The Rediff Special / N K Singh

By that time, V P Singh was fast emerging as a threat to the then
ruling party at the Centre

N K Singh is the CBI officer who arrested Indira Gandhi in 1977. 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 Prime Minister 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 second of six extracts from his fascinating biography, The Plain Truth, N K Singh discloses the genesis of the St Kitts investigation which has now resulted in a chargesheet against former prime minister P V Narasimha Rao.

The Indian Express had got some scent of attempts to malign V P Singh. It carried a story on July 20, 1989 titled 'The Next Move: Not a Forgery but an Account' which reported that 'highly placed sources both in the government and among those who have been working with the government to smear Shri Singh reveal that through the department for diabolical tricks, arrangements have been completed to open an account in a foreign bank which will be attributed to Shri V P Singh.

'To make the arrangements look real, efforts are on to locate the accounts of Shri V P Singh's two sons who live abroad so that some money from the account opened in Shri V P Singh's name can be transferred into the accounts of his sons.'

In August 1989, The Telegraph and the Hindustan Times came out with front-page reports. In fact, The Telegraph, dated August 24, 1989, published, what it claimed was an exclusive interview with George McLean, managing director, First Trust Corporation Limited. The Hindustan Times, two days later, carried a story by Subhabrata Bhattacharya, which said that George McLean had confirmed the existence of account no 29479 in the name of the Janata Dal president V P Singh's son Ajeya Singh.

By that time, V P Singh had assumed leadership of the Janata Dal and was fast emerging as a threat to the electoral fortunes of the then ruling party at the Centre.

Ajeya Singh first went to the UK in 1976, where he qualified as a chartered accountant and got a job. Later, he shifted to the USA. He was working with Tradition Berisford at New York, when the newspaper reports regarding St Kitts appeared. He returned to India in September 1989 and issued a public statement denying that he ever had any bank account in St Kitts.

He said that if the Government of India thought that he had violated any law in the country, he was ready to waive the bank secrecy and immunity and give the government blanket power of authority to examine original records of his account. None, however, came to his rescue and nobody in authority paused for a moment to verify his contentions.

On the contrary, the Directorate of Enforcement responded by issuing a notice to Ajeya Singh under Section 33(2) of the Foreign Exchange Regulation Act, which was served on him at 28 Lodi Estate, where he was staying with his father V P Singh. They followed it up with the threat of action under Section 50 or Section 56 of FERA 1973, which was again served on Ajeya Singh personally at his Lodi Estate house.

Broadly speaking, Section 50 of FERA provides for imposition of penalty for contravention of FERA and Section 56 for imprisonment, fine or both in case of conviction by court under FERA. Simultaneously, a deputy director of the Enforcement Directorate was deputed to the US and St Kitts for verification and on the basis of his report, both Houses of Parliament were told on October 13, 1989 by the then minister of state for finance, Eduardo Faleiro, that enquiries had confirmed the existence of an account in St Kitts.

At that point of time, the entire Opposition had withdrawn from Parliament. The members of the ruling party, therefore, had a field day in the absence of the Opposition and vied with one another in hurling abuse on V P Singh. Only Syed Shahbuddin, who was present in the House, put up a feeble resistance. K K Tewary, at whose instance, almost after a global search, documents containing the signatures of Ajeya Singh had been collected and kept in proper custody, had now become the minister of state for information and broadcasting. Not to lag behind, on his own intervention he hurled choicest allegations against V P Singh on the floor of the House.

After the V P Singh government assumed office in November 1989, a two-member team of intelligence officers from the CBI was deputed abroad for confidential verification. The team produced an excellent report. Based on that as well as scrutiny or relevant files and other information available, the CBI finally registered a regular case on May 25, 1990 for offences of criminal conspiracy, forgery for the purpose of harming reputation, using forged documents, defamation, cheating, etc.

K L Verma, the then director of the Directorate of Enforcement, who had allegedly played a very important role in the whole affair as well as his deputy director, A P Nanday, along with Chandra Swami and his associate Mamaji were named as the accused in the first information report. The FIR also named the foreign nationals -- Larry Kolb, a US national and distant relation of Khashoggi, and George McLean, a Canadian national, as the co-accused.

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.