It is painful to have to return to the Bofors payoff scandal. That we should be engaged so passionately in this controversy more than 18 months after it first broke surface in April 1987, speaks of the pathological character which our political debate and discourse have acquired. Only a political community either indifferent to the nation’s diverse and urgent concerns such as the killings by the terrorists in Punjab and the growing violence in Sri Lanka, or incapable of coping with them, could have allowed itself to be obsessed by a single issue. But it is precisely because the obsession is a fact that we cannot avoid returning to it. As it happens, we also regard this obsession a frightening symptom of a deeper malaise.
In an atmosphere so surcharged as in this case, it is difficult to try and take a non-partisan view, and it is even more difficult to convince those who disagree with one’s non-partisanship and concern for the health of political life and discourse. But despite the heavy odds, we have tried to do so in the past and we are trying to do so once again. So we find ourselves obliged to say that neither of the two protagonists, Mr Rajiv Gandhi and Mr VP Singh, has acquitted himself with credit. Prime ministers do not indulge in what the Defence minister, Mr KC Pant, has called loud thinking in matters which involve their own honour and say in public without careful foresight what might contradict, if only apparently, what they have said earlier on the same subject. Similarly an opposition leader who sees himself, and is seen by millions of his countrymen as a future prime minister, does not pass off documents published by a newspaper months earlier as a new piece of evidence and on that basis go so far as to assert that the country’s Prime Minister is himself a recipient of a payoff in a deal.
Yet that is exactly what Mr Rajiv Gandhi and Mr VP Singh have done. In an interview to Sunday, Calcutta, Mr Rajiv Gandhi has spoken of the possibility of commission having been paid by Bofors, when he had earlier maintained that no commission had been paid. And Mr VP Singh has “dug up” documents published by The Hindu five months ago and tried to sell them off as new conclusive evidence against the Prime Minister. This is a sad commentary on the state of our public life. We have a Prime Minister who speaks too much without forethought and we have a would-be prime minister who does not mind claiming to possess what he does not possess. And these are only the most recent episodes in a shameful story. All along, Mr Rajiv Gandhi has shown himself as being on the defensive and Mr VP Singh has behaved as if his sole claim to the high office, first of opposition leader and then of prime minister, lies in the former’s alleged guilt.
Great effort has been invested and millions of words have been written and spoken to establish what was all too obvious within weeks of the appearance of the first report of payoffs in connection with the Bofors howitzer deal. It was truly extraordinary that a distinction should have been sought to be made between “commission” and “winding up” charges and that such a superficial distinction should have been sought to be discredited. In a deal such as the one in question, a payment is a payment is a payment, by whatever name it is called. So the first issue that the confirmation of the first report raised was whether Mr Rajiv Gandhi would conclude that the actions of Bofors had compromised him to a point where he should seriously consider and offer his resignation. Apparently, he did not take such a view. As it happened, the disclosures were followed by the then President, Giani Zail Singh’s tacit claim to the right to dismiss the Prime Minister and a number of other developments which made it appear as if there was indeed a conspiracy to destabilize the government, and through that the country, since an alternative to Mr Gandhi was not visible in the Congress or the opposition. That is incidentally why we concurred with his decision to fight back against his detractors.
Once it had become evident that Mr Rajiv Gandhi was not going to oblige those who were gunning for him, for whatever reason, conspiratorial or otherwise, the issue boiled down to whether evidence could be dug up to establish that either Mr Rajiv Gandhi personally, or some individuals close to him as relatives or party colleagues, had been beneficiaries of the payoff. For that was the only way to remove him from the office of Prime Minister. To leave no scope for ambiguity, the issue has not been the innocence or otherwise of Mr Rajiv Gandhi; that is a subjective matter. Also, the issue has not been public morality because we are all agreed that it has sunk pretty low in our country. The issue has been the presence or absence, availability or non-availability of conclusive evidence against the Prime Minister. Regardless of whether such evidence exists, his opponents have not produced it. Mr VP Singh has done something much worse. He has made in public a charge which he has not been willing to repeat in Parliament, lest he face a motion of breach of privilege. This is strange behaviour on the part of a leader who has such an elevated view of himself. In the process, he has denied himself and his supporters an opportunity to reopen the entire issue before a Parliamentary committee. That is his business. Our concern is that the country’s political life is being denuded of sanity and reasonable discourse.