Bofors: Smoking Again

The ghost of Bofors payoff scam is back. After 25 years it has returned to haunt those who thought they had given it a decent burial. Though in terms of bribery amounts involved, it may be a mere mouse dropping when compared with present day 2G scam. But for the first time in the country's history, it brought to the fore the big bucks and murky dealings that go about in defence procurement.

For the benefit of post-Bofors generation, a quick recap. The union government in the mid-80s decided to buy 150-mm field guns for the Indian army. Various arms manufacturers around the world had expressed interest. Among them Swedish company AB Bofors was chosen, relegating other frontrunners such as Austrian and French manufacturers, for the purchase of 410 guns.

On April 16, 1987 a Swedish Radio broadcast claimed that AB Bofors had paid kickbacks to key Indian policy makers and top defence officials to secure the deal. The news came when Rajiv Gandhi government's honeymoon with the media and the masses was fading. The government went on denial mode.

Soon information started trickling in various newspapers about the bribes being paid, with The Hindu and Indian Express on the forefront. The word 'kickback' became part and parcel of the lexicon of the English newspaper reading Indian middle class.

The names of Rajiv Gandhi, Ottavio Quattrocchi, AB Bofors and its former chief Martin Ardbo, defence secretary SK Bhatnagar and AB Bofors agent Win Chadha figured among the main beneficiaries. Later on it emerged that Quattrocchi was the man who pocketed a major part of the kickbacks through a front organisation called AE Services.

But the long arm of law always developed butter fingers, when it came close to catching him. The last golden chance was in 2007, when Argentina arrested him based on Interpol alert. But CBI followed the lead with two left feet and came up with ridiculously lame excuses like it does not have Spanish translators to go through the Argentine court documents.

By 2009, the Indian Government even gave up the pretence of pursuing Quattrocchi and told Supreme Court about its decision to withdraw the case against him, as he could not be extradited.

While Congress reluctance to nab Quattrocchi was understandable, the non-Congress governments that came to power too, for inexplicable reasons, seemed groping in the dark. Some of them had come to power after stridently using Bofors as a poll plank. Thus the Indian public had resigned themselves to the fact that no matter which government is in power, the truth will never come out.

The recent disclosure by a retired Swedish police officer Sten Lindstrom in a media watch website The Hoot seems to have breathed life into the dead issue. The former police officer said the gun was first rate but procurement was murky. He cleared names of Amitabh Bachchan and even Rajiv Gandhi to some extent. He said the former prime minister was not directly involved in scam, but his government had carried out cover up. His also revealed that the Swedish government too was a willing partner in this game.

What really struck me in his disclosures was the tenuous relationship a whistle blower shares with a journalist. He seemed more impressed by Chitra Subramaniam-Duella than The Hindu, "I would have leaked the documents to you even if you had worked for any other newspaper," he says in the interview. He dismissively calls Hindu's role as that of a "medium of communication" and feels peeved that it carried the disclosures after a long time. Meanwhile, his name started doing rounds in Delhi as whistle blower and it caused him distress. Lucky, he was not staying in India, where whistle blowers become endangered once their identity gets revealed.

An even more striking feature is the timing of the interview on Hoot. It came close on heels of Columbia University listing N Ram for his Bofors expose in "50 great stories". Maybe the university wanted to fete its old student (Ram), but in the Hindu report too Chitra Subramaniam-Duella's name was conspicuously missing.

Interestingly Chitra Subramaniam had left Hindu in not so friendly circumstances and soon took sanyas from journalism. Hence, making a cameo appearance with a very revealing interview with the Bofors whistle blower assumes great significance. A whiff of professional acrimony is very much evident and N Ram seems to belittle her role in the expose, saying she was part of a larger team. Though it was quite evident that minus Chitra, the team would have been like FC Barcelona sans Lionel Messi.

Back in the 80s the expose in The Hindu did create a flutter, as the paper was never known for anti-establishment stand or investigative stories. Jawaharlal Nehru had once remarked that, “The Hindu always reminds me of an old maiden lady ...Very prim and proper, who is shocked if a naughty word is used in her presence. It is eminently the paper of the bourgeois, comfortably settled in life.” The Bofors disclosures was one of the few major deviations this newspaper (founded in 1878) took from its straight-laced "prim and proper" path.