Probes by agency in successive arms deals have yielded no result.
The Bofors case, which the Centre has decided to formally close, is not the first defence scandal in which investigations have fizzled out, allowing arms agents and other accused to get away.
The Bofors case, in which late Rajiv Gandhi and several others were accused of fixing a deal to buy artillery guns against commissions paid by the Swedish manufacturer, was formally closed on Tuesday. Solicitor general Gopal Subramanium told the Supreme Court (SC) that the CBI had failed to extradite Ottavio Quattrocchi, an Italian businessman and friend of the Gandhis, and had decided to close the case.
Sources within the establishment and outside blame the lack of success in investigating defence scams on the political manipulation of the CBI. “I don’t think there is another scandal where so much time and money was spent to bury it,” said former CBI chief Joginder Singh, who brought 500 documents on the Bofors case from Switzerland in 1997.
Bofors was a landmark case. It decided the fate of the 1989 national election, stalled the Army’s artillery modernisation for two decades, and slurred the otherwise clean reputation of Rajiv Gandhi. Whatever maybe the merit of the Bofors investigations, the fact remains that the CBI is repeatedly failing to nail the perpetrators of corruption in arms deals.
In 2005, CBI investigation into another major defence scandal of the 80s, the purchase of HDW submarines from Germany, also fizzled out. The case had a sensational twist in 1987 when the CBI accused former navy chief Admiral SM Nanda of playing the role of an illegal middleman for the deal. Today, Admiral Nanda’s son is an influential arms agents.
After filing an FIR in 2006 against then defence minister George Fernandes and others in the 1999 Barak missile deal, the CBI investigation is no where near completion. Sudhir Choudhrie, a key agent in the Barak deal, has left India. These days he operates a powerful network from UK that fixes defence deals in India.
“There is no real interest in pursuing the cases,” said a senior CBI official. The CBI is so open to political manipulation that “arms dealers are the first to get away, given their intrusive hold over the political structure”, he said. A senior IPS officer said, “There seems to be a deliberate move to go slow against arms dealers who have considerable clout in political, bureaucratic and military circles.”
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