by Kuldip Nayar
The letter adversely affected the support Zail Singh had enjoyed. He was viewed as a president settling personal scores with Rajiv Gandhi at the expense of the smooth functioning of the government.
At one time the president was inclined to give approval to a petition by the well-known cartoonist and journalist, Rajinder Puri, seeking permission to prosecute Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi on allegations of corruption. However, in the wake of the letter incident, any move by Zail Singh would have smacked of personal vendetta so he rejected the petition. He, however, told me that had he not been a Sikh, he would have given permission for prosecution. I think he was right. Some in the Congress had already planned to impeach Zail Singh if he gave permission. The assassination of Indira Gandhi by her Sikh personal guards had made the Sikh community suspect and therefore Zail Singh’s fears were not unjustified.
As the country faced the 9th Lok Sabha elections in 1989, the Rajiv Gandhi government was facing corruption charges in defence contracts. The most damaging was the $285 million contract with Swedish arms company Bofors for supply of 155 mm Howitzer field guns. The army was in favour of another variant which should normally have been purchased because in the course of testing, its performance was superior. Rajiv Gandhi imposed his choice based on kickbacks received rather than merit. Later, the then chief-of-army staff Gen. K.S. Sunderji, admitted that the French howitzer which the army had selected was superior to that from Bofors.
Indeed, the word corruption was substituted by Bofors during the Lok Sabha elections. The disclosure came from Norway where an enterprising radio channel broadcast the full story. Rajiv Gandhi had bent all the rules to order Bofors’ howitzers. Even the circumstantial evidence testified to his involvement. A close friend of his told me that Rajiv Gandhi had opened a new account abroad and had deposited the kickbacks there. This benefited his Italian in-laws, parents of Sonia Gandhi. Ottavio Quattrocchi, an Italian middleman in Delhi, close to Sonia Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi, was responsible for the clandestine payment.
Quattrocchi had once threatened to sue me for defamation because of what I had written about his ‘nefarious activities’ in my book The Judegement (1977). He escaped punishment for all he had done and was eventually allowed to leave India, the CBI ensuring that no harm came to an individual so close to the dynasty. When I checked with some senior officers in the agency, their reply was that there were orders from above. H.R. Bharadwaj told me in Bangalore that he had ‘put everything in order’ before moving to Karnataka as governor.
According to former CBI director Joginder Singh, Quattrocchi was aware in advance of every move the agency proposed to take against him. For example, he was shown all official papers before he appeared for extradition proceedings at a Malaysian court.
I once asked Foreign Minister Madhavsinh Solanki in the Narasimha Rao government about the documents he had delivered to the Swedish government regarding the kickbacks. New Delhi was keen that the Swedish authorities remained silent. He did not comment on the documents but said that the Bofors gun deal was ‘as messy as Narmada’s non-use of water’.
It was a coincidence that one day (3 January 2011) before the CBI was to submit a plea in the court to close the case, the income-tax appellate tribunal pronounced its judgement that Ottavio Quattrocchi was the recipient of kickbacks amounting to Rs 41 crore and demanded that income tax be paid on the income earned. Congress General Secretary Digvijay Singh, ever adept at rescuing chestnuts from fire for the party, said it was a deliberate leak by a government official to complicate the Bofors case. Digvijay Singh’s loyalty to the Sonia Gandhi family was understandable but not his efforts to distort facts. The appellate court signed the judgement on 31 December 2010 and the press only learnt of it on 3 January 2011 so it was not just a day earlier as Digvijay Singh had alleged.
The official spokesman’s rationalization was that it was a civil, not a criminal suit. Whatever the nomenclature given to it, kickbacks remained kickbacks. The question was not a legal but a moral issue. I recall that Mahatma Gandhi had made the same remark when a CWC member, Ishwar Singh Kweshwar defended his non-payment of Rs 500 on the plea that it was time-barred. The creditor had sent a postcard to the Mahatma. Gandhi told Kweshwar that the issue was not a legal but a moral question.
It was the Bofors scandal that led V.P. Singh, finance minister in Rajiv’s government, to resign. In him, the non-BJP opposition, then in the wilderness, found a leader who could possibly provide an alternative to the ruling Congress. Indeed, V.P. Singh cobbled together the Janata Dal, consisting of his Jan Morcha (the ex-Congressmen who had been defeated in the late 1980s), socialists seeking a new home after the Janata Party had collapsed, the Lok Dal of Haryana’s Chief Minister Devi Lal, and the Telugu Desam party of Andhra Pradesh. The Janata Dal soon emerged as a political party which sought to identify itself with the economic and social aspirations of the cultivating peasantry drawn from the lower castes or Other Backward Classes (OBCs), from the Hindi heartland: UP and Bihar.
The Congress which had won 421 seats in the previous Lok Sabha was reduced to 197 seats in the elections held in 1989. This was indeed a wholesale people’s rejection of the party. Rajiv Gandhi rightly decided to sit in the Opposition even though the Congress was the single largest party in the House. He regarded the election results as a verdict against him and his party. This was an honest and courageous appraisal, and I felt he had established a healthy precedent.
Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated on 21 May 1991. It was his last public meeting in Sriperumbudur, a town approximately 30 miles from Chennai.
Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination was the handiwork of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) suicide bomber Thenmozhi Rajaratnam who came to be known as Gayatri. It was evident that the LTTE avenged their anger over the introduction of the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) which went to Sri Lanka to help the government curb internal conflicts. This was despite the fact that Rajiv Gandhi was in touch with Prabhakaran, the LTTE chief who had appeared to have given his consent to the IPKF operation to bring law and order to the country.
I did not know Rajiv Gandhi well but felt that India had lost him just at a time when he had matured as a leader. Now he really knew what prime- ministership meant. His greatest contribution was the revival of panchayats. As prime minister he had rightly initiated legislation to transfer power to them. That experiment has won growing appreciation with the passage of time notwithstanding the burgeoning corruption and nepotism that has penetrated the grassroots.
Jawaharlal Nehru, his great-grandfather, dreamt of a scientific temper enveloping India. Rajiv, to a degree, brought that dream to life. He was technology savvy and introduced computers in government offices. Sam Pitroda, his friend, helped him to lay the foundation for the software revolution that has contributed significantly to India’s economic growth.
In Priyanka Gandhi’s visit to jail to meet Gayatri, Sonia Gandhi’s family showed the courage to come to terms with the tragedy. It is a pity that the process which should have ended with the release of Gayatri, after serving the term to which she was sentenced, was not taken to its logical corollary. That indeed is the tragedy of the Congress party which sometimes demonstrates Mahatma Gandhi’s trait of forgiveness but surrenders to the exigencies of politics.
15
V.P. Singh as Prime Minister
Kashmir, My Appointment as High Commissioner in the UK, and the Implementation of the Mandal Commission Recommendations
Indian politics took a dramatically different configuration in 1989. The Congress party won even less than 40 per cent of the vote in comparison to 48 per cent in 1984. The Muslims, constituting some 15 per cent of the electorate, by and large voted against the Congress. The party won 197 Lok Sabha seats in a House of 545. Rajiv Gandhi himself volunteered to sit in the Opposition although the Congress was the largest party in the House. His plea was that the people had shown no confidence in his governance through a vastly reduced vote. I felt that it was an example which the nation had n
ot known earlier and there was general applause for his courageous step. Vishwanath Pratap Singh, leader of Jan Morcha, was able to harness the support of the BJP and the Left to head the new government.
However, Chandra Shekhar, a leader of significance in the party, was opposed to him and in favour of another stalwart, Devi Lal, who too commanded support in the party but far less than V.P. Singh. A contest seemed inevitable.
There was no doubt that V.P. Singh had a majority among the Lok Sabha members in the Janata Dal. He had the Bofors gun scandal as his election plank, and it was his personal victory. The voters expected him to become prime minister. As a well-wisher of the party I took upon myself the responsibility of averting a contest. I approached Arun Nehru, then a close associate of V.P. Singh. Arun favoured a consensus but not at the latter’s expense.
I knew Devi Lal well and met him on the morning of the party’s election. Devi Lal had no illusions about himself. He said that V.P. Singh would make a better prime minister but his dilemma was that he had given his word to Chandra Shekhar that he would contest for leadership. I knew it was Chandra Shekhar’s move to stall V.P. Singh’s election as leader. Chandra Shekhar was the kind of politician who would split a party or bolt from it if he did not have his way. The split I feared might bring the Congress back to power, and I saw no signs that the party had learnt any lessons from the Emergency. Devi Lal requested Chandra Shekhar to meet him at Orissa Bhawan and took me along. Biju Patnaik, the senior leader from Orissa, was already there at Chandra Shekhar’s request. It was clear that the party would split if V.P. Singh was not accepted as prime minister. Chandra Shekhar announced that he had requested Madhu Dandavate to propose Devi Lal’s name which he would second. Sensing Chandra Shekhar’s strong opposition to V.P. Singh, I suggested to Devi Lal that he should accept Chandra Shekhar’s formulation. Devi Lal agreed but wanted to know why.
When we drove together to parliament, I told him that once his name was proposed and seconded, he should forego the honour and propose V.P. Singh’s name. Devi Lal was agreeable to this because he was unhappy at the thought of betraying Chandra Shekhar. I mollified him by giving him an analogy from the Mahabharata. Yudhisthar, I told him, agreed to say that Ashwathama, the elephant, had died in the battle. The Kauravas had a leading warrior, Dronacharya’s son, his namesake, and had proved too good for the Pandavas. Yudhisthar did not lie but used this for their own purposes, drowning the word ‘elephant’ amidst a beat of drums, seeking to shatter the morale of the Kauravas.
I told Devi Lal that he would fulfill the word he had given to Chandra Shekhar by remaining the leader momentarily and it did not matter if he subsequently stepped down. He accepted my reasoning. No one except Devi Lal, Ashwani Kumar, editor of Punjab Kesari, and I were aware of the formula. As agreed, Dandavate proposed Devi Lal’s name and Chandra Shekhar seconded it. True to his word, Devi Lal rose from his seat and proposed the name of V.P. Singh as his successor. Through oversight no one had been asked to second V.P. Singh’s name, and this Ajit Singh did when he realized that there was no one else to do it.
V.P. Singh was unanimously elected but by then the UNI ticker had announced Devi Lal’s name. The agency’s reporter had run to a nearby telephone booth, as reporters from news agencies are wont to do, to be the first to relay the news. My heart missed a beat when Devi Lal took some time to rise up to announce his withdrawal. He said he wanted to remain the tau (elder uncle), as he was popularly known. V.P. Singh appointed Devi Lal deputy prime minister.
When I went to congratulate Devi Lal at his house, he was surrounded by members of his family who badgered him for having accepted the number two position when he could have been prime minister. He assured them that the word deputy would vanish in a few months’ time. Om Prakash Chautala, Devi Lal’s son who later became Haryana’s chief minister, never forgave me for not allowing his father to become prime minister, believing that I had conspired to make V.P. Singh prime minister.
Soon after the V.P. Singh government assumed charge in December 1989, Home Minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed requested me to go to Srinagar and assess the situation on behalf of the government. I told him that anyone based in Delhi could gauge that the state was slipping into chaos as a consequence of the rising levels of militancy. This notwithstanding, he was insistent.
On my arrival in Srinagar I rang up Abdul Ghani Lone, an eminent Kashmiri leader and a personal friend of mine. He dissuaded me from visiting his house on the ground that in his locality there were a large number of militants who had returned from Pakistan after being trained and armed.
Lone came to Hotel Broadway where I was staying and spent two hours discussing Kashmir. He said that these boys had refused Pakistan’s overtures for years but when they found that the state election in 1988 had been rigged they lost faith in the ballot box and chose the gun. I told him that the National Conference had no need to rig the elections because Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah would in any case have won by a small margin. Lone said that Farooq was afraid of losing elections and rigged them in order to leave nothing to chance.
I told Lone that New Delhi might be willing to have a dialogue with ‘the boys’, and his view was that India should first re-establish its authority in Kashmir because its writ did not run there. What should Delhi do? I asked him. ‘You will have to kill at least 20,000 people before you can establish your authority.’
On my return to Delhi, I told Mufti Mohammad Sayeed that ‘we are reaping what you had sown’. His laconic reply was that they had made many mistakes in the past but were now prepared to rectify them. By then he had had his daughter, Rubaiya, released from the militants who had kidnapped her. Foreign Minister Inder Kumar Gujral himself went to Srinagar to negotiate the terms of her release. This only proved how effete the Indian polity was.
Lone proved to be correct. His figure was 20,000 but twice that number were killed. The security forces and the militants clashed throughout Kashmir and inflicted heavy casualties on each other.
The militants were optimistic about ‘releasing Kashmir from the clutches of New Delhi’. On an earlier visit to the Valley I was told in Anantnag that on my next visit to Kashmir I would require a visa from the ‘liberators’. Anantnag would by then be renamed Islamabad.
Kashmiri leaders, including Lone, were detained without trial. That was when the torture chambers, called Papa One and Papa Two, were established. Apparently, they were interrogation centres where indescribable cruelties were committed. As a human rights activist I probed a few cases and found a deliberate, devious official plan.
I also saw numerous barricades in Srinagar and could sense the embers of revolt and alienation suggesting that a massive conflagration was in the offing. I couldn’t figure out exactly what the conflagration would result in but it appeared evident that the pro-India elements would face difficult times and in due course be greatly diminished in numbers.
My analysis was that after the rigged state elections of 1987, notwithstanding many assurances from the government to the contrary, the youth in Kashmir, who had till then trusted the ballot, had completely lost faith in the system. Disillusioned, these youths crossed into Pakistan to get arms, believing that the bullet alone could achieve what the ballot had failed to do.
They were wrong because they underestimated India’s might and the degree to which it would go to confront them. The militants represented quite a formidable force when they returned from Pakistan after being trained and obtaining weapons. There were open clashes in various parts of the Valley and thousands died over the years in pursuit of their ideals.
The security forces were unable to differentiate between the militants and others, some of whom were sympathizers of the militants’ cause. Village after village was surrounded and subjected to brutal and indiscriminate searches. The attitude of the security forces was akin to that of a force entering enemy territory, fired more with the idea of inflicting punishment rather then attempting to genuinely find incriminating evidence. Therefore the secur
ity forces became extremely unpopular and India more distant. If ever the history of zulum by the security forces is recorded, the interrogation centres in Kashmir will rank quite high up the ladder.
I had often gone to Kashmir in the days when militancy was high and visited the houses of the aggrieved. The recurrent complaint was that young men were picked up by the security forces, some after registering their names with the local police station, but the majority did not return.
The reports which we, activists, wrote each time after returning from Kashmir were unfavourably viewed by New Delhi and we were characterized as ‘apologists for the militants’. The reports were quoted at length by the Pakistan authorities at the UN and international conferences. However, the trips helped us develop personal relations with the Hurriyat leaders. A few still visit me at my house in New Delhi.
At one dinner party at my home, which some Hurriyat leaders attended, a television channel announced that India had successfully exploded a nuclear device. Prof. Abdul Ghani, a Hurriyat leader, remarked at the dinner table that he now saw a role for Kashmir as a bridge between India and Pakistan.
Prof. Abdul Ghani was present at a meeting at which I asked Syed Ali Shah Geelani, a hard-liner, about the return of Kashmiri pandits to their homes. Geelani said that this would have to wait until the Kashmir problem was resolved. I argued that it was unfair because most of the pandits had been driven out forcibly, apart from a few who left at the instance of Jagmohan, then the state governor. Geelani stuck to his position then, but many years later told me he had been wrong. The Kashmiri pandits were entitled to return to their homes. Very few did and those who returned left again because they found they were not welcome.
The plight of victims suffering at the hands of the security forces, on the one hand, and the militants on the other, was so much on my mind when I became a Rajya Sabha MP that I allocated Rs 50 lakh of the MPLADS (Member of Parliament Local Area Development Scheme), for the welfare of victims’ families. Initially, the parliament secretariat did not accept inclusion of victims of the state’s violence as valid recipients. I eventually won my point that a widow or an orphan was entitled to receive assistance whether the bread-earner had died at the hands of security forces or the militants. A sympathetic female deputy commissioner at Srinagar identified 37 families for rehabilitation. My next allocation went to the victims of violence in Assam.