The Rediff Special / N K Singh

'Names of Narasimha Rao and of Rajiv Gandhi were dropped'

N K Singh is the CBI officer who arrested Indira Gandhi on October 3, 1977. The first time a former Indian prime minister has gone to prison. Forced to return to his home cadre in Orissa after she returned to power, this courageous and diligent Indian Police Service officer was brought back to the CBI by V P Singh's government.

One of the first cases he was assigned was the St Kitts forgeries. Unfortunately, his meticulous investigation into the case earned the wrath of the next prime minister, Chandra Shekhar, who transferred him out of the agency.

In the fourth of six extracts from his fascinating biography, The Plain Truth, N K Singh discloses how Chandra Swami's assistant Kailashnath Aggarwal pressurised Indian diplomats in the St Kitts case.

As mentioned before, K K Tewary had been able to lay his hands on two applications of Ajeya Singh for the renewal of his passport, which contained his signatures. In the meantime, Ajeya Singh had changed his style of signing his name. This was around 1986. The bank papers of St Kitts, however, carried his signatures of 1977, or in other words, those prior to 1986. But no verification of his contention was done, and he was asked to submit his original passport.

He offered his passport for inspection at his Lodi Estate house and also allowed them to take xerox copies, but declined to give his original passport, expressing his apprehensions that it might be fraudulently used to further implicate him. Ultimately, as a last resort, he appealed to the President of India on October 11, 1989 seeking his intervention, but in vain.

In the meantime, in pursuance of the decision to depute an Enforcement Directorate officer to the USA and St Kitts for conducting enquiries, A P Nanday, deputy director, was finally selected for this purpose. Originally he was to go to New York and from there to St Kitts, but K L Verma, director, enforcement, had his programme modified. Accordingly, he first reached Miami, from where he went to St Kitts, and then he came to New York.

On his return, he submitted a report saying that it was clear that the account in question was maintained by Ajeya Singh with V P Singh as the beneficiary. He had arrived at this conclusion on the basis of statements, including that of George McLean, which he had recorded abroad.

George McLean had claimed in his statement that he had compared the signatures of Ajeya Singh and V P Singh on an agreement between them with the signatures on their respective passport copies. This statement, however, was false, because V P Singh's signatures in his passport were in English, while his signatures on the agreement were in Hindi.

As to the credibility of the enquiry conducted by Nanday, it was found that he had taken the assistance of Larry Kolb of Florida in examining the concerned persons in St Kitts. He had not only travelled on a private plane owned by Larry Kolb during his journey from St Kitts, but had also been accompanied by Chandra Swami's associate Kailashnath Aggarwal, aka Mamaji, who had joined him from New York to Miami. This explains the modification made by K L Verma in his tour programme, proceeding to Miami first, instead of New York, as originally planned.

Apart from other things, Chandra Swami and Mamaji were already accused in another CBI case which had been registered in 1988 and they had been permitted by the court to go abroad during the investigation on the grounds of preaching religion.

This is how Chandra Swami was preaching religion in the US. This is how a deputy director of the Enforcement Directorate was making independent enquiries about the existence of a bank account in the name of Ajeya Singh with the help of Chandra Swami and Mamaji and Larry Kolb who was connected with Khashoggi!

Before Nanday returned from the US, serious attempts were made to get a written communication from the prime minister of St Kitts saying his government was making an investigation into the allegation of existence of a bank account in the name of Ajeya Singh. This communication was required immediately for telling Parliament that the charge against V P Singh was not a baseless one. The idea obviously was to lend credibility to the enquiry report confirming the existence of the bank account. And for getting this communication, no stone was left unturned.

The then foreign secretary, S K Singh, the additional secretary, Prakash Shah, and the joint secretary, R S Rathore, were all in a great hurry to get it. Shiv Kumar, high commissioner of India at Port of Spain, Trinidad, who had also jurisdiction over St Kitts, had a miserable time. Names of P V Narasimha Rao, then minister for external affairs, and of Rajiv Gandhi, then prime minister, were dropped.

Mamaji had the audacity to speak directly to Shiv Kumar on October 6, 1989, claiming to be a businessman and a family friend of Narasimha Rao. According to Shiv Kumar, when Nanday contacted him from New York on October 16, 1989 he had introduced Larry Kolb as Rajiv Gandhi's friend. Larry Kolb issued what seemed like a directive to Shiv Kumar for requesting the government of St Kitts to institute an investigation into the matter.

Ultimately, S C Gupta, second secretary, Indian high commission, Trinidad, met the prime minister of St Kitts. But Larry Kolb was not satisfied with only the oral confirmation which, according to Gupta, he had got from the prime minister.

Excerpted from The Plain Truth, Memoirs Of A CBI Officer, by N K Singh, Konarak, 1996, Rs 395, with the publisher's permission. Readers may direct inquiries about the book to Mr K P R Nair, Konarak Publishers, A-149, Main Vikas Marg, Delhi 11 00 92.