Indian bureaucrats 'tutored' Bofors officials 'how to absolve Rajiv Gandhi' in 1987: Book

New Delhi: Senior Indian bureaucrats had "tutored" Bofors officials in a "secret meeting" in 1987 on "how to absolve then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi of all blame" in the infamous bribery scandal, according to an upcoming book by investigative journalist Chitra Subramaniam.

The scandal had rocked the then Congress government nearly four decades ago.

Subramaniam's claims are based on an agreed-upon summary of a secret meeting between "Bofors' top dogs and India's top bureaucrats" provided to her by a source, Sten Lindström, aka 'Sting' in the book, the Swedish head of police who was conducting the Bofors investigations in his country.

The Bofors scam pertains to allegations of a Rs 64-crore bribe in a Rs 1,437-crore deal with Swedish firm Bofors in the 1980s during the then Congress government for the supply of 400 155mm field Howitzers, which played a significant role in India’s victory during the Kargil war. The case was closed in 2011.

The journalist, who covered the case from Europe soon after Swedish Radio broke the story of alleged bribery in Bofors' Howitzers deal with India on April 16, 1987, has chronicled her investigation in a 320-page book titled Boforsgate, published by Juggernaut.

On August 22, 1989, Sting provided the journalist with a tranche of documents in Stockholm, which also contained a 15-page "agreed-upon summary" of meetings between Bofors and Indian officials, which "laid the basis of an eventual cover-up." "It was a 15-page agreed-upon summary of how to hide corruption, how to deal with my investigations as I made progress and, above all, how to absolve PM Rajiv Gandhi of all blame. These discussions were held in the Ministry of Defence on 15, 16, and 17 September 1987 (exactly five months after the Radio's revelations)," the book to be released on March 17 mentioned.

Calling these secret meetings taking place in the shadow of "crime and death", Subramaniam said the Bofors team was made to stay at a five-star hotel in a high-security zone on Sardar Patel Marg with their rooms kept "off limits to all".

Per Ove Morberg and Lars Gohlin led the Bofors delegation, while the Indian team comprised stalwarts like SK Bhatnagar, PK Kartha, Gopi Arora, and NN Vohra, who were assisted by then Joint Secretary, Defence Ministry K Banerji, Subramaniam claims.

The Bofors group had maintained that it had terminated all contracts when India laid down a "no agents" policy and sought a guarantee that whatever it revealed would be kept "confidential", but India claimed it was not in a position to do so because of revelations in media and public agitation, the book says.

"Then the tutorial began. The Indian officials told the Bofors team that the JPC was a parliamentary body but that they (Bofors) were not required to tell them anything more than what they deemed necessary. The Indian delegation was suggesting ways Bofors could conceal information, even as it was securing details for itself," Subramaniam, in her sixties, writes.

The book delves into the role of Arun Nehru, alleged attempts to frame Amitabh Bachchan, the dilution of requests to seek information from Switzerland, the role of contemporary journalists and editors in covering the story, and Subramaniam's struggles as a young mother.

"Four years into my marriage, I had a baby just as the scandal broke. I raised our son between feeding bottles, Pampers, mashed apples and trunk calls from India. As I juggled my marriage against the biggest story of my career and my country's contemporary history, questions ran amok through my mind," she writes.