Rahul Bedi 
Chandigarh: Interminable inquiries by successive governments into innumerable cases of dodgy defence deals over the past four decades, had failed not only in establishing criminality and securing convictions, but also ended up impeding military modernisation and adversely impacting the operational efficiency of all three services.
The endlessness of such investigations was recently highlighted by the Supreme Court while granting bail to Christian James Michel, the principal accused in the sale of 12 AgustaWestland Aw-101 helicopters to the Indian Air Force’s (IAF’s) VIP squadron, that was scrapped 15 years ago in 2010, following corruption allegations.
“Given the pace at which the case is proceeding, the trial will not be completed even in the next 25 years, going by what your conduct has been,” the court told the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and the Enforcement Directorate (ED) on February 12, jointly prosecuting the AW-101 case since 2013.
Considering that the petitioner, the two-judge bench added, who was extradited (from Dubai) has been in custody for over six years, and despite three chargesheets and two supplementary chargesheets, the investigation was still ongoing (without result).
The never-ending period surrounding the AW-101 case is not an exception, but the norm. Over the years the CBI has inquired into all such dubious materiel imports, like 410 Swedish Bofors howitzers, four diesel-electric German HDW submarines, 1,000 South African anti-materiel rifles, Israeli Barak surface-to-air missiles (SAMs), Rolls Royce engines, Brazilian Embraer aircraft and Tatra military vehicles to name a handful, but failed miserably in determining culpability in them all.
India’s premier federal investigating agency’s recurring ineptitude in this regard brings to mind the 1999 suggestive The Times of India headline, “Nobody killed Jessica (Lal)” that later became the title of a Bollywood biopic, relating to the shooting dead of the 34-year-old model of that name at a trendy South Delhi eatery. Dozens of patrons witnessed Jessica’s shooting at point-blank range by one of the guests, enraged at being refused a drink by her, but thereafter it incredulously emerged that nobody had actually killed her.
This was despite dozens of guests at the gathering identifying Manu Sharma, the son of a prominent Congress Party MP as the shooter who was acquitted, prompting the beguiling newspaper headline. A sustained media campaign years later, however, did result in Sharma’s deferred conviction, but no such investigative or judicial vindication has ever ensued in seemingly dubious defence deals.
Instead, this failure has concurrently had an adverse consequence – that of adversely impacting force modernisation and the military’s operational functioning. It is nobody’s case that corruption and transgression in military contracts should, in any way, be overlooked and not probed; but it’s an immutable reality that the CBI’s reputation in this regard is as disappointing as the Ministry of Defence’s (MoD’s) record in debatable decision making in attempting to augment India’s military capability.
CBI inquiries into l’afaire Bofors, which rocked India in 1987, and was largely responsible for former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s Congress party’s defeat in the 1989 general elections, lasted 25 years and cost the exchequer Rs 250 crore to investigate, before they were formally closed in 2011, with no convictions. Recent news reports, however, have startlingly revealed that the CBI dispatched a letter rogatory or judicial request earlier this week to the US seeking information from a private investigator inquiring into alleged kickbacks of Rs 64 crore in the Bofors howitzer import that were allegedly paid into Swiss bank accounts, 38 years ago.
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Alongside, Geneva-based journalist Chitra Subramaniam, who regularly published her investigative reports on the Bofors scandal in The Hindu and the The Indian Express, through the late 1980s and 1990s, has claimed the existence of several ‘unopened boxes’ of Swiss documents still in the CBI’s possession. In her upcoming book ‘Bofors Gate: A Journalists Pursuit of Truth,’ Subramaniam maintained that these sealed boxes containing 500-1,000 pages of secret Swiss documents related to the howitzer deal were handed over to then CBI director Joginder Singh in 1997, but for inexplicable reasons, never opened.
Be that as it may, the Bofors scandal led to the MoD repeatedly deferring for over two decades till 2012, the option to domestically license-build the Bofors FH-77B 155mm/39 calibre howitzers based on blueprints that were transferred to the then Ordnance Factory Board, alongside the Swedish gun purchase.
This chronic delay only exacerbated the Indian Army’s (IA’s) dire artillery shortfall during the 1999 Kargil war and an extended period thereafter, when it faced challenges from a recidivist Pakistan along the line of control in Jammu and Kashmir. Eventually, after the CBI came up with nothing, the MoD operationalised the howitzers drawings to develop and upgrade the 155mm/45 cal ‘Dhanush’ howitzers that are presently being inducted into service to make up for enduring artillery shortfalls.
Similarly, CBI investigations into the HDW submarine contract, which included the outright purchase of two ‘hunter-killer’ Type 209/1500 boats from Germany’s HDW and Mazagaon Dockyard Limited (MDL) licence, building the remaining two platforms, via a transfer of technology, proved gravely detrimental to the Indian Navy’s (IN’s) underwater asset inventory. It spawned what the IN even today distressingly refers to as the ‘lost decade’ between 1995 and 2005, when MDL’s submarine construction facilities were rendered idle, predicated to the CBI’s inquiries which, after some two decades, too were terminated without outcome.
However, this hiatus in submarine building led to MDLs specialised submarine workforce, especially skilled underwater welders seeking alternative employment abroad. And, in 2005 after India signed a deal with France to licence-build six Scorpene SSKs, MDL had to resurrect its submarine construction facilities and re-induct a specialised workforce at great cost.
But even the licence-built French submarines – five of which have already been commissioned and the sixth is scheduled to imminently enter service – were swathed in controversy, which was quickly hushed up by the IN. This centered on an investigative report in The Australian newspaper detailing the Scorpene’s operational and combat capabilities, like their stealth features, frequencies at which they gathered intelligence, their noise levels at various speeds, in addition to their diving depths, range and endurance. Also specified were the speed and conditions for using the submarine’s periscope, and propeller and radiated noise levels that occurred when the boat surfaced. The newspaper report also included detailed aspects of the platform’s torpedo launch, communication and navigation systems.
In response, the IN dismissed the revelations, declaring that the documents posted by The Australian had been duly examined and posed no security compromise, as vital operational parameters had been redacted by the newspaper itself. But senior naval veterans and security analysts questioned the IN’s assertions, as did The Australian’s reporter responsible for the expose.
“These leaks had potentially restricted the operational scope and capability of the Scorpene boats even before they were inducted into service,” said a senior retired naval officer. The IN, he added, requesting anonymity, would need to be ‘especially creative’ in employing these platforms, as a large proportion of their competence had been duly compromised.
Moreover, the CBI’s probe into the 12 AW-101 helicopters for contravening the MoD’s Integrity Pact and employing the services of an ‘agent,’ led to the termination of all contracts with its parent company Finmeccanica-later Leonardo – and all its other 38 subsidiaries. This latter proscription included Italy’s Whitehead Alenia Sistemi Subacquei (WASS), which had been contracted to supply 98 Black Shark heavy-weight torpedoes (HWTs), to the IN for its Scorpene’s that had been specially designed to install them.
Terminating the HWT contract led to the Scorpenes being armed with upgraded German-origin, SUT torpedoes acquired in the mid-1980s that IN officers themselves conceded were a ‘poor substitute’. And last December, seven years after the WASS procurement was terminated, the MoD signed a Rs 877-crore contract with France’s Naval Group, to arm all six Scorpene’s with Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO)-designed ‘Varunastra’ Electronic HWTs.
However, the price of the torpedoes, manufactured by Bharat Dynamics Limited was not intimated by the MoD via the Press Information Bureau on December 30, 2024, and would be an additional cost. Industry estimates price each Varunastra torpedo between Rs 10-12 crore and 98 of them, as indented for originally by the IN, would cost an extra Rs 980-1,176 crore.
Meanwhile, the outcome of the AW-101 deal which went into arbitration is unknown 15 years after it was scrapped. Four AW-101s which were delivered to the IAF were reportedly mothballed in Delhi, with their status remaining undefined, predicated to the outcome of the corruption case allegedly involving Michel. Ironically, even Michael, according to legal experts, has served more time in Tihar Jail as an under-trial, than he would have had he been convicted.
Earlier in 2016, the CBI’s preliminary enquiry (PE) into the procurement of three Brazilian Embraer EMB-145 aircraft by the DRDO in 2008, for its Indigenous aircraft early warning and control (AEW&C) programme, had revealed that $5.5 million was illegally paid as commission to an ‘overseas agent’ to facilitate the sale. The CBI, for its part, was reacting to a report by the Brazilian newspaper Folha De S Paulo, but then it seemed the trail went cold and the entire inquiry floundered inconclusively, leading to choric delays in the AEW&C project.
In late 2013, the CBI filed a closure report on its eight-year-long inquiry into alleged wrongdoing by South Africa’s state-owned armaments maker Denel, to secure the contract to supply 1,000 NTW-20 anti-materiel rifles and 398,000 rounds of ammunition to the IA for an estimated $40 million. In its report filed before a special CBI court in Delhi, the investigative agency claimed it had failed to uncover any ‘credible’ evidence of corruption in the rifle procurement as a consequence of which Denel, that produced a range of competitively priced weaponry which India needed and could have acquired, was blacklisted for years.
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And in May 2023 the CBI filed a corruption case against Rolls Royce, two London-based Indian expatriates – deemed ‘middlemen’ or agents – and ’unnamed’ officials from Hindustan Aeronautics Limited and the MoD for supplying Adour Mk871 engines to power licence-built BAE Systems Hawk 132 advanced jet trainers for the IN and the IAF. This occurred a whopping 19 years after the engine deal was signed in 2004 and nearly eight years after the CBI’s PE into their import in 2016.
Space constraints impede tabulating a larger list of analogous cases unsuccessfully undertaken by the CBI, but others comprise the contract with Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) to locally manufacture Barak-8 SAMs for all three services in conjunction with the DRDO. It also investigated terminated tenders for air defence guns once, and twice for light utility helicopters, amongst numerous other purchases, but failed in ascertaining any blameworthiness or fault in any.
Several of these cases have seen arrests but no convictions, with the majority ending either in acquittals or being dropped, largely due to lack of evidence. In some instances, like in the AW-101 case, overseas courts had imposed convictions on individuals linked to the deal, but CBI-related proceedings, for their part, have been beleaguered by complex procedural hurdles, political interference, or simply the passage of time with no government ever demanding accountability from the CBI.