Who’s afraid of Sonia Gandhi in Modi sarkar?

Last week, the Ministry of Information & Broadcasting issued a sharply-worded lengthy press note on the action taken since May 2014 to unravel the AgustaWestland bribery scandal and bring the middleman who brokered the deal as well as bribe-takers to book. The unusually detailed note was prompted in large measure by senior leaders of the Congress demanding an explanation from the NDA Government for a foul deed that was committed when the UPA was in power.

The details of the scandal and subsequent revelations of how money changed hands are too well-known to merit repetition. Like any other case of bribery involving the purchase of military hardware, in this instance too circuitous methods were used to canalise paybacks to beneficiaries in the political, bureaucratic and defence establishments of Lutyens’s Delhi.

What we know for sure is that the UPA Government agreed to pay ₹3546 crore for 12 AgustaWestland helicopters. Of that ₹3546 crore, nearly 10 per cent, or ₹360 crore, was paid back to certain individuals, powerful enough to have facilitated the deal, by way of bribes. There can be no other word for that, unless we settle for ‘kickbacks’, a word much used by newspapers in the 1980s and 1990s when the popular imagination was seized by the Bofors bribery scandal. We will come to that in a while.

We also know, courtesy the judgement of an Italian appeals court, that some very powerful people were the “driving force” behind the decision to purchase AgustaWestland helicopters that were primarily meant to ferry “VVIPs”, which is a code for the President, the Prime Minister and other top Ministers. Why were so many helicopters needed for this purpose when a couple would have sufficed is a mystery that remains untouched, unresolved, untalked about?

But let not such mundane details distract us. What is important to note is that technical requirements were tailored in a manner that AgustaWestland could qualify as a supplier. A key clause in such procurements, that the Government will sign purchase agreements only with ‘Original Equipment Manufacturers’, was waived to bring the deal to fruition. Field trials, to have been conducted in Indian locations, were done at AgustaWestland’s facilities in Italy.

These are decisions that are taken only on the basis of political interventions. And such interventions matter only if they are made by politicians at the top of Delhi’s power pyramid. So it can be safely surmised that there was indeed a “driving force” that drove the AgustaWestland deal. Whether that “driving force” was a certain ‘Signora Gandhi’, as claimed by the Italian court, is something best left to Indian investigators to establish.

For the record, Congress president Sonia Gandhi, who was chairperson of the UPA and who, using the cover of the National Advisory Council, ran the Government notionally headed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh with an iron fist, has denied any role in the entire affair. She has let it be known, for good measure, not once but twice, that she’s not afraid. The last time we heard her say that was when the courts took cognisance of allegations of National Herald properties being misappropriated by Sonia Gandhi and her son, Rahul.

The brazen attempt by the Congress’s leaders to deflect attention from the usual suspects, the Dynasty and its doorkeepers, revives memories of 1987. Which brings me to the Bofors bribery scandal. The Howitzer field guns offered by the Swedish arms manufacturer Bofors were no doubt the best in their class. When Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi agreed to purchase 410 of these guns for $285 million in 1986, eyebrows were raised and suggestions made of price-padding.

But any defence deal fetches similar allegations by politicians and, more so, a certain class of journalists who tout their expertise on military affairs. The competitor who loses out spends lavishly to run down the bid-winner; the bid-winner spends even more lavishly in countering the allegations. This would explain why AgustaWestland and its parent company Finmeccanica spent ₹45 crore to scotch inimical references to the helicopter deal.

I was at the newsdesk of The Telegraph when Swedish Radio broke the story about how Bofors had bribed the political leadership in Sweden and India to secure the deal. That was in April 1987. Predictably, major outrage followed. Rajiv Gandhi retorted that neither he nor his family had taken any money. The bribery amounted to ₹65 crore, loose change by today’s gold standards of corruption and bribery in high places

That brazen denial and defiance did not go down well. Nor did the blacklisting of Bofors cut any ice with the masses. The dominant slogan of the 1989 election was “Gali, gali mein shor hai, Rajeev Gandhi chor hai“. VP Singh, who had walked out of the Congress and Rajiv Gandhi’s Government, went from kasba to kasba, waving a Casio digital diary (quite an awe-inspiring device those days), claiming he had the number of the Swiss bank account in which the Bofors payola had been parked and promising to make it public if voted to power.

History tells us VP Singh was voted to power but is remembered for implementing the Mandal Commission report on OBC quota, not for disclosing the Swiss bank account number and bringing those guilty of accepting bribes from Bofors to justice. The CBI investigation dragged on; Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated (as was the Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme), the Congress returned to power in 1991, and one fine day, or rather dark night, Ottavio Quattrochhi, an Italian wheeler-dealer known for his proximity to Sonia Gandhi, fled from India. By then he had been identified as the bribe-taker.

To cut a long story short, Red Corner notices were issued for Quattrochhi and his wife, the CBI and the courts played an elaborate game of ducks and drakes, Atal Bihari Vajpayee came to hold the Prime Minister’s office as the head of the first NDA Government, the Bofors investigation became a dumb charade, the Congress returned to power as the leading party in the UPA, and the ghost of Bofors was laid to rest.

The two bank accounts of Quattrochi in London where bulk of the Bofors payoff had been parked and which had been frozen, were ‘defreezed’ at the request of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s Government. The money was wired out within minutes before India got to learn of what had happened. Manmohan Singh was unfazed. He went on to say that the entire investigation and prosecution “was an embarrassment”.

So why does the Bofors bribery case become relevant today? It’s as relevant as the National Herald scandal or the land scams in Rajasthan and Haryana: When it comes to the Nehru Dynasty, everybody backs off from a proverbial fight to the finish. Politicians otherwise hostile to the Congress and especially its first family rage and rant in Parliament, threaten disclosure and punishment at election rallies, but do next to nothing when they are given the mandate to out and oust the obvious beneficiaries. Those who were once willing to strike become strangely afraid to wound.

That takes me back to where I began: the Government’s press note giving an account of all that has been done to investigate the AgustaWestland scandal and prosecute the beneficiaries of ₹360 crore in kickbacks after Narendra Modi became Prime Minister. A close scrutiny of the seemingly aggressive note will tell you it’s a defensive litany of ‘we did a lot but so far it has yielded little result; we plan to do a lot more, please bear with us’.

Politics is less about reality and more about perception. In the popular perception while Modi and his team may have signalled the end of venality in the guise of governance, they have done nothing to punish the guilty men and women of the UPA’s tainted decade. True, procedures and processes have their own momentum and neither can be accelerated beyond a point, but an India impatient to see the corrupt punished has neither the time nor the inclination to read the small print.

That exuberant impatience which made the most significant contribution to Modi’s spectacular victory in the summer of 2014 is, exactly two years on, fast turning into despondency and doubt. The 2G cases are in a limbo, prosecution in the coal scam is far away from a closure, the beneficiaries of the Aircel-Maxis deal remain un-prosecuted, and the promise to get cracking on black money remains unfulfilled, at least in perception if not in reality. As for Sonia Gandhi’s son-in-law Robert Vadra’s dubious land deals, neither the Government of Haryana nor that of Rajasthan has cared to dig for facts.

The Government’s antipathy towards its core support base among the middle-classes has left many asking, ‘Quo vadis, Modi sarkar?’ More worrisomely for Modi sarkar, many of its diehard supporters have begun to flirt with indifference even as charlatans wave the flag. Here is a poll I conducted on Twitter last week which attracted 3,851 respondents:

After initial bluster, will the AgustaWestland copter scandal go the way of the Bofors field-gun scandal?
Yes.       65%
No.        24%
DK/CS   11%

These findings are no small indictment of a Government that could do no wrong for the better part of the last two years.