In the Madras of the time, what The Hindu said was the word to us. And the Bofors scandal was the newspaper’s biggest story. It implied that the top echelons of the Congress, including Rajiv Gandhi, may have accepted a bribe to buy guns made by the Swedish company Bofors, once a steel-maker that was acquired by Alfred Nobel, who converted it into an arms maker. (The implication was never proven).
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The bylines of Chitra Subramaniam, who is widely regarded as the person who revealed the most about the scandal, and N. Ram, the newspaper’s editor, became just as familiar to teenagers as ‘Bofors.’ (It was a time when teenagers read the newspaper, though we may not have gone beyond the headline, byline and maybe the first paragraph of an article.)
Chitra Subramaniam has come out with a book on how she investigated the story. Her Bofors Gate is also, inevitably, about a time. People tend to say of the past that it was a ‘simpler time,’ but what does it mean? No time is simple. This book shows us the complexity of that era, its lack of innocence.
There was one major difference though. In the 80s, we didn’t consider it remarkable that a string of investigative stories would roil a powerful government.
At the time when the Bofors controversy broke, Rajiv Gandhi’s Congress had over 414 seats in Parliament and controlled most states. The party hit back at the Bofors story with a very 80s statement: that the Central Intelligence Agency of the US was behind it in an attempt to ‘destabilize India.’ This was a feeble retaliation from the country’s then most powerful party. Subramaniam says she did feel fear at many points. She feared for her life and her family. But in the end, the ‘powerful’ were taken down by proper idealistic journalism.
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There are two reasons I feel why Bofors was so influential.
In the 80s, the world was, of course, a corrupt place run by practical men, men of the world, as Subramaniam showed us, but that world had shame. The powerful did what they had to, and arms dealers did what they had to, but it was very important not to get caught. There were consequences if the media got to know. That is what I mean when I say the world had shame. The powerful and the ordinary, both had shame.
Shame was a strong emotion. Most people were probably good only because they were afraid of being found out. And those who did shady things had to be careful of idealistic journalists.
That is what seems to have changed. We have become shameless today. Disgrace does not have severe consequences. This has been the greatest influence that entrepreneurs have exerted on the world. They have made people think like entrepreneurs, taught us to be practical, to shrug and say, ‘But the powerful will be a bit corrupt, a bit like this, a bit like that.’ In the 80s, ordinary people used to think like activists.
There is another reason why a Bofors-like story cannot be so powerful today. In the 80s, our lives were small. We had two kinds of cinema, one kind of theatre, one or two TV channels, two or three kinds of cars. In such a small world where we lived like villagers, a big story about a leader was memorable; it had gravitas. Today, it is hard to move us with merely important things. What moves us are things that remind us of us, or things that we misunderstand as being about us.
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Bofors Gate may remind many of us that we only knew, or remember, the synopsis of the story. As I was reading the book, I was reminded that I only knew the shady bits, and only vaguely, not the people who were exonerated. I recall how the Bofors story became even more intense after the name of Amitabh Bachchan was dragged in. We didn’t know until then that he had a brother, Ajitabh Bachchan, who was accused of receiving kickback money on behalf of the Gandhis. Subramaniam says that this was a plant right from the start, and there was no truth to it.
It was a time, it seemed, when nobody sued the media, and the powerful had no real control over journalism. I’m not so naive to believe that it was a particularly ethical time. Just that the whole game was still new and people were still figuring out how to play it.
People might be tempted to say that the Bofors story changed the modern history of India because it contributed to the political fall of Rajiv Gandhi, and a string of events since then took him to Sriperumbudur, where he was assassinated. It did change history, but then everything changes history. A man choosing to take a right turn instead of left can change history.
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What the Bofors story certainly did was brand the Congress party in a certain way. Since then, any allegation of financial corruption stuck easily to the party, reaching its peak in the anti-corruption movement a little over a decade ago. It is fascinating, then, that we still do not know who the political recipients of the Bofors bribe were. This despite the fact that the Congress party has been out of power for very long periods since it lost its parliamentary majority in 1989, and has become even more insignificant over the past decade.
The howitzer gun, meanwhile, turned out to be very good and was deployed successfully in the Kargil War, and its tech-transfer to Indian versions, too, has been impressive, just as Bofors had promised.
The author is a journalist, novelist, and the creator of the Netflix series, ‘Decoupled’.
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