NEW DELHI, 3 October 2005 — The Bharatiya Janata Party yesterday demanded that the government come out with a white paper on the role of foreign money in India’s politics. He also urged the federal government to appoint a Supreme Court judge to investigate allegations by a former KGB officer that members of assassinated Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s government, officials and journalists received bribes from the then Soviet Union.

Addressing a news conference here, BJP chief Lal Krishna Advani said the details coming out of the Mitrokhin papers could be termed as the biggest scandal of independent India which should be discussed thoroughly and cannot be swept under the carpet.

Two chapters of the recently released book, “The Mitrokhin Archive II: The KGB and the World,” detail the deep penetration of Indira Gandhi’s Congress-led government and the Communist Party of India by the Soviet espionage agency in the 1970s.

The book was written by Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, who smuggled out files from the KGB’s archives and provided them to British intelligence in 1992.

“We had scores of sources throughout the Indian government,” the book quotes former senior KGB official Oleg Kalugin as saying. “It seemed like the entire country was for sale.”

Advani accused Congress and left parties of maintaining a “guilty silence” on the issue. He asked Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to take the issue seriously and detail sources of foreign money coming into India in the past 58 years.

“The government should give all information it has on this matter through a white paper. The white paper should include money received from various sources like the KGB, the US Central Intelligence Agency and the Pakistani Inter Services Intelligence, because, at the end of the day, ISI’s role in the country has been very significant and there should be a public discussion on that,” Advani said.

The BJP leader said that what had been revealed in the Mitrokhin papers had maligned the country and besmirched its image in the comity of nations. “But unfortunately the response of the government has so far been total silence while a CPI leader has even called these revelations ‘spy thriller’,” he said.

The language of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) seems to suggest that it wants to distance itself from what has been revealed while implying that there could be some truth about the involvement of the CPI, Advani said.

Congress and the CPI dismissed Advani’s demands, saying it was a “belated reaction” from a “besieged leader” of a party that was in “total disarray.”

Congress spokesman Anand Sharma said the allegations leveled by Mitrokhin about incidents that were three decades old “lacked credibility.”

“They cannot be given any credence by any responsible leadership. The nature and timing of the matter are both intriguing and questionable,” he said.

Sharma advised Advani to focus on the organization he headed “which is caught in a terrible storm and is also immersed in scams and scandals of the NDA regime.”

Sharing his sentiment, CPI Secretary D. Raja said the BJP was in “total disarray — ideologically, politically and organizationally. “I pity Advani. He is trying to beat a dead horse,” Raja said.