Will BJP's Strategy To Blame Sonia Gandhi For The AgustaWestland Scam Work?

Will the BJP’s strategy to pin the blame for the Agustawestland scam on Sonia Gandhi work?

- Sandeep Unnithan with Kaushik Deka and Uday Mahurkar

On a hot May morning, with the temperature touching 40 degrees in Lutyens’ Delhi, the Congress party’s communications chief Randeep Surjewala fights sleep and a barrage of phone calls from Congress bigwigs and the media as he crafts a counterattack strategy for the next day’s Parliament session. It has been like this for nearly a week now since a political war of words broke out, with the BJP directly targeting Congress president Sonia Gandhi and her close advisors in Parliament and outside, hurling a fusillade of bribery accusations in the Rs 3,600 crore VVIP helicopter deal signed with Italian firm Agusta Westland by the UPA in 2010. Surjewala’s late-night discussions over the scam with Sonia Gandhi’s political secretary Ahmed Patel stretch into the wee hours. He now steels Jyotiraditya Scindia, his party’s chief whip in the Lok Sabha, to tackle queries on the helicopter bribery scandal.

The immediate impetus for the BJP’s broadside against the Gandhis was the April 7 judgement of a court in Milan, convicting two executives— former CEO Giuseppe Orsi and head of the helicopter division, Bruno Spagnolini—of Italian helicopter maker Finmeccanica, for bribery. They were sentenced to four-and-a-half and four years in prison respectively for paying out bribes to the tune of 30 million Euros (in a variety of deals involving various countries).

The parallels with the 1987 Bofors scandal are unmistakable: both are defence bribery scandals which surfaced overseas but which had the potential of inflicting grievous domestic political harm. The Milan court’s 225-page judgement painstakingly documented how a ring of middlemen had allegedly bribed family members of the then air force chief S.P. Tyagi and possibly, bureaucrats and politicians, to change tender specifications and knock a rival helicopter firm out of contention.