The politician in Sonia Gandhi is now out in the open. After playing the perfect widow at Sriperumbudur, she has thrown the gauntlet at all her detractors on the Bofors issue at Bangalore. She knows only too well that nothing extraordinary is expected on the Bofors front until at least the elections are over. She can thus afford to be on the offensive in the smug belief that offence is the best form of defence.Little else can explain her confidence in challenging the government to come out with the whole truth on the Bofors gun deal. It is true that the six governments that followed Rajiv Gandhi's have failed to unravel the truth. This, despite the fact that in the 1989 election, V.P. Singh had boasted that within a week of his party coming to power, the names of the bribe-takers would be announced. But his performance on that score, as also that of his successors, was far from edifying. Even so, Sonia Gandhi is only partially right when she refers to the large number of governments led by non-Congress parties that failed. She conveniently forgets that even during the interregnum between her husband's assassination and now, the Congress had the longest tenure in office either as the party that governed or the one that provided support to the government. Thus hers is as much an indictment of the Congress as it is of the Opposition parties.Allowance must also be made for the fact that even as efforts were on to unravel the mystery, powerful forces were at work to frustrate such attempts, presumably at her behest. There was the classic case of a foreign minister carrying messages which asked the Swedish authorities to go slow on Bofors.Besides, the slush money recipients have covered their tracks so well that it was no easy task to unravel the truth. Yet, it cannot be said that there has been no progress in the investigation. And, unfortunately for Sonia Gandhi, the details available about the transactions do not show either the family or the Congress, whose fortunes she wants to resuscitate, in good light. Now that it has been established conclusively that money did change hands before the gun deal was struck, to state this is to state the obvious. Seen in this context, Rajiv Gandhi's culpability is beyond doubt. But more than that, it is one name - that of Ottavio Quattrocchi - that should really bother Sonia Gandhi.The Bofors papers in the CBI's possession clearly mention the Italian national as one of the figures who played a major part in striking the deal. What is yet to be uncovered is the name of the person on whose behalf he had taken the money and to whom the money finally went. Ordinarily, Quattrocchi's name should not have figured at all as he had no locus standi in the deal since his area of business was different. Yet he found himself calling the shots in clinching the deal. Obviously, what helped him was his connections with the family whose reputation Sonia Gandhi is now keen to protect. Small wonder then that, instead of having him detained for interrogation, her own party's government allowed him to flee the country. Seen against this backdrop, Sonia Gandhi's challenge cannot but be seen as the challenge of a smart politician. It is for the new government to call her bluff by taking the investigation to its logical conclusion.
