Deve Gowda under pressure from Left to place Bofors papers before Parliament

George Iype in New Delhi

Ten years after it rocked India, the controversial Bofors gun deal is all set to create a political storm in the country. Partners in the United Front government want Prime Minister H D Deve Gowda to place the Bofors papers in Parliament.

A team of officials headed by Central Bureau of Investigation Director Joginder Singh will collect the Swiss bank documents linked to the 1986 howitzer gun deal in Berne on Tuesday.

The documents include details of bribes paid by Swedish arms manufacturer A B Bofors to the middlemen involved in the multi-billion rupee deal. The crucial documents also contain the names of these beneficiaries, bank entries and information about other transactions.

The decks for the transfer of these documents were cleared after the apex Swiss federal court last month rejected five appeals against the July 1995 decision of the Swiss magistrate to hand over the papers to the Indian authorities.

Though the Swiss court rejected five appeals, one appeal remains pending with it. But CBI sources said despite the single pending appeal, the bank documents of the other accused are of immense significance to the investigations into the gun deal.

While political circles in the capital are abuzz with speculation about what the Bofors papers will reveal, the UF government is undecided whether to place the documents before Parliament.

But India's Left parties insist they will settle for nothing less. "We want the Bofors papers to be placed before Parliament so that it becomes the property of the people's representatives," Harkishan Singh Surjeet, general secretary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) told Rediff On The NeT.

Surjeet said he has already informed Prime Minister Deve Gowda that the CPI-M would like to see heads roll even if the Bofors papers reveals names of top politicians. "The prime minister has assured me that all those who are found guilty will not go unpunished," the CPI-M general secretary said, adding that "we are happy that the documents are finally arriving after a decade."

Insiders say the Bofors papers will be a trump card, which Deve Gowda might use to threaten the Congress party in his struggle to continue in power.

The Bofors case had unseated the then Congress prime minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1989 when the Opposition parties alleged that he was one of the recipients of the Rs 640 million kickbacks in the deal. Gandhi's name is linked to Bofors through his Italian friend, Ottavio Quattrocchi, who represented the Italian giant Snamprogetti in India.

The crucial question that confronts Congress leaders is whether the secret documents will name Rajiv Gandhi as a recipient of the kickbacks. "We are not bothered whether the documents discloses Rajiv's name or not. Our only demand is that the government should unmask the whole deal and make it public for all Indians so that they can know who were behind the biggest fraud in Indian history," says A B Bardhan, general secretary of the Communist Party of India.

Bardhan told Rediff On The NeT that the CPI was the first to put pressure on the UF government to get all the documents relating to the secret Swiss bank.