NEW DELHI, July 6: The Bofors guns have begun to boom againand this time it isn't due to any journalistic or judicial enterprise. As the controversy enters its 11th year and the CBI prepares to receive the final set of documents from the Swiss, India's former Ambassador in Stockholm B M Oza has come out with a book saying that he has ``no doubt'' that former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi had received bribes in the gun deal through Ottavio Quattrocchi.

Oza was posted in Stockholm from 1984-1988the period in which he alleges Rajiv Gandhi and members of the Prime Minister's Office (PMO) indulged in a massive cover-up. He retired from the Indian Foreign Service in 1994.

Oza writes that it was his interrogation by the CBI earlier this year that ``filled his heart with a sense of suffocation'' provoking him to write the book. In the preface to the book, titled Bofors: The Ambassador's Evidence, he says that in 1992 he had sought permission from the then Prime Minister P V Narasimha Rao to write his account and ``clear my chest of the Bofors Bronchitis.'' He was advised to wait until retirement.

Oza thus becomes the second Government official besides former army Chief General, K Sundarji, to expose the high-level machinations that went on after the Bofors scandal broke in 1987.

For Bofors watchers, Oza's book may not provide much in terms of fresh documentary evidence but it provides revealing circumstantial links as seen by a diplomat who was at the receiving end of the pulls and pressures from Rajiv Gandhi's PMO when the scandal peaked in New Delhi. Oza says that during his tenure in Stockholm his appreciation of Rajiv Gandhi's role in the Bofors deal had undergone a ``metamorphosis.''

He says in March 1986, when Rajiv Gandhi asked Swedish Prime Minister Ingvar Carlsson to give the howitzer gun contract to Bofors, he thought Rajiv was ``forthright and clean.'' When the Swedish Radio first reported the kickbacks in April 1987 and the Indian premier dismissed the story as mischievous, Oza says he thought he was being ``impetuous.''

Taking his chronology of corruption further, Oza says that even when Rajiv Gandhi personally spoke to Carlsson and asked him to terminate the official probe and later called off the visit of Bofors officials to India, he felt the Prime Minister was being ``naive'', ``clumsy'' and ``confused.''

However, he goes on, by the time Rajiv Gandhi refused to support the Swedish public prosecutor Lars Ringberg's investigations, he was convinced the prime minister had something to hide. Finally, Oza concludes, when the name of Quattrocchi had come out in the open, though he was well into his retirement, he was convinced about Rajiv Gandhi's guilt. ``I had no doubt in my mind that they (the commissions) were actually the bribe money for Rajiv Gandhi paid by Bofors through Quattrocchi... He got the deal swung in favour of Bofors and that too in a record time. He could not have done this without Rajiv Gandhi's support. What more evidence do you want?''

Oza, it now transpires, spent his years in Stockholm doing much more than writing aide memoirs. After the Bofors scandal broke the Indian Ambassador did his own sleuthing -- he initially contacted journalists from the Swedish Radio and later kept a line open to Lars Ringberg. This was obviously not liked by New Delhi and on more than one occasion, he reveals, officials from the PMO telephoned him and asked him to go slow.

On one occasion, he says, Rajiv Gandhi had expressed his disapproval at his interventions at a meeting of the Cabinet Committee of Political Affairs (CCPA) and had proposed he be immediately recalled or transferred from Stockholm. It was Foreign Secretary, K P S Menon who had intervened and he stayed on in Stockholm till 1988. When he left, he says it was hardly surprising that the next posting given to him by the Rajiv Gandhi Government was a ``punishment posting.'' Besides the behind-the-scenes on the Bofors scam, the former Ambassador's book is a scathing indictment on the functioning of the PMO under Rajiv Gandhi.

He says the PMO had developed a ``bluff and bluster'' style of operations and had seriously undermined the role of the Ministry of External Affairs. ``This bluff and bluster culture,'' he claims, ``literally transformed the key functionaries in the PMO into mafias. They could get away by issuing any instructions to anybody in the name of the Prime Minister without being accountable if nothing was put in writing.''

The book reveals a sequence of events showing that in the aftermath of the expose on Bofors it was officials of the PMO, in particular Joint Secretary Ronen Sen who would telephone the Ambassador in Stockholm and issue instructions-always on telephone. As far as the Bofors investigation was concerned Oza alleges the PMO `` systematically and deliberately bypassed the embassy channel and dealt with the Swedish authorities. This was highly undesirable and the most guilty in the long line of officials was the top man Rajiv Gandhi himself.''

Copyright © 1997 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.