NEW DELHI, January 22: The BJP announced today that it had abandoned its efforts to forge an alliance with Lakshmi Parvati and will go it alone in Andhra Pradesh. However it made a handsome gain in Vinod Khanna, the hero of numerous Hindi films, who will contest on the party ticket from Gurdaspur (Punjab).The party also stepped up attack on Sonia Gandhi and demanded that the government immediately release the CBI's SIT report on the Bofors scandal which recommends the prosecution of her close friend Ottavio Quattrochi.
Party spokesman M Venkaiah Naidu said that Sonia Gandhi had dared the government to release the Bofors papers secure in the knowledge that the Swiss documents could not be made public.
The BJP accused the government of sitting on the 250-page report of the CBI's special investigation team (SIT) which was submitted during Deve Gowda's tenure. "The Gujral government has pleaded that papers received from the Swiss authorities on the Bofors payoffs cannot be made public since they are meant
only for trial purposes. But there is no such restriction on the CBI's SIT report," Naidu said.
The report, he said, recommends the prosecution of senior retired bureaucrats and Ottavio Quattrochi, the close friend of Rajiv and Sonia Gandhi. In July 1993, though the Swiss authorities made public the fact that Quattrochi was a beneficiary of the payoff, he was allowed to flee the country by the Narasimha Rao government. BJP leader Vajpayee also criticised Sonia for raking up the Bofors issue.
"The UF government should make public whatever documents it has on Bofors ..it should come out with its own findings if it cannot divulge the Swiss Bank documents due to the undertaking given to the Switzerland Government," Vajpayee said addressing rallies at Allahabad and Gorakhpur.
Meanwhile, the party released the names of 17 more candidates this afternoon, including 11 from AP. Prominent among them are Ganga Charan Rajput (Hamirpur), Ila Pant (Nainital) and Vinod Khanna.
Copyright © 1998 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
