NEW DELHI, 26 October 2004 — Controversial Hindu guru Chandraswami was yesterday acquitted by a Delhi court of forging papers which alleged that former Prime Minister Vishwanath Pratap Singh stashed illegal funds abroad. Special Judge Dinesh Dayal acquitted Chandraswami, saying there was no evidence against him.
The federal investigative agency filed the case in 1990. It accused Chandraswami of forging bank documents to falsely implicate Singh and his son in keeping illegal funds in the Caribbean island of St. Kitts.
“The truth has triumphed,” an elated Chandraswami told reporters outside the court. The probe against Chandraswami was launched soon after V.P. Singh’s Janata Dal party came to power in 1989, inflicting a humiliating defeat on the Congress party government then led by Rajiv Gandhi.
During his campaign against Gandhi, Singh alleged that the Congress leader and his close friends accepted kickbacks in a 1987 defense deal valued at $1.3 billion involving Swedish armsmaker Bofors.
The St. Kitts illegal funds scandal surfaced against Singh soon after the Bofors scandal and was seen as a political riposte by the Congress party, whose leaders had close relations with Chandraswami.
“I’m happy that the way the V.P. Singh government tried to drag in former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi’s name did not work. I’m more happy for Rajiv Gandhi,” said Chandraswami. Rajiv was assassinated in 1991 by a Tamil suicide bomber while on the election campaign trail.
In earlier hearings, Chandraswami told the court that Singh’s government had hounded him because of his closeness to Rajiv and to the then-senior Congress party leader P.V. Narasimha Rao.
