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Bofors and Bihar

Here is a suggestion for Rabri Devi (or whichever other puppet Laloo Prasad Yadav sends to plague Bihar) -- the moment s/he enters the chief minister's office, a portrait of a certain Italian lady should be put up in a place of honour. For it is she who is truly responsible for the Rashtriya Janata Dal's return to offices of power and profit.

No, I am not talking of Sonia Gandhi, who really shouldn't be described as an Italian any longer. Italian-born yes, but also an Indian citizen as of 1984. (Why she waited 15 years after her marriage to take up Indian papers is another story.) No, the Italian woman I refer to is the genuine article -- Maria Quattrocchi.

Signora Quattrocchi isn't, however, residing in Italy and longer, but in the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur. As far as can be told, Maria Quattrocchi has never displayed any particular interest in India. But if there is no interest at stake, there is a considerable amount of capital from India, all safely stacked away in foreign tax-havens.

Maria Quattrocchi and her husband left India after spending a considerable amount of time here. The couple went, in fact, in 1993 -- just about the time when the authorities in Switzerland confirmed to the Indian government that they had been recipients of the Bofors slush funds. The documented proof of this is now available to the Central Bureau of Investigation. It is an open question why the Quattrocchis were permitted to leave at this sensitive stage, but one must remember that it was a Congress ministry in office at the time.

It has been alleged that the Bofors case isn't the only one where the Quattrocchis were involved. This, of course, is not particularly surprising; why should Bofors have used their services unless the Swedish armaments giant had reason to believe that they would be useful? In all fairness, however, I must note that these are only rumours. Tangible proof of their activities exists only in the Bofors case. But that needn't stop us from taking a look at certain other circumstances.

In 1987 -- a year before the Bofors scandal really hit the fan -- India sought funds from the World Bank to set up a fertiliser plant. The machinery and the technology was supplied by the Italian multinational Snam-Progetti. The work on the Indian end was handled by Quattrocchi. But when the World Bank set out to examine the proposal, several worms were unearthed.

As it happened, Bangladesh had decided to go in for a fertiliser plant a few months earlier, again with Snam-Progetti's assistance. This meant that the comparative figures were easily available. So why was it that the Bangladesh plant was costing so much less, Rs 1.46 billion less to be precise? That, of course, is what the World Bank officials too wanted to know.

Confronted with such evidence, the Indian authorities should have immediately taken Snam-Progetti to task. Instead, the Rajiv Gandhi regime chose to question the World Bank's figures. Amazingly, the Indian government decided to reject the World Bank's aid, choosing to pay more money rather than lose Snam-Progetti's valuable services. All this is a matter of record.

All very interesting no doubt, but how, you may be wondering, does all this tie in with Rabri Devi. Believe me, there is reason to believe the two are linked.

After Sonia Gandhi visited Narayanpur, the site of the massacre of Dalits, she proclaimed that the Rabri Devi ministry had lost the moral authority to govern. She also asked the Union Government to do three things: (a) start a primary school, (b) set up a police station, and c) provide jobs for the relatives of the victims. These eminently reasonable requests were conveyed through Sushil Kumar Shinde.

So what happened in the next couple of days? Well, on February 22, 1999, the Supreme Court handed down a ruling on the Quattrocchis, ordering both husband and wife to present themselves to the Indian authorities no later than March 15. Nothing else -- no political or judicial development -- happened.

Within hours, the Congress Working Committee was summoned, and it was decided to make a serious attempt to upset the Vajpayee ministry by using Bihar as an excuse. That, as we all know, did not succeed. But the message is quite clear: as long as the spectre of Bofors haunts Sonia Gandhi and her friends, the interests of Dalits (or whoever) shall take second place.

T V R Shenoy