Remember Som Nath Thapa?

Remember Som Nath Thapa?
Sunil Jain

Chances are you won't remember Additional Commissioner Som Nath Thapa who was posted at the Marine Prevention wing in Mumbai till 1993, when he was arrested under TADA for allowing those involved in the Bombay blasts to smuggle RDX -- Thapa's now being tried for his role, along with R.K. Singh, his assistant commissioner. I don't know either, but colleagues of theirs say there's no way that they'd knowingly have allowed smuggling of RDX.

What they would have gone along with, was the more `innocent' smuggling of silver, or vitamin B1, or perhaps gold in the pre-liberalisation days. So, how did the RDX come in? It's likely the smuggling gangs whose activities Thapa overlooked kept importing silver, and after many months of doing this to fool the customs, these gangs began importing the RDX.

This, in fact, is the crux of the Olga customs fraud that this newspaper has written so many pieces on. It is well-established by now that customs officers at the Indira Gandhi International Airport in Delhi were allowing at least one Uzbek gang to operate freely under their noses.

So freely, that as this newspaper documented, customs officers were not even examining the baggage brought in by gang members. And in order not to inconvenience the gang, customs officials used to prepare adjudiction orders well before the goods even came into the airport. Some fictitious amount of goods and a description would be entered in this document -- this is supposed to be made after a physical verification of imports -- and an import duty would be fixed on this. This would then be paid by the importer, and no one was any the wiser about the actual goods brought or their quantity. In two cases documented, the adjudication orders were kept ready on days that Olga Kozireva -- one of the gang's couriers -- never even arrived at the airport.

Okay, that shows great complicity, you'll say, but so what? Aren't customs officials who are being bribed by smuggling syndicates supposed to be fudging papers on behalf of them? Yes, they are, but that's my point. This was not just ordinary smuggling, and it had a much bigger security implication. With the syndicate having free run over the airport, what's to prevent them, or ensure that they were not smuggling arms?

After all, if the Additional Commissioner in charge of the airport V.K. Singh Kushwah could prepare a fake adjudication order for Olga, it's quite clear that he wasn't even bothering to see what she was bringing in, in fact he wasn't even bothered if she was coming into the country! In fact, the Finance Ministry's letter detailing Kushwah's misdemeanours cites instances of how customs officials routinely crossed out and changed the value of goods, and their description, not just for Olga but for several other regulars from Uzbekistan. So you can just imagine how porous the airport is.

But what's the actual proof of arms or drugs coming in? On at least two occasions bullet-proof jackets were brought in by these Uzbek nationals -- in October 1999 and June 2000. The customs officers, in one case Kushwah himself, cleared these on payment of a nominal import duty -- who these were for, whether they were legal, they clearly weren't bothered. Olga, by the way, was also a regular visitor to Pakistan, if that means anything to you.

What makes this episode so frightening is that the probe has been riddled with political interference -- till February 15, just 19 officers had been suspended even though the investigation report asked for suspension of 42 persons. Top ministers and bureaucrats pleaded with Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha asking him not to suspend Kushwah -- it was only after this paper ran several pieces on the scam that, on February 20, the ministry sent him a letter detailing the charges against him, giving him 10 days to reply to them.

Worse, the two officers in the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence (DRI) who are in charge of the investigation -- D.D. Ingty and Rajiv Talwar -- have both had long postings at the IGI Airport during the time Olga and her accomplices were operating out of the airport. Now surely this is something that A.K. Pandey, who heads the vigilance wing at the Central Board of Excise and Customs, should be knowing -- Pandey has spent a dozen years in Delhi in just this business, including at the airport and the DRI.

So it certainly does smell cover-up. Worse, the probe has been restricted to just the past few months, when it is well known that the Olga gang was operating for the past three years. Does this have something to do with the fact that previous commissioners at the airport include Vijaya Zutshi (wife of the DRI chief), and N. Raja who is now the Director General Vigilance?

Also, if an Uzbek gang, with an obvious English language problem, could have such a free-run, imagine what could be happening with flights from the Middle East or South East Asia. Now that the budget-making exercise is over, perhaps Yashwant Sinha would like to order a full probe, and keep Parliament posted. And for starters, perhaps the DRI's report, no matter how limited it is, could be laid on the floor of the house.

He's a customs official sentenced under TADA, for his role in allowing RDX smuggling.