Ahead of his visit to Sweden, President Pranab Mukherjee on Tuesday set off a controversy by pointing out that no Indian court has given its verdict on the >Bofors case and therefore it cannot be officially denoted as a “scandal.”
Speaking to Swedish national daily Dagens Nyheter at Rashtrapati Bhavan, Mr. Mukherjee said: “No Indian court has given [its] verdict on it [Bofors case], and no process of trial is going on…and unless somebody, some authoritative institution describes it as a scandal and punishes, how could you say it is a scandal. You may have some doubts, you may have some suspicion, but that is not proof.”
The President was replying to a question on the >Bofors issue that rocked the corridors of power in the late 1980s and raised questions on the involvement of some senior Congress leaders, including the then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi.
Asked whether the >Bofors case was a “media trial,” Mr. Mukherjee, who was a long-standing member of the Congress and served as a Union Minister during the successive Congress regimes, said: “I do not know. I am not describing it, you are putting that word. Don’t put that word.”
Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar declined to speak on the issue. “I cannot comment on that. You will have to ask him [President Mukherjee] what condition he was in when he spoke. If you ask me, the quality of Bofors is good,” he said.
