It has been a recurring theme in the Bofors case. The CBI has somehow always managed to be just one step away from zeroing in on the accused. For instance, by the time the CBI had gotten around to impounding Ottavio Quattrocchi’s passport, the Italian businessmen had just fled the country. Now that the Supreme Court has ordered that the government ensure Quattrocchi’s bank account in London is re-frozen, no doubt a CBI team will arrive in London only to discover that the Rs 23 crore in that account has just been spirted away. Each time we assume we have heard the last of Bofors, like Banquo’s ghost it re-appears. The rights and wrongs of the case are lost on a new generation. Many of today’s young were born after the Swedish radio first broke the story, way back in April 1987. After all, how long can you sustain interest in a 20-year-old soap opera with so many twists and turns? With the matter dragging on endlessly, some of the indignation over the bribe taking has eroded. One wholly irrelevant defence put forward is that Kargil established that the Bofors gun was, at any rate, first class. Others deflect the issue claiming the total amount of Rs 64 crore was chicken feed by today’s standards of corruption. Bofors has spawned a school of specialists who can explain every convoluted legal mechanism involving FIRs, chargesheets, letter rogatories, red corner notices, freezing of bank accounts, court cases, appeals, et al. The man on the street is by now bored stiff with Bofors. The only question he wants answered is why — after so many years and seemingly clinching evidence in the form of documents — the guilty have not been brought to book in India. Particularly since there were also non-Congress governments in power during this period. Ironically, the legal systems of Sweden, Switzerland and the UK, as well as Interpol, have been more convinced by the evidence on Bofors than Indian judges. Partisanship on Bofors is so pronounced that who the good guys are and who, the bad, is entirely dependent on which side your sympathies lie. And, over time, even some of the key players such as V.P. Singh and Ram Jethmalani have done a volte-face without a blush. A close look at the Bofors investigations will reveal that our much vaunted CBI has taken very little initiative in actual sleuthing. It has left the detective work to journalists like Chitra Subramaniam, who have been helped by Swedish and Swiss authorities in procuring the incriminating documents. The CBI has acted essentially as a post office; one which moved a little faster when a non-Congress government was in power and dragged its feet when a Congress or a Congress-supported government was in charge. Indian officials, who have been brought up under the colonial method of file pushing, have perfected the art of procrastination. Once a file has been opened, it is difficult to close it. Its duplicates will pop up in other departments. Our babudom prefers the route of negation by prolonging a matter indefinitely, wearing down the opposition, rather than closing the file abruptly and raising questions. Officials believe in guarding their own backsides, since you never know which side will be back in power. If the CBI was slow, the court procedure was still more dilatory. After the special judge in the lower courts upheld the charges made out by the CBI, the Delhi High Court threw up a series of technical objections. The judge first quashed the FIR and the investigations on the basis of a PIL. A second time he quashed the investigations and the letter rogatory on the basis of a petition by Win Chadha. A third time he demanded to know why the CVC had not been taken into confidence by the CBI before filing charges. The case shuttled back and forth between the Delhi High Court and the Supreme Court, with the latter overruling the former each time. Finally, in May 2005, the judge dismissed the case of cheating against the Hindujas on the ground that the documents it had relied on from Sweden were photocopies and not originals. The CBI prepared the ground to challenge the ruling in the Supreme Court pointing out that the Swedish Prosecutors Office had acknowledged the authenticity of the documents and then Swedish Special Prosecutor Lars Ringberg was willing to testify. But by then the UPA government was in power and did not feel it was necessary to go in appeal. In dealing with the case, whether for making it move backwards or forwards, most of the seasoned hands who dealt with Bofors have worked on the principle that the best results are achieved through discretion and slow and measured moves. But Law Minister H.R. Bhardwaj broke the cardinal rule. Instead of sitting it out till the CBI changed its mind on unfreezing Quattrocchi’s account — surely time and a few crucial transfers would have done the trick —Bhardwaj blatantly disregarded the CBI’s opinion and impulsively dispatched Additional Solicitor General B. Datta to London. Possibly Bhardwaj’s haste was induced by the fact that he had to prove his loyalty urgently since his Rajya Sabha term expired in March. He ignored the fact that the Hindujas’ exoneration by the court had no bearing on Quattrocchi’s case and that, as far as India is concerned, the Italian businessman continues to be a fugitive from the law. Thanks to his impulsiveness, Bhardwaj has been caught on the back foot, as was another loyalist — Madhavsinh Solanki — before him, who similarly attracted undue attention by delivering a letter to a Swiss judge. If Bofors has taught us one thing it is that fools rush in where wise men tread slowly and with circumspection. Bhardwaj may well be made the scapegoat since the government has to restore its shattered credibility. But few will swallow the line that the law minister and the personnel minister acted on their own. Some might argue that the law is an ass. Rather, it is the naive assumption that the law is the same for all of us. Those in high places know how to manipulate the system in their favour, even if in this case it has taken two decades to complete the task.
