On February 4, 2004, the Delhi High Court formally cleared Rajiv Gandhi off all involvement in the Bofors. This is no surprise: 17 years since the Swedish radio first broadcast that bribes had been paid to unnamed Indian officials to secure the contract from India for the sale of Bofors gun, the CBI failed to find even a scrap of evidence against Rajiv Gandhi, one of the accused in the case. Exonerating Rajiv from the case, Justice J D Kapoor said, ‘So far as public servants namely late Rajiv Gandhi and late (Defence Secretary) S K Bhatnagar are concerned, 16 long years of investigation by a premier agency of the country– could not unearth a scintilla of evidence against them for having accepted bribe/illegal gratification in awarding the contract in favour of A.B. Bofors, now rechristened Kartongen Kemi Ochi Forvaltning AB, which had won the bid to supply 410 guns to the country.

’Justice Kapoor speaks of the Bofors case as’ –a nefarious example which manifestly demonstrates how the trial and justice by media can cause irreparable, irreversible and incalculable harm to the reputation of a person and shunning of his family, relatives and friends by the society. Fairness of trial is of paramount importance as without such a protection there would be trial by media which no civilized society can and should tolerate.’

Rajiv Gandhi, India’s most popularly elected Prime Minister and the nation’s brand manager, has turned in his grave for 13 long years. More debilitatingly, the motivated controversy crippled his soul for the four years he was alive and fighting wild allegations of kickbacks in the gun deal fanned by a man who became Prime Minister on the crest of what now transpires to have been a pack of cunningly knit lies floating on an agenda of power propulsion.

Yes, Rajiv’s exoneration in the Bofors gun scam has come as a great vindication. But that’s a bit too less and a bit too late. Here was a man on whom epithets like fierce nationalist and visionary found their most potent identity. Here was a man who was sincerely engaged in changing the culture of impassive politics into interactive progression. Here was a man who knew how to put a nation of immense potential into a channelliser of prestige, welfare and economic liberation. And here was a man who was craftily pushed into a web of false and sticky allegations which not only crippled him and his work but also took away the best initiative India had at that time. He was a rare leader of singular honesty who could have taken the nation on a vertical climb to global prestige. It is, thus, to the discredit of the entire nation that he lay in his grave, watching helplessly the raw vilification of a family he loved so much.

Apologies for this mass misdemeanor are required from every segment of India - from us, the electorate who downed a good leader with eyes and brains as widely shut as we kept our weak ears open; from the persons who cried foul every time Rajiv rose in self defense; from an investigative agency that kept propitiating charges hopefully, knowing there were none; from a judiciary that took so long in giving back a man’s prestige which was his life-support; from political leaders who chanted corruption without verification, and last, but not the least, from the system itself which allowed such an atrocity to not just happen but also fester on innocence. V P Singh has expressed relief at Rajiv’s name being cleared and has now asserted that, ‘...at no point did I charge that Rajiv personally took money in the Bofors affair.’ For a memory walk, the 64-crore scandal erupted in 1987 when Swedish radio reported that the Bofors firm had paid more than 50 million dollars in bribes to secure a contract for a one-point-four-billion-dollar sale of field guns to the Indian Army, against stiff international competition. The bribes were paid into secret Swiss bank accounts. Indian authorities obtained documents relating to the accounts after a seven-year legal battle with Swiss authorities. The scandal created a political uproar in India, and Bofors became a symbol of political corruption. It tarnished the image of Rajiv Gandhi, leading to his party’s defeat in the 1989 General Elections, two years before his assassination.

Investigations into the Bofors case have been painfully slow and the center of much political controversy. Governments led or supported by the Congress Party have been accused of trying to bury the case. Come to think of it, and it has been clear for anyone interested in truth, the Bofors campaign was about everything other than corruption in public positions. It was an opposition vehicle to catapult itself into ultimate power. It was a tool in the hands of unscrupulous vested interests to keep out clean leaders like Rajiv from the chosen path. In retrospect, it was also the most debilitating example of how vulnerable truth is to the machinations of propelled falsehoods. Rajiv Gandhi was a victim of this vicious web of lies which are so much the staple of politics in India, a staple that a growing nation like ours can only ill afford.

If you see Rajiv’s political trajectory, he was a man not magnanimous with mistakes. But there was one mistake he committed inadvertently - he believed that people at the helm in corporations like A B Bofors would not be lying when they categorically said that agents had been sacked and no payments were made with respect to sales made to India, and stood by the offered version. Vir Sanghvi has described the situation very aptly in his column‚ ‘Counterpoint’, and it would be best to reproduce his words here: ‘He made a crucial mistake which more or less sealed his fate from the very beginning. This was his claim that Bofors had paid no commission. Yes, Bofors had told the defense ministry that it had sacked its agents. But how could the government of India know that this was true? And why should it care even if Bofors had paid commissions as long as India got the best gun at the best price? But once Rajiv was committed to this position, then his government was sunk. All that the Opposition needed to show was that commissions had been paid. It was not even necessary to display that they had been paid to Rajiv. It still rebounded on the Prime Minister because he had said that no commissions were paid. And sure enough, as The Hindu proved, commissions had been paid, after all.’