New Delhi: Actor Amitabh Bachchan reacted with relief in a late night blog post on Wednesday to his exoneration in the Bofors case after the main informant in the controversial deal said the case against the actor and then Congress MP and his family was planted in Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter by Indian investigators.
Former Swedish Police chief Sten Lindstrom has owned up to being the informant of journalist Chitra Subramanian who had broken the story, 25 years after the incident. In an interview that appeared on website thehoot.org, Lindstrom owned up to being the informant of journalist Chitra Subramanian who had broken the story. Lindstrom had operated under the pseudonym Swedish Deep Throat.
"I speak from personal experience and personal exoneration. 25 years after the incident, I read today from one that pioneered accusation and investigation, of innocence. Of the fault that never lay before me," Bachchan wrote in his blog.
"Of one that remained and shall perhaps remain a darkened spot, blemished beyond all recognition, but in admittance of wrong doing against me. No one shall be able to understand or even remotely fathom, the hours and days and months and years of the anguish of petulant blame that I had to go through," he wrote.
The case involved illegal payoffs and had rocked both India and Sweden in the late 1980s. Lindstrom also said there was no evidence to show that former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi had taken a bribe in the Bofors deal. However, he said Gandhi didn't stop the cover-up to protect main accused Ottavio Quattrochi.
Bachchan said "those that colluded in desperation still abound, without as much as a conscious twitch on their well articulated and fashionably cleaned skins. And would it really have been of any relevance if they had ? Of course not!"
The Bachchans and the Gandhi family were close in 1984 when Amitabh was a Congress MP. However, the family had maintained a distance from politics following allegations of involvement in the Bofors scam. Along with the late Gandhi, the 69-year-old star was implicated in the kickbacks scandal on the Rs 1,500 crore gun deal.
His wife, Rajya Sabha MP Jaya Bachchan also spoke out. "We knew the truth 25 years back but justice takes its own time and our stand has been vindicated," she said.
The Bofors gun payoff scandal was a major corruption scandal in India during the 1980s and 1990s implicating then prime minister Rajiv Gandhi and several others who were accused of receiving kickbacks from Bofors AB for winning a bid to supply India 155 mm field howitzers. The scale of the corruption -- estimated to the tune of Rs.64 crore -- was far worse than any that India had seen before and directly led to the defeat of Gandhi's ruling Indian National Congress party in the November 1989 general elections.
A vindicated Bachchan said: "Their mission was misguidance, connived to its maximum, for issues that never ever did be of any concern in the execution of their own selfish mercenary agenda. They won momentarily. But lost ultimately. Lost position and strength and power yes, but importantly their conscience. And today that counts the most! Loss of ones conscience would have to be the most defeating element in our lives. Somewhere we shall all fall victim to it. But, greatness lies with them that redeem it in time!!"
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