On the first day of the 13th Lok Sabha in October 1999, the freshly-minted NDA government filed its chargesheet in the Bofors case naming the dead Rajiv Gandhi as an accused. On the last day of the 13th Lok Sabha, the Delhi high court threw out the case against Rajiv Gandhi, saying 16 years of investigation had turned up not a “scintilla of evidence” against the dead man. Because, as an NDA minister flaunted on his masthead when he was editor of this newspaper, the truth involves us all. Sadly for Arun Shourie, it has.Cocking his snook at the judgement, the other Arun, minister of law and justice Jaitley, retorts that the case against Ottavio Quattrocchi goes on and since Quattrocchi is an Italian and Rajiv Gandhi married an Italian, it follows that whatever money there is jumping from one Quattrocchi account to another, it must be Rajiv Gandhi’s. Balderdash. The case also goes on against the Hindujas, Britons of Indian (or, at any rate, Sindhi) origin, like Lal Krishna Advani. For decades, the Hindujas have been great friends of Atal Bihari Vajpayee. Does that mean whatever money there is jumping from one Hinduja account to another is Vajpayee’s, or Advani’s? Yes, as expatriates living in the same city, the Quattrocchis and Sonia Gandhi did know each other. Just as Vajpayee and Advani, as visiting expatriates, were entertained by the Hindujas when they were in London. What does any of this add up to in regard to arms dealers, middle-men, winding-up charges and Bofors? Nothing. Nothing at all.What needs to be investigated is who was the ‘N’ in the Martin Ardbo diaries — and why did neither editor Arun nor persecutor Arun care to check on whether the AE Services-Bofors shenanigan was not a sting operation mounted (perhaps by yet another Arun) to mulct the disingenuous Ardbo (who knew India so little, he could not even spell the most famous name in India, Nehru). They could have done no better than begin with what their own ace reporter, Chitra Subramaniam, was filing from Geneva. As Chitra herself has revealed, the propagandists at the India end deliberately suppressed and refused to print the evidence she was turning up against a leading political ally of theirs, whose name begins with ‘N’ — and has never been incorrectly spelt. Well, high standards of journalism can hardly be expected from a scribe-turned-minister who excoriates the Ambanis when in his editorial chair, then praises them to high heaven when transmorgified into a minister.Whatever any fair or objective observer’s assessment of the involvement of Rajiv Gandhi in the Bofors pay-offs while he was prime minister, surely if the truth involved us all, re-assessemnt was called for when Rajiv Gandhi, in his first intervention in Parliament as leader of the opposition, less than a month after he demitted office, demanded that every single piece of paper relating to the Bofors deal be placed on the table of the House. Why would a guilty ex-prime minister want the whole world to know what crookedness he had been up to as PM? Unless, of course, he had been up to no crookedness at all and, therefore, knew that the files would not turn up a ‘‘scintilla of evidence’’ against him?Instead, Arun Jaitley, then beginning his climb up the greasy pole to the eminence he has now achieved, started shuttling between Stockholm and Delhi, ferreting out all he could as the duly anointed boss of the prosecution team. He had access to every single piece of paper that V.P. Singh was refusing, despite his commitment on the floor, to table in the House. Instead of confirming the truth available in the papers that no public servant, including the former PM, had been paid a khota paisa for awarding the howitzer contract to the best and cheapest manufacturer (as proved at Kargil), the additional solicitor general disgraced the nation carrying letters rogatory that were pasted over with bits of hurriedly typed paper and even amended in pencil. The Keystone Cops he carried with him became the laughing stock in Geneva with their pronunciation of Credit Suisse as Credit Suzy. But, comicality apart, none of the one Arun’s exertions nor the other Arun’s fulminations could help V.P. Singh fulfill his electoral promise of revealing within a fortnight of becoming PM the account numbers (which he claimed to be carrying in his pocket!) into which Rajiv Gandhi’s bribes had been paid.Political advancement being, of course, more important to the BJP than seeking the truth, they got a pusillanimous P.V. Narasimha Rao (who was then, in early 1992, dependent for survival on their collaborative support) to drop external affairs minister Madhavsinh Solanki for transmitting a lawyer’s note to his Swiss counterpart. That finished poor Solanki’s political career as thoroughly as Arun Shourie’s railings against another court-acquitted innocent, A.R. Antulay, had destroyed Antulay. But, boy, did it make the political careers of the two Aruns! As ministers of the government, they have had five long years to examine every scrap of paper in the Bofors files, talk to as many Swiss and Swedish authorities as their heart’s desire (and even chat up that weird former CBI director who, as Khushwant Singh has revealed, walks around Lodhi Gardens listening for hours on his Walkman to recordings of his own speeches). Yet, as the Delhi high court has observed, although they have received the fullest possible cooperation from the Swiss government and banking circles, they have not been able to turn up a ‘‘scintilla of evidence’’ against a man who is not even here to defend himself.If Arun Shourie can apologise to the Ambanis for hounding them, surely the least he can offer is as abject a mea culpa to the nation for his hounding of Rajiv Gandhi? Of course, the honourable minister will do no such honourable thing. And neither will the other Arun. So, before Vajpayee is consigned to history, as surely he will be in the coming elections, perhaps it is time he got himself a more capable lawyer than the one Arun and a more truthful propagandist than the other Arun. Because the truth involves us all!
