On Bofors I was not involved with the purchase of the Bofors guns as the deal was finalised in March 1986 before I came back to Delhi as Cabinet Secretary in August-September 1986. From then on, I had a vantage view when it came before the Cabinet or the Cabinet Committee on Political Affairs. It was being primarily dealt with in the Ministry of Defence and mostly in the Prime Minister’s Office. I dealt with it directly only from March 1989, when I became Principal Secretary to the Prime Minister, till I left service in December 1990. The genesis of the Bofors affair lies in the practice initiated by Indira Gandhi and further refined by her son Sanjay for collecting funds for the Congress party. No doubt the Congress party and other political parties in India have needed funds mostly to fight elections from 1947 when the country became independent. Till the middle of the 1960s, during the regime of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, collection of funds for the party was a more transparent business and business houses were also permitted to make open donations. Collection of funds for one’s party was then not a highly competitive and corrosive practice corrupting the whole social, economic and political fabric as happened later. Indira Gandhi decided that a far better way to collect funds for the party was through claiming cuts from foreign deals. Sanjay Gandhi perfected and refined this still further from 1972 onwards. When she came back to power in 1980, I was additional secretary in the Ministry of Home Affairs. My colleagues told me that in January 1980 itself Sanjay Gandhi called senior officers from certain concerned ministries for giving orders and making deals and clearly and firmly told them how they should be finalized. Trusted senior officers were posted to ministries such as the Defence Ministry and also to the Department of Defence Production. Coming back to the Bofors affair, V P Singh had resigned as Defence Minister on 12 April 1987 in connection with the HDW Submarine case. We were just recovering from this when the Bofors revelation exploded upon the scene from Sweden on 17 April. The newspapers, quoting Reuters, said the Swedish radio had broadcast that Bofors won the US$ 1.3 billion howitzer contract by paying bribes to senior Indian politicians and key defence officials through secret Swiss bank accounts. The Cabinet Committee on Political Affairs met that morning and issued an official statement calling the story ‘‘false, baseless and mischievous’’. We also asked our ambassador in Sweden to get from the broadcasting office the basis of the story. There was a debate in Parliament on 20 April wherein Opposition demanded a parliamentary probe which was rejected by the government. We clearly stated that the howitzer was chosen after careful evaluation and that it was government policy not to have any agent in defence contracts and this had been made clear to the competing firms. I had an uneasy feeling that the Prime Minister’s Office knew the names of the recipients and had communicated them to the Prime Minister. One could only surmise that the beneficiaries could be the Congress Party or a close relative or friend of the Prime Minister’s family. In August when the appointment of the JPC was to be discussed in Parliament, Rajiv Gandhi made a statement declaring that neither he nor any member of his family had received any consideration in the Bofors’ transactions. All of us were impressed by his suo moto statement that clearly reflected not only his honesty and integrity but also the conviction that his integrity was beyond doubt and his image was unnecessarily being tarnished. To conclude, I can say without any hesitation that neither Rajiv Gandhi nor any member of his family received any amount in the Bofors case. Though his personal integrity was beyond doubt, there was strong circumstantial evidence that he knew the names of the recipients but was reluctant to expose them, maybe because they were of the Congress party or close relations or friends of the family. The question then arises whether he knew the names before the contract was finalised or came to know afterwards. I have no doubt at all that it was the latter as he was too decent a person to be dishonest. One can only surmise what might have happened. When he took over as Prime Minister in late 1984, he had decided to cleanse politics and especially the Congress party of powerbrokers and corruption. His decision not to have agents in any deal or contract was one of the major measures in this regard. But his political inexperience and inadequate knowledge of how governmental and bureaucratic machinery works must have nullified his intentions. The political machine was not at all happy with his new policy and even unhappier when he tried to depend more on young professionals from outside. In the case of Bofors too, politicians and even some officials must have disregarded Rajiv Gandhi’s directions and quietly continued to have their own way. Further, when he came to know the names of the recipients of the commission, the same politicians and others must have advised him not to bother as they had managed to sail through such bad patches comfortably in the past when his mother and brother were at the helm of affairs. To that extent these aides and advisers failed him and in the process inflicted huge damage not only on him but also on the political system. On V P Singh V P Singh became prime minister after the general elections in December 1989 and resigned in November 1990 when he could not win a vote of confidence in Parliament. His was a complex personality. He was an introvert and did not show his emotions or feelings. He was very fond of reading and was a poet and also a painter in his own right. He had really wanted to become a scientist and had been a student of Fergusson College in Poona. His wife, Sitadevi, told me that their time in Poona had been their best years. Singh was very considerate but at the same time demanding and hardworking. Files came back from him promptly with precise and clear orders. He wrote good English and Hindi, and also wrote his own speeches for TV. Unfortunately he did not come across very well in his TV appearances and the rather high cap that he wore made him look a bit dull. He had his own personal office at his residence 5 Race Course Road that I visited often, unlike Rajiv Gandhi who never allowed any official to visit his private residence. Besides being an introvert, he seemed detached and even cold in personal relationships which perhaps explains why there are not many loyal colleagues and supporters around him. Of course, there were Vinod Pande and Bhure Lal but not many others in the civil service, and of his political colleagues only Sompal and Bhartiya were close to him. In short, he was not good at inspiring personal loyalty, unlike Rajiv Gandhi. He had a peculiar personality trait. He was in the habit of adopting causes with missionary zeal some times bordering on mania, and one such cause was his drive to cleanse political life. He could have received widespread support for this if only personal vendetta and ambition were not mixed with it. His personal loyalty to the Gandhi family was not in doubt but he picked on Rajiv Gandhi as a target and his campaign against him appeared like a personal vendetta. He might not have personally approved, but the vulgar slogans shouted at Rajiv Gandhi regarding the Bofors gun during the election campaign of 1989 were in bad taste. The same can be said about his campaign against tax evaders and tax defaulters. We were aghast when the venerable and old industrialist S.L. Kirloskar was arrested. Singh might not have ordered this, but it was the result of his indiscriminate campaign and zeal to teach tax evaders a lesson. He was definitely a shrewd politician and at times a crafty one. The campaign targeting Rajiv Gandhi for corruption was a master strategy for damaging Congress credibility. Again, his nomination as Prime Minister by Devi Lal was a piece of political skulduggery by itself and Chandrashekhar was rightly outraged. His electoral alliance with the BJP for seat adjustment was another politically calculated strategy even though he never shared any platform with them in the election campaign. Unfortunately, the Janata Dal did not do too well in the south and BJP’s support was necessary from outside to form the government. He did not succeed in splitting the Congress party either as he had hoped. Again, when he noticed the BJP’s strategy for Ram Mandir at Ayodhya, he started playing the Mandal card for political gains. But he only created a holocaust that consumed him. When by October 1990 he knew that the end was coming and his defeat in Parliament was inevitable, his political craftiness surfaced. He made the best of a bad bargain and gave to his exit the appearance of a principled stand that he was not afraid of losing even power and authority for this. On Chandrashekhar It was at Male (SAARC Summit 1990) that I saw Chandrashekhar from close quarters as Prime Minister and as a private person. He was extremely considerate and courteous to all of us, and at the hotel he personally enquired whether we were comfortable. Everyone at the SAARC meeting was very curious about the new Prime Minister of India, as he was totally different from Rajiv Gandhi who most of them had known. He impressed all of them by his sincerity and openness and seemed not to have any hang-ups or any inflated ideas about India and his mission. He can be faulted for only one incident. At the end of the conference when the heads of government and state were making their speeches, Chandrashekhar started in English but suddenly switched to Hindi. I was startled and asked Muchkund Dubey and also Vidya Charan Shukla if he had been advised to speak in Hindi. The reaction of both was sheepish and I felt that he had either been so advised, or not told not to do so when he must have mentioned that he was more at home in Hindi. This created a slight awkwardness as some of the delegates, especially from Pakistan and Sri Lanka, asked sarcastically if India, which they always called the big brother, expected all of them to know Hindi. English is the official language for SAARC and there is no facility of simultaneous translation of other languages. The Nepali Prime Minister who spoke after Chandrashekhar commented that he would also like to speak in Nepali but as it was not understood by many he would speak in English. When the Prime Minister heard of this later, he did not react too pleasantly. I have always wondered why the Prime Minister asked me to leave but without accepting my resignation. When he had returned my resignation without signing it he had asked me to continue till my tenure was over on 31 January. When did he then decide otherwise? One possibility is that from the very beginning he did not want me to continue with him but gave me the opposite impression and took me for a ride. But as he had treated me with all consideration and courtesy, if not affection, I do not think this is correct. Another interpretation is that he wanted me to continue but some of his colleagues persuaded him to terminate my services. I think three of his closest colleagues must have prejudiced him against me. Dr Subramaniam Swamy never liked me because I put him in his place and he realised that he could not push me around. So also Kamal Morarka who wanted to dominate the PMO which I did not allow him to do. I made it clear that the principal secretary is the head of the PMO and submits files only to the Prime Minister and he could not ask for any files unless specifically desired by the Prime Minister. Yashwant Sinha too influenced him to some extent. Some close aides of Rajiv Gandhi might also have given him the impression that I did not want to continue. I also think that Chandrashekhar was rather hurt when I put in my resignation as it implied that I did not think his government would last long. He could not understand why I should ask to be relieved of such an important and prestigious position that civil servants try so hard to achieve. He either failed to understand or refused to understand that my resignation was no reflection on him but that that was the convention. I think he might not have appreciated this position. At a personal level Chandrashekhar is a warm and affectionate person and must be a good friend because he has such a wide circle of friends and admirers, which is remarkable for a politician who has been in office and in power so late in life and that too for a very short period. Normally a politician in power is surrounded by all sorts of people who claim to be his friends and admirers but conveniently forget him when he is no longer in power. In his case, thanks to his personality, he has retained the friendship of a vast circle. However, in his ambition to become Prime Minister he turned into a typical Indian politician. This made his prime ministership a failure, but that may also be because he headed a freak government which was, however, his own creation. By arrangement with HarperCollins India
