& çâÌæÚUæð´ ·¤è ¥ôÚU Îð¹Ùæ ÁæÚUè ÚU¹ð´ ¥ÍæüÌ ¥ÂÙð ÜÿØ ÂÚU ŠØæÙ ÚU¹ð´Ð ãæÚU Ù ×æÙð´, €UØô´ç·¤ ·¤æ× ·¤ÚUÙð âð ¥æÂ·¤ô ©gðàØ ·¤è Âýæç# ãôÌè ãñ ¥õÚU ÁèßÙ ·¤æ ¹æÜèÂÙ ÎêÚU ãôÌæ ãñÐ ÖÜð ãè ÁèßÙ ×ð´ ç·¤ÌÙè Öè ·¤çÆÙæ§ü €UØô´ Ù ¥æ°, çÁ™ææâæ ¥õÚU ©ˆâæã ÕÙæ° ÚU¹ð´Ð ŠØæÙ ÚU¹ð´, ÜÿØ ã×ðàææ ¥æÂ·Ô¤ Âæâ ãôÌð ãñ´ çÁ‹ãð´ ÂæÙð ·Ô¤ çÜ° ÂýØæâ ¥æÂ ·¤Öè Öè àæéM¤ ·¤ÚU â·¤Ìð ãñ´Ð

The gun that misfired

KULDIP NAYAR writes from New Delhi
***Unfortunately, corruption has ceased to be news in India. It is one of those things which India cannot live with but knows no way to live without. These past few years of the Vajpayee government have been periods of scams and scandals…Yet, if the nation has to retrieve the values, a clean society is a must. There have to be exposures and loud public protests. The attitude of resignation does not help. A people's protest needs to be built.***
THERE was practically no discussion on Bofors gun kickbacks in the 13th Lok Sabha which has been dissolved for early elections. Once Rajiv Gandhi died -- the main target -- the nonCongress parties lost interest in the scam. Whether he was involved or not had continued to be at the back of people's mind, even after his name was dropped from the charge sheet. By pronouncing that there was no evidence against him for having accepted money, the Delhi High Court has ended the debate in one way. But it has taken 16 long years.
Rajiv Gandhi's widow and Congress president, Sonia Gandhi, is justified in her complaint that her family, including the one in Italy, faced a campaign of vilification for years. But she is ill advised to make it a poll issue. The first set of advertisements the Congress has released suggests that Rajiv Gandhi's exoneration may be the party's plank at the polls. The advertisement displaying Rajiv Gandhi's picture is captioned: Let those who inflicted intolerable mental agony on his family hang their heads in shame. Who are they? Sonia Gandhi does not have to look far. Most of them are the Congress allies in the coming
elections. How does the party serve its interest by telling Rashtriya Janata Dal president Laloo Yadav, Samajwadi Party chief Mulayam Singh, Lok Janshakti leader Ram Vilas Paswan or DMK chief M Karunanidhi to "hang their heads in shame?"
V. P. Singh, Sonia Gandhi's strong supporter, won around 90 seats in the 1989 Lok Sabha polls by making Bofors synonymous with corruption. I
recall travelling through Rajasthan during the polls. The Congress lost all the 26 Lok Sabha seats in the state. V.P Singh has said in a TV interview that he felt relieved after Rajiv Gandhi's exoneration. This is the least he could have said because he was the first to drag Rajiv Gandhi through the mud.
The BJP and its partners in the NDA have been no less savage on Rajiv Gandhi's "involvement." Their decision to join issue with the Congress, as the statement by party president Venkaiah Naidu indicates, may be counterproductive. They have no argument left to drive home after the exoneration. Yet, the Congress itself should realise that once it resurrects Rajiv Gandhi, many skeletons may tumble out from nowhere. Some officials who have disclosed the details about the
scandal have not given a clean chit to Rajiv Gandhi. The feelgood factor in the party should stay at that level, not beyond.
That there was no evidence against Rajiv Gandhi was known for a long time. For different reasons, the successive governments prolonged the case: the non-Congress ones because they were keen to get at Rajiv Gandhi and the Narasimha Rao government because it wanted to make sure
that nothing untoward came out against Rajiv Gandhi.
Soon after I joined parliament in 1997, I wrote to Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee over the inordinate delay in knowing the name of recipients when the fact of kickbacks had been established. His reply was that "the matter is receiving due attention and all necessary steps will be taken to see the matter to its logical end." It was a typically bureaucratic reply.
What I wanted to know was whether the NDA's promise to take action in the Bofors case "within one month" held good. He denied that. He said: "While the importance of the matter cannot be overemphasised, I may point that the national agenda for governance which guided principles and policies of the government does not include any such specific time frame." Subsequently, in an
interview, he told me that the inquiry was going on but Rajiv Gandhi's name was not there. The evidence collected was weak for a court case. Vajpayee has proved to be correct. However, the reply at that time surprised me because the general impression was that the centre had dragged its feet purposely. The BJP was particularly suspect because its leaders were close to a foreign-based business house,
said to be one of the recipients of kickbacks. Even though all the noise about the case has more or less ended in a whimper, political parties have hurt themselves in the process. The much-vaunted Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), however, comes out the worst. True, the CBI goes in appeal before the Supreme Court. Still its sterile effort over such a long period is black mark against it.
Understandably, the Delhi High Court has been savage in its remark: "Sixteen long years of investigation by the premier agency of the country could not unearth a scintilla of evidence against them (Rajiv Gandhi and late Defence Secretary S K Bhatnagar) for having accepted bribe/illegal gratification in awarding the contact in favour of Bofors."
How many officials visited how many countries and for
how long -- if all that were translated into money, it would run into crores of rupees. Why the agency failed to locate the recipients is a matter for some high-power inquiry. Was the failure due to political reasons? Why was Quattrochi, an Italian who supposedly received part of the kickbacks, allowed to leave India?
One should, however, admit that there was a lot of political interference in what the CBI
was doing. The inquiry was diluted in 1992, two years after the case was registered, when K Madhavan and M.D. Sharma, the two officers pursuing the case doggedly were transferred without any explanation. One CBI top brass said at that time that he had his doubts about the outcome "in the face of the transfers of the two officers and repeated message from political bosses to hush up everything."
The lack of evidence -- the point underlined in the judgement -- was also the reason why the hawala case against Home Minister L.K. Advani and a few others collapsed in a Delhi court. The names entered in the diary seized required some corroboration. The CBI failed to provide one. In fact, the Supreme Court took the agency to task for not having moved against the recipients of
hawala bounty on the basis of disproportionate wealth if the other evidence was not forthcoming.
The failure of the CBI, as is apparent from the Bofors scandal and the hawala case, does not mean that it is the end of the matter. The government has to meet the demand for justice. Had the working of the agency been transparent, things wouldn't have come to such a pass. The Shah Commission, which went into the misdeeds of the emergency (1975-77), had suggested openness in the working of the CBI. But no government has even considered the proposal. Unfortunately, corruption has ceased to be news in India. It is one of those things which India cannot live with but knows no way to live without. These past few years of the Vajpayee government have been periods of scams and scandals: political chicanery, diary entries and defence deal kickbacks. Leaving aside two or three state chief ministers, the rest had their fingers in the till.
Yet, if the nation has to retrieve the values, a clean society is a must. There have to be exposures and loud public protests. The attitude of resignation does not help. A people's protest needs to be built, not by political parties because of their own involvement, but by those who are outside the system and still enjoy credibility.
Kuldip Nayar is an eminent Indian columnist.