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THE WEEKEND
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Ho hum, another Olympics, another breast-beating session at the lack of medals! So let us turn back to the sport at which Indians really excel--politics.
As you read this, I think Chandraswamy shall be back in the news. No, not for the Lakhubhai Pathak case alone, but for something that grew out of it, one of the major scandals of the Rajiv Gandhi era.
Pathak has testified that he paid US$ 100,000 in 1983. But the authorities paid no attention for four years. And therein hangs a tale.
In 1987, nobody was quite sure where Chandraswamy’s loyalties lay. The biggest issue of the day was Bofors. Chandraswamy went around boasting that he had evidence against Rajiv Gandhi.
He had, he claimed, met Martin Ardbo of Bofors. The Swede confessed that he had bribed Gandhi. And the conversation had been taped.
If true, this would have been devastating. But Chandraswamy’s veracity was open to question even in those days. In the end, only two men believed the story. One was Gandhi himself. (The other, oddly enough, was the normally sceptical Ram Nath Goenka of the Indian Express.)
Prime Minister Gandhi ordered the customs authorities to stripsearch Chandraswamy on his return. Predictably no tape was found.
Rajiv Gandhi wasn’t reassured. He decided to take preventive measures just in case such a recording existed. The best way, he decided, was to put Chandraswamy on the defensive.
Mohan Katre, then the CBI director, was given the job. Digging through the files, Katre came across the long-forgotten complaint by Lakhubhai Pathak. (In those days, the CBI still didn’t dare to frame someone from whole cloth!)
Katre, accompanied by Joint Director Gupta, flew to London for the details. Once he had them, charges were filed against Chandraswamy. What was more, he was remanded to judicial custody.
In a now-familiar device, Chandraswamy, pleaded ill-health, and got himself into a nursing home. At this point, his old friend Narasimha Rao came to the rescue. Rajiv Gandhi was persuaded that Chandraswamy’s talents could be useful for the Congress.
On the sixth day of the judicial remand, the magistrate went to the nursing home to announce that Chandraswamy was free. The godman now set about keeping his side of the bargain.
V.P. Singh was the spearhead of the Bofors movement. Chandraswamy decided to act. (None of Katre’s scruples for him!) The result was the St.Kitts forgery.
It is worth mentioning that it was Narasimha Rao’s external affairs ministry that supplied the nuts-and-bolts of the Chandraswamy plan. Rao--or his secretary--went so far as to tell Indian missions to look after Swamiji’s comforts.
In the subsequent furore, Lakhubhai Pathak was again conveniently ignored. Until, in the dying days of the Rao regime, a public interest litigation forced the authorities to act. And this time, Chandraswamy found himself in the fastness of Tihar jail, not a friendly nursing home. As a result he is ready to sing.
It is funny. Rao, Chandraswamy, and the rest of the clique spent five years trying to destroy any vestige of the Rajiv Gandhi era. Now they find themselves in trouble because of a case initiated at Gandhi’s insistence. And it all goes back to Bofors.