"Q" sera, sera?
You don`t say!
Darius Nakoonwala
The big news last week was the de-freezing of Ottavio Quattrocchi`s London bank accounts at the specific request of the Indian government and the fact that the prime minister did not know that the law minister had made the request, using one of the ministers of state in the PMO. The government said there was no evidence to link the two accounts with the Bofors case.
The leader writers howled in unison and for once there were no "on the other hand" edits. No, let me correct myself here: the pro-Congress Hindustan Times maintained an undignified silence, as did The Telegraph. Cat got your tongue, mates?
The Hindu, which had been so instrumental in making expose after expose in the Bofors scandal back in 1988, was deeply hurt. "Even the fig leaf has been discarded… the Government is willing to go further than showing a studied lack of interest in pursuing the country`s most sensational corruption case… politically scandalous, (the Indian) submission was unashamedly intended to facilitate the free operation of two of the Italian businessman`s accounts in the BSI AG bank in London…the key question is: why does the Government want a freeze that was upheld by the London High Court and the British Supreme Court to be lifted now?"
Why indeed? Only the Pioneer mustered up the courage to say what everyone knows anyway. Calling it a `shameless cover up" it said " It is no secret that Mr Quattrocchi enjoys proximity to the Congress`s first family. It was this proximity that Mr Quattrocchi used for operating out of New Delhi, securing and brokering big money deals and profiting from them. Nor is it a secret that the Congress in the past has exerted to cover-up his role. Soon after the Swiss authorities informed the Government in 1993 that Mr Quattrocchi was one of the beneficiaries of the accounts into which the Bofors kickbacks had been deposited, he was allowed to slip out of the country."
The Indian Express was uncharacteristically subdued, given that it too had played a prominent role during the Bofors scandal. "The UPA government must explain why its law officer acted in a way that suggests a blatant cover-up. Ottavio Quattrocchi`s well-known association with the Gandhi family should have made it more scrupulous." That it still chose to conjure up a clean chit-that-wasn`t from the CBI to let Mr Q, against whom extradition proceedings are still on avail of his long frozen crores speaks of a remarkably chilling cynicism."
It then asked the question that has been bothering everyone. "Why has there been such inconsistent follow-through, with so few questions asked, on the leads unearthed from time to time, mostly by the investigative media? Why were governments, even non-Congress ones, non-serious about taking this case forward and why did a supposedly independent judicial process allow governments to get away with their deliberate inaction?"
The Business Standard asked a larger question, based not so much on the de-freezing as on the fact that the prime minister did not know that his law minister and his own minister of state has cooked up the whole caper. "…whenever there was something really important to be done the prime minister has not been consulted… the old criticism about there being an extra-constitutional authority has re-surfaced… over the last few weeks… the message has gone out louder and clearer than even before: Dr Singh`s ministers do not think it necessary to keep him in the loop…the situation is becoming hugely embarrassing…the prime minister and the Congress president need to do something about freelancing ministers who think that as long as they can square things with the latter, they are safe. "
Contact: Darius.Nakhoonwala@gmail.com