#dnaEdit: Scent of a scandal

It would not be sufficient to express outrage over the bribes paid to Indian decision-makers by middlemen of the Italian defence manufacturer, Finmeccanica and its British subsidiary, AgustaWestland. An Italian court has convicted and sentenced the top honchos of Finmeccanica and AgustaWestland. Former Indian Air Force (IAF) chief SP Tyagi and his kin were on the radar. The issue figured in the last year of UPA-II and the defence minister at the time, Congress’s AK Antony, had told the Rajya Sabha that the company would be blacklisted. Apparently, it was not blacklisted. 

The BJP chose to rake it up with Information Technology and Telecommunication Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad summing up the situation neatly: The Italian courts have punished the bribe-givers. Will the Indian bribe-takers please stand up? Prasad had directly addressed his question to Antony and dared him to name the guilty. The minister had every right to use the rhetorical device, but it was clear to him as well that that is not the way to unearth the truth and punish the culprits. When asked by journalists whether the NDA government was pursuing the investigation, he said that he was not bound to reveal all the details in a day. What the newly nominated member, Dr Subramanian Swamy, said in Rajya Sabha is part of the ruling party’s political ruse to further dent the battered image of the Congress Party.

The question is whether the BJP is content to smear the image of the Congress as that of a corrupt party, or is it serious about tracing the money trail and punishing the guilty in the courts of law? The BJP apparently wants to do both. It wants to gain whatever political mileage it can out of the issue, and at the same time allow the investigative agencies to do their job. It is quite possible that the criminal investigation is likely to take a long time keeping in mind the international hurdles that need to be crossed in garnering evidence and the many jurisdictions that need to be negotiated before the guilty could be punished. The lynchpin in the bribes seems to be the Polish-origin British middleman Christian Michel, who is said to have referred to Congress president Sonia Gandhi as the driving force behind the deal. But this wisp of a reference might not be sufficient to nail the Congress leader. But the BJP is keen to take advantage of it for all it is worth on the political front.

Whatever the jousting that the BJP would want to indulge in, the more serious question of how to make defence deals transparent remains elusive. The Ministry of Defence (MoD) did work out a normative plan to keep defence procurements clean as recommended by the BG Verghese committee in the wake of the tehelka.com sting, Operation West End. But things have not been worked out at the ground level. The huge negative fall out of this haziness is that procurement has slowed down, and it has even come to a halt in many cases, because the armed forces and the ministry are engaged in elaborate and convoluted mechanisms to keep the purchases fair.

Corruption scandals might come in handy for political parties but they do no good to the armed forces which need to buy equipment regularly as part of the upgradation and modernisation programmes. Scandals hurt the interests of the armed forces and the security of the country. Politicians need to pause and ponder over this and focus on making defence deals simple and transparent.