By Vir Sanghvi
On Wednesday, the Delhi High Court formally cleared Rajiv Gandhi of all involvement in Bofors. No surprises there: the CBI had been unable to turn up a shred of evidence against Rajiv so the Court had no option.
The big question is: if there was never any evidence against him, why was Bofors able to destroy Rajiv’s mandate, the largest ever given to an Indian Prime Minister?
Here’s my theory: Bofors wasn’t so much about the money — the sums involved (Rs 64 crore) seem laughably small in this era of billion rupee scams (Ketan Parekh or Abdul Rehman Telgi dealt in larger sums every day). Nor — as we have seen — was it really about corruption: the High Court has confirmed that.
Bofors, and the way it was used to cripple Rajiv Gandhi’s Prime Ministership, represented something much more profound. It was the last weapon used by the traditional political classes against the forces of change represented by Rajiv Gandhi and his men.
It is hard for people who weren’t there at the time to appreciate how different Rajiv and his people were from what had gone before. His close aides, who followed him into politics, were all from other worlds: Amitabh Bachchan was from films, Arun Singh from the corporate world and Satish Sharma was an Indian Airlines pilot. Arun Nehru, who had been brought in by Mrs Gandhi but was seen as part of Rajiv’s gang, was also a corporate type.
Even though he was born into the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, Rajiv was, effectively, the first (and probably only) Indian Prime Minister to have emerged from the salaried middle class. He made a point of wearing his old school blazer when he went to the Doon School annual day; he had disdain for old-style politicos; he talked about things that nobody understood at the time, such as how India needed to be a leader in information technology in the Twenty-first Century; and his aides made no attempt to live up to the hypocritical Indian political tradition of austerity: Amitabh Bachchan rented Arun Singh’s farmhouse on the outskirts of Delhi, Satish Sharma built himself a palatial home and Rajiv himself (though he was extraordinarily simple in his habits) would wear Ray-ban glasses or use a Nikon camera.
These days, even the traditional political class has abandoned the pretence of austerity but back then, the refusal to wear khadi and to pretend to be poor went against all precedent. Rajiv’s agenda also abandoned the old slogans and cliches.
Traditional politicians saw Rajiv and his style as a threat. But they also recognised that his open embracement of an upper middle-class lifestyle was a weakness. It would be easy to portray Rajiv and his aides as people who liked money too much. Amitabh had a movie star’s lifestyle so he made an easy target. Rajiv had a foreign wife so it was simple to suggest that she and her family were squirreling Indian money abroad.
We forget, now, how much the anti-Rajiv Bofors campaign was framed in them-and-us terms. The alternative to Rajiv was a real Raja, V. P. Singh, who had chosen to give up his lands and claimed to live the simple life of the Indian poor. Even the slogan that V. P. Singh’s supporters used, “Raja Nahin, Fakir Hai”, hammered home this point.
When Amitabh was attacked, the only thing critics could find against him was that his brother lived in a small flat in Switzerland. This proved, said the Opposition, that he was stealing money from India. Otherwise, why would he choose Switzerland, the banking capital of the world? (Nobody mentioned that V. P. Singh’s son was working in Switzerland at roughly the same time.)
In this day and age when we have a slightly more sophisticated view of the world, we may laugh at the notion that residence in Switzerland is proof of corruption. But in those days, any foreign link was treated with suspicion. This became clearer when V. P. Singh eventually issued a Letter Rogatory to the Swiss in 1990 to try and trace the Bofors money. Among the individuals to be investigated were the husbands of Sonia Gandhi’s sisters. There was no evidence at all that any of them had been involved in Bofors but it went with the mood of the critics: all foreign links are proof of corruption. (Of course, nothing came of that line of inquiry).
Not only was Rajiv not a politician in the traditional sense, he was also not ready for the job (nobody had expected him to become PM so soon). He never quite understood how much he was antagonising the political class. And when politicians retaliated, he was too naïve to recognise what was going on. Instead, he simply panicked. He had just come out of a situation where President Giani Zail Singh came close to dismissing him and the atmosphere in Delhi was thick with intrigue, with talk of conspiracies and plots. Having spent most of his life avoiding politics even while living in a political house, Rajiv was completely out of his depth in this world of plots and coups. He was also, incredibly badly advised.
He made a crucial mistake which more or less sealed his fate from the very beginning. This was his claim that Bofors had paid no commission. Yes, Bofors had told the defence ministry that it had sacked its agents. But how could the government of India know that this was true? And why should it care even if Bofors had paid commissions as long as India got the best gun at the best price?
But once Rajiv was committed to this position, then his government was sunk. All that the Opposition needed to show was that commissions had been paid. It was not even necessary to display that they had been paid to Rajiv. It still rebounded on the Prime Minister because he had said that no commissions were paid. And sure enough, as The Hindu proved, commissions had been paid, after all.
By the end, it got to the stage where Rajiv was fighting so hard to prevent the revelation about commissions from getting out (the Bofors JPC was a shameful whitewash) that even people like myself who had been initially sympathetic to the government were forced to conclude that, even if Bofors was much ado about nothing, the cover-up with all its talk of ‘winding-up charges’ was impossible to defend.
Could Rajiv have played it any differently?
In retrospect, it is easy to argue that because he had nothing to hide (and 18 years later, not one embarrassing fact has come to light), he should have come clean.
At the time, however, I think he just lost perspective. He knew what he was up against. It was an uneasy coalition of all the forces that dominated Indian politics in the 1980s: press barons who loved making and un-making governments, sadhus and swamis who conspired with Opposition leaders, traditional politicians who made a virtue out of hypocrisy, old-style Congressmen who thought they were on the verge of becoming obsolete, and an opposition that had been humiliated at the hustings.
Try as he might, he could not believe that the public, which had given him such as huge mandate, would turn against him. But people are fickle and easily misled. First, Amitabh, till then India’s most loved person (a distinction he has since reclaimed) was driven from politics. And then Rajiv lost the election. (But see it in perspective. In 1989, the Congress got 197 seats and ‘lost’. In 1998, the BJP got 182 seats and ‘won’. So winning and losing are relative terms.)
For a while, it seemed as though old-style politics had won, that India had lost sight of the future — in the twelve months after Rajiv demitted office, we had both Mandal and the rath yatra and then, massive political instability.
Fortunately, this was a mirage. Rajiv, alas, is not around today and it has taken 18 years to clear his name, but India is no longer obsessed with politics: we have no unscrupulous Presidents, no intriguing press barons, no Chandraswamis, no blind mistrust of anything with a foreign connection, and no hypocrisy about political lifestyles. The old-style politico is finally on his last legs — and about time, too.
It is a tribute to the style of politics exemplified by Rajiv that today, something like Bofors would never come to obsess the nation. India has moved on, beyond politics and on to the things that really matter: economic progress, our place in the world and a more open way of doing things.
Rajiv lost. But his way of doing things finally won through.
