BHOPAL, June 15: Almost 16 months after six top Congress leaders of Madhya Pradesh were indicted in the infamous hawala case, charges against four of them have been dropped by the courts.

The acquittal of the four leaders, one by one, has not been a surprise for them since they were all confident that once the case went to the courts they would be pronounced innocent and be able to wipe out the stigma attached to their names.

Senior Congress leader and former union minister, Kamalnath who was the fourth leader from Madhya Pradesh to be acquitted last week, has already said it was ``unfortunate that there was no system to fix accountability for the torture that he had to undergo in the last 16 months because of a case in which the courts found no evidence to proceed against him.''

Kamalnath has also said that he would write a letter soon to former Prime Minister P V Narasimha Rao explaining in detail the damage that the Congress has suffered following its leaders being implicated in the hawala case. Although leaders from other states were also named in the case, Madhya Pradesh bore the brunt of it with as many a six of its top leaders coming under a cloud.

These six were former union ministers, Vidya Charan Shukla, Madhavrao Scindia, Kamalnath and Arvind Netam, senior Congress leader, Arjun Singh and former Uttar Pradesh Governor, Motilal Vora.

Those against whom charges in the hawala case have been dropped till now were Shukla, Singh, Scindia and Kamalnath and there is a strong possibility that Vora and Netam would also be cleared soon.

Shukla, Scindia, Kamalnath and Netam were union ministers when the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) sought permission to prosecute them in the hawala case and this forced all of them to resign from the union council of ministers.

All four came to be known as hawala-tainted and were denied Congress tickets for contesting the June 1996 Lok Sabha elections.

Of them only Scindia left the party and formed the Madhya Pradesh Vikas Congress and won from Gwalior in the last parliamentary elections. Scindia returned to Congress late last year after Sitaram Kesri took over as party president.

Shukla did not contest while the wives of Kamalnath and Netam contested from their constituencies of Chhindwara and Kanker in Bastar district and got elected.

Earlier this year, Kamalnath's wife, Alkanath resigned from the Lok Sabha but in the bye-election held on February eight, her husband lost to veteran BJP leader and former Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister, Sunderlal Patwa.

Arjun Singh could contest the Lok Sabha elections as he was the working president of the All India Indira Congress(Tiwari) at that time but he lost in Satna to Sukhlal Khushwaha of the Bahujan Samaj Party. Singh has also since then returned to Congress after it merged with All India Indira Congress (Tiwari).MP Chief Minister Digvijay Singh was the only person who had stated publicly that Congress tickets should not be denied to leaders on the ground that their names figured in the hawala case.

The high command however, chose to ignore his viewpoint and denied tickets to four former union ministers and this was one of the reasons for the party's poor performance during the Lok Sabha elections in MP.

Copyright © 1997 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.