Mediaport's Disclosures Regarding Dassault Aviation Must Be Probed
By A Special Correspondent
First publised on 2021-11-12 07:13:52
About the Author
Defence purchases have always attracted controversy and allegations of kickbacks as they involve huge amounts of money and the process is not transparent given the nature of the deals. Even if the need for the equipment is not questioned, the way it is acquired and the amount paid for it is being questioned with unfailing regularity. Although the Congress party, especially Rahul Gandhi (he coined the slogan "chowkidaar chor hai" and carried Rafale models at each of his rallies in the 2019 elections to rub it in) alleged kickbacks in the Rafale deal, it could not produce evidence to substantiate the charges. But now, Mediaport, a French media company, has disclosed that a bribe of Euro 7.5 million was paid to middlemen by aircraft manufacturer Dassault Aviation through some firms in Mauritius between 2007 and 2012 when the UPA was in power. NDTV.com has reported that bribes were paid from 2002 to 2012 which means the process of payoffs started when the first NDA headed by Atal Behari Vajpayee was in power.
Immediately after the disclosures, the Congress and the BJP have engaged in a war of words and have been blaming each other. The BJP has called the Indian National Congress (INC) as the 'I Need Commission' party while the Congress has wondered why the government is not ordering an inquiry. Political slugfests are not going to take us anywhere as the Bofors case showed. What is needed is an independent inquiry that will establish why and how the kickbacks were paid and who were the end beneficiaries in the government, the armed forces or the political parties. The middlemen and the companies through which the funds were routed were just fronts - in the end it were the people who could influence the decision that got the major share of the payoffs. The people of India need to know about the shady deals and the corruption in defence procurement, even if it happened in the past.
