JYOTI MALHOTRA
Gulf News column, February 2007
For two long weeks, India’s most infamous Italian Ottavio Quatrochhi (for those who don’t know, and for the record, Sonia Gandhi is Indian), charged with having taken kickbacks in the Bofors gun controversy 20 years ago, has been cooling his heels in an Argentinian jail. For just as long, the Indian foreign office has been in the know about Quatrochhi’s whereabouts.
According to Indian law, both bribe-giving and bribe-taking are offences. Under normal circumstances this would have been an open-and-shut case, with New Delhi asking Buenos Aires to extradite the Italian businessman.
However, when the Quatrochhi story is linked to none other than former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, whose widow Sonia is easily the most powerful woman in India today, it is easy to see why the plot has been so murky these past 20 years. Or why the Congress-led government in New Delhi has been tying itself up into knots over what to do with a certain gentleman in Buenos Aires, for the past two weeks.
With the Opposition already baring its teeth over the Congress party’s overt keenness to dismiss a major provincial government in the heart of India, Uttar Pradesh, it seems as if the charm around India’s first family, the Nehru-Gandhis, may just be beginning to leak.
In India, where politics has no beginning and no end, the Quatrochhi story has all the sights and smells of a first-class soap opera. Inevitably, it is linked to the Sonia Maino-Rajiv Gandhi saga, and soon enough in the Delhi of the Seventies, the Quatrochhis become friends with the Gandhis. The Italian language is clearly something they have in common.
So far, so good. Then, young Rajiv, in late 1984 becomes the youngest prime minister of India with the largest majority ever in parliament, and promises a new era in political life. Half-way into his prime ministership, by 1987, he is embroiled in a huge scandal, called the Bofors gun controversy, in which he is personally accused of taking bribes from the Swedish gun manufacturer Bofors. One of the three middlemen involved, those said to have facilitated the kickbacks, is Ottavio Quatrochhi.
The Bofors scandal casts such a long shadow over Rajiv Gandhi’s reputation that one of the yardsticks of modern India will forever be measured by where you stood on this story. (Another was the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992.) Rajiv loses the election that follows, and two years later, in 1991, he is dead.
Quatrochhi has fled, meanwhile, and the Interpol has issued a red corner notice for him. Arrested in Malaysia a few years ago, the Malay authorities refuse to give him up to India. Until two weeks ago, when the Italian businessman flies into a remote corner province of Argentina called Misiones, where he has reportedly come to see the famous Iguazu waterfalls. The Argentinians pick him up, according to the still pending Interpol red corner notice on February 7. Two days later he is brought to Buenos Aires and thrown into detention. The Indian embassy is told, which further informs New Delhi about the matter.
That’s when a wall of silence falls around the pink, stone building in the heart of the capital called South Block, where prime minister Manmohan Singh sits. What is to be done with Quatrochhi?
On the strength of this answer, everybody now knows, will depend the future of the Congress-led government in Delhi. Bringing Quatrochhi back to Delhi will certainly open the floodgates, allowing him to slip away will certainly put another question mark on the government’s determination to deal with corruption in high places.
Clearly, there’s never a dull day in the Indian capital.
In a few months time, the Sonia Gandhi-Manmohan Singh government will mark three years. Hurt by rising prices and soaring inflation, the mood, at least in urban India, is already beginning to darken. The growing pains of a growing economy, even if it is at an extraordinary 9 per cent, cannot dissipate in thin air.
It is this growing sense of dislocation in the public mind, that Manmohan Singh is primarily concerned about improving economic prospects while Sonia Gandhi manages the political show, that is now beginning to show at the seams.
It seemed to have been the perfect arrangement when the Congress won power in May 2004, but the last three years have taken their toll. From farmer suicides that refuse to abate, to the increasing feeling that the poor are guinea pigs in the economic experiment, it seems as if the national happiness index is taking a beating.
Problem with this set of Congress men and women is that they are simply unable to communicate why and what they have done – or left undone – to the masses. And so the subliminal feeling of drift, in the middle of obvious signs of wealth and prosperity around.
In such a situation, the Quatrochhi story represents a brand new opportunity for the Congress-led government. Burying his ghost would not only be a good way to exorcise the past, but also strike a new political direction for the future. Its an opportunity the Congress should grab with both hands.
ENDS
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