As soon as the Congress-led UPA Government came to power in 2004, it took up a slew of half-baked information about arms deals during the NDA regime and wanted as many cases as possible filed against the Ministers of Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s Cabinet, which had proven to the nation that the time for coalition Governments had arrived in India.
It may be recalled that a CAG report on the Kargil coffins deal had drawn much media attention. It stated that the aluminum coffins purchased for martyred Indian soldiers were bought from an American company Buitron and Baiza were steeply priced and purchase procedures had been overruled.
However while this was true, it was bought at a time when Indian Army had run out of their coffin supplies as more and more soldiers were falling at the world’s highest battlefield.
The Government had indeed purchased 500 caskets worth $2500 each — presumed to be thirteen times the original cost. Later, Ambassadors from both India and US had declared in writing that those caskets were worth $2,768 each.
In 2001, ‘Operation Westend’ a half-baked sting operation cooked up by Tehelka’s Tarun Tejpal and Aniruddha Bahal and worked on by Mathew Samuel, had declared that the NDA Government had alleged that 15 defence deals made by the Government had involved major kickbacks and the Barak missile deal, worth Rs 1,150 crore, was one of them. Transcripts of conversations between the undercover Tehelka operative and RK Jain indicate that RK Jain accepted bribes from Suresh Nanda to the amount of Rs 1 crore.
Given that those owing allegiance to power had bagged such huge amounts of money, surely the volume of money for those in power must have been much higher — this is what was popularly believed back then.
It was this operation which caused Goerge Fernandes to voluntarily step down until an NDA-instituted commission gave him a clean chit.
Team Sonia was absolutely convinced that this was NDA’s Bofors moment. While they immediately unleashed the CBI on these so-called scams after raiding well over 35 centres in Delhi, Gurgaon, Mumbai, Bangalore and Chandigarh, their investigations led them to file chargesheets two years later in 2006. But none of them could establish a direct link with the then Defence Minister George Fernandes.
However, even seven years after the first chargesheets were filed and the UPA retained its grip at the Centre, the caged parrot CBI failed miserably to come up with an evidence to nail a single person listed in the chargesheets.
As mainstream media screamed on December 11, 2013 — seven years after claims of a grand conspiracy involving staggeringly large amounts of bribe money in the Navy’s purchase of Barak missile systems from Israel, the CBI has closed the case. No evidence has been discovered against the accused — former defence minister George Fernandes, ex-president of Samata Party Jaya Jaitly, former Navy chief Admiral Sushil Kumar, businessman Suresh Nanda — among others.
Let me add one more fact, now that years after Goerge Fernandes’s has retired from public life, and Abdul Kalam’s stepping down from the position of the President of the country. On October 10, 2006, when George Fernandes was asked by a scribe about the Barak Missile scam, he said, “If they have to make any charge, it should start with the President, who first called for it (Barak), asked for it before I went into the Government.” The President was also the father of the nuclear missile mission of India and had headed DRDO for a considerable period of time before he became a defence advisor. It was his expert opinion that the NDA Government heeded tread in matters of national security.
A decade-long grip over the nation’s affairs by Sonia Gandhi’s Congress-led UPA Government has left the country reeling under acute policy paralysis. Repeated Chinese incursions and Pakistan’s aggressive attitude towards India are forcing every citizen to doubt our abilities. Tehelka and its founding fathers’ integrity should surely be questioned because none of their so-called extensive video recordings could nail anyone they pointed fingers at. Even the commissions set up by the Government didn’t find their evidence worth their while.
Interestingly, as a standard operating procedure, every such video or audio recording needs to be sent for forensic examination, but not a single one was. Why? The answer remains a mystery. When none of the tapes and other documents could provide culpable evidence, no action was initiated against those who tried to malign top Ministers and defence officials. This raises doubts regarding whether all this was a hand-in-glove operation by Sonia Gandhi and her team of mud-slingers. What if Tejpal was a minor pawn in the bigger scheme?
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