Published recently, Chitra Subramaniam's Boforsgate: A Journalist's Pursuit of Truth is the inside story of her exposé on the Bofors scandal. Here's an excerpt:
The phone rang one day when I was trying to get Nikhil to bed. Carlo answered it.
‘Who wants to speak to Chitra?’ I heard him ask. ‘Spell the name.’
I heard him say ‘B A C H A N’.
‘I got it – CH – I got it,’ said Carlo.
The person on the other side must have said ‘C H C H’. By this time, Carlo was irritated. With Nikhil on my shoulder, I ran to the phone to see what Carlo had written. He had noted down ‘Amitabh Bachchan’. My jaw dropped to the floor.
Was Mr Bachchan trying to reach me? The name meant little to Carlo and that was a blessing. He remained calm and went to the kitchen to see what we could have for dinner. I placed a sleeping Nikhil in his baby cot, and we prepared dinner together.
I’ve written earlier that I’m not impressed per se by power, names or money, but Mr Bachchan was a gentleman actor for whom I had a lot of respect. Over a dinner of spaghetti, salad and a glass of red wine, I explained to Carlo who he was, his place in the Indian film industry and his erudition as a scholar of Hindi poetry and language. We also spoke about Mr Bachchan’s wife, Jaya Bachchan, née Bhaduri, and I said it was an actor couple that the whole country admired, even revered. We spoke about Mr Bachchan’s father, Harivansh Rai Bachchan, and his iconic poem, Madhushala. I didn’t know much about Teji Bachchan except that she was a public figure and a friend of Indira Gandhi.
Carlo knew I was worried about the sixth account ever since the Indian investigators had travelled to Bern and Stockholm and the story had appeared in the DN. Bo G. was a friend and an excellent journalist, and I felt uncomfortable about his sixth account story. Journalists have their spaces and methods of work, and it has nothing to do with how one works with each other. We were collaborating closely on the story but that didn’t mean we agreed on everything. His knowledge about Bofors was valuable. To it, I brought the documents and the India angle.
Coomi kept me informed about the slander campaign in India linking me to Mr Bachchan. A group of journalists close to the government called me a ‘Bachchan mole’ that was misguiding the CBI. Prominent among them was Rajat Sharma of India TV, then working with a paper called The Daily, who was in constant touch with Uriah Heep who had been in constant touch with the Indian team while they were in Switzerland and Sweden. Travelling back and forth between India, Switzerland and Sweden was a joyride, where they could say anything without an iota of responsibility or respect to the offices they held. They had a group of journalists in India who were doing their bidding without basic fact-checking – it was fun to be famous in India. Their photographs were all over the media.
Carlo told me that I should be flattered, and we laughed. Bofors had indeed taken over our lives and vocabulary, but we had managed to keep our feet on the ground and preserved our sense of humour. When I was down and out, Carlo would encourage me to take a deep breath and return to work, reminding me that the work I had embarked upon was incomplete and that I would have to go on till the very end, as people and the family (including him) were counting on me.
I called the number that was left for me to connect with Mr Bachchan.
He came on the line. That voice, that voice … you have to hear it to believe it. We set an appointment for him to come home.
The doorbell rang on time and Carlo opened the door. There they stood – Mr Amitabh Bachchan and Mrs Jaya Bachchan. Bofors was the last thing on my mind when I set eyes on them. That iconic song from the film Abhimaan, ‘Tere Mere Milan Ki Ye Raina’, was ringing in my ears.
Mr Bachchan remarked that Carlo was taller than him, and they laughed. I knew this was going to be a nice meeting. Living with an Italian had taught me a thing or two about fashion – always look at people’s shoes first and Mr Bachchan’s were as impeccable as the rest of his clothes. Trousers falling just at the right angle, with the pleat called the spicata that breaks between the front of the foot and the back to make an elegant landing, which is especially visible when people sit. No, it’s not a straight line. It’s a spicata. Pull up your socks is what the British say, and they dress badly. There’s no ‘pull up your socks’ in Italian – their socks come up above the calf. The coat sleeves must also come down just to the right level at the palms, when you hold your hands in a certain way as an Italian couturier fits you out. Mrs Bachchan was dressed in elegant Indian attire, with a beautiful shawl draped around her. What a splendid couple they made.
I don’t get tongue-tied often, but this time I was.
We invited them in and they graciously sat in our drawing room that was also Nikhil’s playroom. Mr Bachchan sat on the sofa and Mrs Bachchan sat on the floor mattress opposite. I had tidied the room for their visit, but suddenly, sitting on the floor, I saw baby things sticking out everywhere. Mrs Bachchan smiled.
Carlo opened a bottle of good red wine and served us all. He had a trick – when he didn’t like someone, there would be no bottle of good wine.
We spoke about children, university education in India, Europe and the US. We told them that Carlo and I had met while we were students at Stanford. The Bachchans said they had two children. They asked where Nikhil was and how I managed to work on a story like Bofors with a baby. I felt good – they were regular people. No pretence, no airs and no nonsense – just like I had hoped they would be.
But heck, how often do Amitabh Bachchan and Jaya Bachchan walk into your house?
Please don’t talk to me about Bofors, please don’t, I thought, as the evening progressed. I can sing. Please ask me to recite Madhushala, or that that song from Abhimaan or even ‘Humko Man ki Shakti Dena’ from Jaya’s iconic film, Guddi.
The talk finally came around to Bofors. They were understandably troubled. I told them that I had no evidence of their involvement in the corruption. I felt small – who was I to give them a character certificate? I had my documents, Sting and Snowman were telling me they were not involved, in the secret agreed summary Bofors had assured the GoI of their innocence. But the might of the Indian government led by V.P. Singh and his top investigators had accused them of accepting bribes from Bofors! During my investigation, there was no power equation and the only powerful thing (if one may call it that) were the facts – backed by documents or people speaking to facts and explaining the context. Context was all too important – it explained why and how certain things happened, and what must be done to either question the facts or accept them. As per my investigation, the ‘sixth account’ story had neither fact nor context, and much less any content.
The meeting with the Bachchans had gone well. There were no awkward silences, no meaningless repartees or filler words. When, in a conversation, there is no one who is trying to hide something or be disrespectful, everyone learns. I pick these things up – thank you, nose.
Mr Bachchan was being hounded by the might of the Indian machinery abroad. If memory serves me right, his credit cards were frozen and there may even have been efforts to meddle with his passport. That meant he could be declared persona non grata with the Indian missions abroad if he needed any consular inputs. Win Chadha, the prime accused, was walking in and out of the Indian consulate in New York, while the same privileges were not extended to Mr Bachchan against whom there was no evidence.
Mr Bachchan and I met a few times at a village next to mine as well as our home. He spoke about his work in the film industry, the good and the difficult moments, and the roles he particularly liked. I asked if he could cry when the camera came on, to which he said it’s a skill that actors acquire. He was patient with all my questions about the film industry, about which my knowledge was limited. We developed a comfortable space where I felt I could share information with him. I told him I was aware of the slander campaign against me and my work in India, and asked if he could send me pieces he had come across. We exchanged fax numbers. A Bombay-based gossip writer, who was much older than me, joined the cacophony. She wrote that I was a brilliant journalist but needed to do something about my hair and makeup. This piece was faxed to me by Ajitabh Bachchan, who lived in Switzerland. He came home once with his wife, when his brother was visiting us.
As the French would say, Amitabh Bachchan was a grand monsieur in every sense of the word – unassuming, erudite, elegant and had a sharp intellect. He came home for a meal one day. I’d told my mother-in-law that a very nice person was coming, so she made gnocchi – one of her signature dishes with her magic touch – which was a dash of grappa and mustard that was added to the mixture of potato and white flour, after the gnocchi were rolled into a special consistency. She was at the door with me to receive him, and I introduced them to each other. Both of us went into the kitchen to ready the meal, while Carlo took care of coats and conversations till we could announce dinner.
‘Mon Dieu, il est grand et beau (My god, he is tall and handsome),’ my mother-in-law said, as we added the finishing touches to the tomato sauce and got the water to boil to dunk the gnocchi. As I took care of the food, she took out the crockery and cutlery from the kitchen cupboards, and went to our drawing and dining area. She told me she handed over everything to the grand monsieur, who graciously started laying the table. I peeped out of the kitchen in disbelief and a quiet sense of happiness. We were still making do with Carlo’s student-days dining table and here was Mr Bachchan, making it look like a king’s table that he was readying for a grand feast. He has that kind of presence. Quiet power. That’s it. He exuded quiet power that he wore lightly.
At dinner, he spoke about technology with Carlo and the future of this domain that would alter the way we would do everything. He was extremely well read, had opinions on world issues, Europe, the Americas, arts, culture and I wondered if he did crosswords. Mr Bachchan spoke about people’s expectations of him. Once, at a cricket game in Calcutta where there was a little problem, the crowd had surged towards him to find a solution, he said. He had held up both his hands indicating they should stop, and the crowds had receded. It was a beautiful image, almost biblical. It was raw and spoke of power worn gracefully and peacefully, even as he continued to eat and asked me to compliment my mother-in-law on her gnocchi. We were so engrossed in the conversation that we forgot that a chocolate cake had showed up on the table, courtesy my mother-in-law. She had cleared the table, done the dishes and gone into the room to be with Nikhil who was beginning to stir.
Then, one day, the Indian ambassador to the UN in Geneva (I would be persona non grata depending on the government in Delhi) called, asking if he could meet Mr Bachchan. The ‘mole’ story was doing its rounds. They wanted him to be the environment ambassador to the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) in Nairobi and the Geneva-based high officer, an Indian, wanted to make the request. Appointment fixed, the Indian ambassador, his wife and the Geneva head of UNEP came home. Mr Bachchan had already arrived. The ambassador’s wife gifted me a small kajal (kohl) box for Nikhil – a traditional Indian gift for young mothers.
The Ambassador explained the purpose of the meeting, and the UNEP gentleman took the floor. He went through numbers, people, international work, documents, studies available as well as those in progress, the damage to the Amazon, the future problems for India and the importance of people like Mr Bachchan to lead the global call for justice from India. The presentation lasted well over half an hour. What was Mr Bachchan going to say?
He said environmental degradation was a matter that worried him as well, but he wasn’t sure what and where the solutions could come from. He pointed to high-profile protests in Bombay with film actors, who would then return to the comfort of their homes where they continued to enjoy lifestyles that were not environmentally responsible. These ‘fashionable protests’ (my term) were for the cameras. What, he continued, would be the solution for women who had to gather wood as cooking fuel? What was the solution that was being proposed for them? He gave examples from rural India – the direction of the conversation he took, and the sweep of his knowledge made what had been said before he spoke small and irrelevant. He politely declined the request to be the environment ambassador.
L’Hebdo is a Swiss French magazine. They wanted to profile Mr Bachchan and came home to interview him. The photographer had set up the room with lights et al., and Mr Bachchan waited patiently till she was ready. She asked him if he was used to cameras and lights, to which he replied that he had had a little experience in the area and that she could take her time. A grand monsieur, I told you.
(Excerpted from Chitra Subramaniam's Boforsgate: A Journalist's Pursuit of Truth with permission from Juggernaut Books)