NEW DELHI: In a major development, the Central Bureau of Investigation on Thursday filed a charge sheet against former Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao in the St. Kitts case. The filing of the charge sheet came close on the heels of the rejection of his anticipatory bail plea by the Delhi High Court in the Lakhu bhai cheating case earlier in the day. The charge sheet says when Mr. Rao was the external affairs minister in the Rajiv Gandhi government in 1986; he had entered into a criminal conspiracy with Chandraswami and others to tarnish the reputation of V P Singh by claiming that his son Ajeya Singh operated a bank account in St. Kitts’s where huge amounts of cash were stashed.

Although reports of investigations into cases against Mr, Rao have been hitting the headlines for quite some time, the framing of charges in the court of additional sessions Judge Prem Kumar plunged the Congress party which Mr. Rao headed until three days ago into gloom. For the first time the party admitted in an official statement that the CBI action against Mr. Rao “was a setback for the Congress” general secretary frankly admitted. *We are bamboozled by these developments and really don’t know how to respond to the Situation.” According to the

Charge sheet, Mr. Rao entered into a conspiracy to damage the reputation of V P Singh who had quit the Congress in 1989. He was alleged to have plotted with Chandraswami and others to discredit Mr. Singh, who was leading an anticorruption campaign against Rajiv Gandhi mainly on account of alleged Bofors payoffs.

The CBI told the court that Mr. Rao abused his position as external affairs minister to influence the Indian embassy official in Washington to forge documents to implicate V P Singh’s son, Subsequent investigations by the CBI, however, revealed there was no basis in the St. Kitts allegations. The charge sheet has been filed under IPC Section 120B (criminal conspiracy), Section 195 (fabricating evidence), Section 164 (taking gratification in order to corrupt by illegal means government servants or to exercise personal influence with public servants) and Section 471 (using forged document as genuine). While the Congress was in the doldrums, other parties rejoiced.

 

Article extracted from this publication >>  October 2, 1996