr Q's godfather. Take it from me: a certain G (as in godmother)
may also have to join the exit Q if she does not come clean in this most sensational
case of political corruption in India's history.
The UPA Government was born with the taint
of corruption and criminality as its birthmark. When the Opposition first
raised the issue of tainted ministers, the spotlight was mostly on those ''unsophisticated''
figures from the Congress party's allies. Thereafter, the taint reached the
periphery of the Congress party, forcing Jagdish Tytler and Natwar Singh to
quit. Now it threatens to touch the ruling party's very core. Hence the desperate
cover-up operation that's now underway in the Government. Make the CBI take
a sudden U-turn. Put the entire responsibility on its head for defreezing
Mr Q's account, even though facts reveal that the agency had no such plans.
But since the CBI's self-incrimination doesn't convince even the dimmest of
the dimwitted in this land, field the Prime Minister himself to say that his
government had nothing to do with what Arun Jaitley has brilliantly termed
as an absconder's ''acquittal before trial''. It's sad to see our PM, an honourable
and fair-minded man, being compelled to speak a lie.
No officer of the rank of Additional Solicitor
General can travel abroad without the file being cleared by the Law Ministry
and the PMO, and without the knowledge of the PM himself. Especially when
it concerns Mr Q whose name still appears on the CBI's website in the criminal
company of Dawood Ibrahim, Prabhakaran and other fugitives for whose arrest
red-corner notices have been issued. If Dr Singh wants us to believe that
he didn't know what his own government's law officer was going to tell British
authorities in Mr Q's case, it means, in essence, that he is telling the people
of India: ''As the Prime Minister of the world's largest democracy, I do not
know what is going on in my government.''
This is not the first time that an external
power centre has devalued the office of the Prime Minister. Mr Q has been
helped twice in his escape acts-first to escape from our country's borders
and, this time around, to escape (well, almost) from the criminal case itself.
If Dr Singh has become the reluctant accomplice now, another Congress prime
minister, the late P V Narasimha Rao, had to play the same role equally reluctantly
in 1993. Those in the ex-PM's inner circle know wherefrom came instructions
to let Mr Q flee India just days before the CBI was readying itself to arrest
him. Rao's unwillingness to do more of 10 Janpath's bidding is indeed the
reason why he was so shabbily treated-both when he was alive and also after
his death.
Bofors is now less about corruption and more
about official cover-up. The amount (Rs 21 crore) that lay in Mr Q's frozen
account is peanuts these days for such well-connected individuals who operate
in the murky world of high finance. Far more tantalising for him was the real
possibility, after the UPA came to power, of getting discharged from the case
without even having to enter India and appear before Indian courts. But what
was the compulsion on G to help Mr Q's discharge in the Bofors case? If that
question is cracked, everything else is cracked.
From his hideout in Italy Mr Q has cockily
declared that he is ''proud'' of his ''friendship with the Gandhi family''.
In order to impress Congressmen and their allies in the UPA, he has also said
that ''only a party opposed to the Gandhis'' is trying to keep the Bofors
issue alive. How laughable! Is N Ram, whose brilliant reports in The Hindu
in the late 1980s still remain unsurpassed in Bofors investigation, a BJP
pen-pusher? He surely wasn't doing the BJP's bidding when he wrote about ''Sonia
Gandhi's falsification of the record on Bofors'' and ''the deep involvement
in the scandal of Gandhi family confidant and crony Ottavio Quattrocchi, wanted
by the CBI but allowed, through official collusion, to flee the country and
remain beyond the reach of Indian law.'' Nor was the late C R Irani, the legendary
editor of The Statesman, fronting for the BJP when he wrote in 1999: ''Quattrocchi,
the controversial Italian businessman, very close to Rajiv and Sonia Gandhi,
must be one of those dedicated souls who hold with a religious faith that
propositions contrary to demonstrable facts can acquire the garb of truth
if repeated often enough.''
And were M J Akbar and his colleague Seema
Mustafa cronies of the BJP because they published, in The Asian Age, in April
2004, a stunning interview with Sten Lindstrom, Sweden's principal investigating
officer in the Bofors case? Listen to what Lindstrom said: ''Truth has a nasty
habit of surfacing when we least expect it to. I remain convinced that (it)
will surface one day. I do not believe that day is far. The unravelling continues.
Quattrocchi, the Italian middleman who negotiated the political payoff through
A E Services, must be interrogated. Sonia Gandhi must be questioned. All else
is detail.'' His parting words: ''I know what I am saying.''
write to sudheenkulkarni@expressindia.com
