We Had More Shame in the 1980s: Remember Bofors?

A book on that scandal takes us back to a time that seems very distant from the era we now inhabit

- MANU JOSEPH

Like a song or a smell, the word 'Bofors' illuminates a time in the lives of my generation. Among the people, spaces and movies that raised us in the 80s was the persistence of 'Bofors,' and its associated words, like 'kickbacks' and 'Win Chadha'.

In the Madras of the time, what The Hindu said was the word to us. And the Bofors scandal was the newspaper's biggest story. It implied that the top echelons of the Congress, including Rajiv Gandhi, may have accepted a bribe to buy guns made by the Swedish company Bofors, once a steel-maker that was acquired by Alfred Nobel, who converted it into an arms maker. (The implication was never proven.) The bylines of Chitra Subramaniam, who is widely regarded as the person who revealed the most about the scandal, and N. Ram, the newspaper's editor, became just as familiar to teenagers as 'Bofors'. (It was a time when teenagers read the newspaper, though we may not have gone beyond the headline, byline and maybe the first paragraph of an article.)

Chitra Subramaniam has come out with a book on how she investigated the story. Her Bofors Gate is also, inevitably, about a time. People tend to say of the past that it was a 'simpler time,' but what does it mean? No time is simple. This book shows us the complexity of that era, its lack of innocence.

There was one major difference though. In the 80s, we didn't consider it remarkable that a string of investigative stories would roil a powerful government.