Chitra Subramaniam’s new book, Boforsgate, explains the plot to ‘fix’ the Bachchans

A major dilemma that Chitra Subramaniam faced while investigating the Bofors defence scandal — which shook Indian politics in the late 1980s and made her a household name in the country back then – was whether or not to trust the Indian investigation team that told her that there was a sixth Swiss bank account holder who received kickbacks to help secure the Indian government’s purchase of Swedish Howitzer guns.

The name of the sixth account holder was Amitabh Bachchan, a team member told her. The Bollywood icon’s name was not mentioned in the First Information Report (FIR) filed in India. Subramaniam was also told that Swiss authorities – who were also simultaneously investigating the case – had orally communicated this “information” about Bachchan to a few members of the Indian team.

Subramaniam, who was 29 and pregnant with her first child when she began her work on the scandal involving the Rajiv Gandhi government and Swedish arms manufacturer AB Bofors in 1987, had already identified five Swiss bank account holders to whom Bofors paid the bribe to seal the deal over a French competitor. The Indian investigators visited Switzerland in January 1990.

The five other people whose bank accounts were later frozen by Swiss authorities were those held by Win Chadha (two), Ottavio Quattrocchi (one), and the Hinduja brothers (a company belonging to them had three accounts code-named Tulip, Lotus and Mont Blanc).

Subramaniam makes this revelation about the attempt to implicate Bachchan in this case in her new book titled Boforsgate: A Journalist’s Pursuit of Truth, which is now available for pre-order. It is published by Juggernaut.

Switzerland-based Subramaniam had by then written several explosive investigative stories about the defence payoff scam based on inputs and documents she had collected thanks to whistleblowers. Being a domicile of that country gave her an advantage because most of the banks where the money was paid by the Swedes to strike the contract were based there. The total bribe accounted for 11.5% of the Rs 1,437-crore contract, according to a secret agreement the documents of which are given in Subramaniam’s book.

The story about the Swedish payoff to arms dealers and Indian officials was first reported by Swedish radio Dagens Eko on April 16, 1987. Subramanian soon began chasing the story tirelessly, unearthing the money trail and people involved in the corruption scandal that rocked India. Her sources were primarily Swedish and various other officials disappointed with the probe being scuttled by people in high places in the Scandinavian country. She had used pseudonyms for most of her sources.

Her Bofors stories published in The Hindu played a role in the Congress party losing power at the Centre in the 1989 elections. Later, her stories on the topic appeared in The Indian Express and Statesman.

It was while she was still digging up more dirty truths about the role of arms dealers, manufacturers and government officials in the defence contract that the Indian investigators comprising senior officers from the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and other officials landed in Geneva and claimed that there was a sixth account holder. VP Singh had become prime minister a month earlier, trouncing the Congress party in the Grand Old Party’s second biggest election setback in independent India.

Subramaniam recalls that moment when she and a member of the Indian probe team were waiting outside the Federal Department of Justice and Police in Bern, Switzerland, where the others had gone to meet Swiss investigator Dr Pierre Schmid. To her surprise, two team members emerged from the building after meeting him, saying ecstatically, “Ek aur account mil gaya (one more account has been found)”.  She drove back to Geneva along with the team, who later joined her for dinner at her home in nearby Gland. “It was in my living room that animated discussions about Amitabh Bachchan and his brother continued,” she reveals about the plan to “fix” Amitabh Bachchan, a close friend of the late Rajiv Gandhi.

While in reality there was no such Swiss bank account, her first impulse was a sense of disbelief and then dejection. “Did I miss that story? If I run the story these men have provided to me just now, will I be allowing myself to be manipulated by people with vested interests?” Subramaniam tells Open about her worries at the time.

It took her many more months to confirm that there was no such account. A court in London later threw out the case against the so-called sixth account holder and exonerated Bachchan in the multi-dollar defence purchase case.

The book narrates Subramaniam’s scepticism about the version offered by some of the Indian investigators, “Dr Schmid was a top Swiss officer who was working with several countries, seeking information about crimes and criminals… He sat at confidential high tables around the world, and his views were solicited internationally in matters of criminal procedures in Switzerland. A typical Swiss, he was thrifty with his words and actions, and rarely advanced theories based on hearsay. What the member of the Indian team was telling me didn’t make sense.”

But then the story appeared in a Swedish tabloid, Expressen, that the Indian team had ‘discovered’ a sixth account and mentioned the Bachchan connection in the defence deal. Subramaniam says she was distraught because she was supposed to be on top of the story, and yet she decided against filing the story without any proof or word from officials. Whistleblowers who had helped her counselled her to not fall for unverified information. She still pursued the story that finally led her to Dr Schmid himself, who wondered “where the information linking the Bachchans to the account had come from”. Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter (DN) also carried the story on January 31, 1990, the same day that, Subramaniam says, “several newspapers [in India] front-paged the Bofors-Bachchan connection, recycling the Expressen story”. Of course, it all later turned out to be false. The Bachchans, who had sued the DN for defamation, went on to win the case in the London High Court.

Thanks to this experience of not falling for the plot to “fix” the Bachchans, Subramaniam says, “My learning curve was indeed steep.” She notes in the book, “Writing about it – the sixth account (holder) – like this in the book is the first time I make public what was discussed at home.”

The former Swedish Police chief and whistleblower Sten Lindstrom, who led the Bofors probe in his country, had also given Bachchan a clean chit in 2012 in an interview with Subramaniam, and had said that Indian investigators probing the scandal “planted the Bachchan angle”.

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