Bofors Scandal

The Bofors scandal was a major corruption scandal in India in the 1980s and 1990s, initiated by Congress politicians and implicating the prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi and several others who were accused of receiving kickbacks from Bofors AB for winning a bid to supply India's 155 mm field howitzer. The scale of the corruption was far worse than any that India had seen before and directly led to the defeat of Gandhi's ruling Indian National Congress party in the November 1989 general elections. The Swedish company paid 64 crore (US$11.65 million) in kickbacks to top Indian politicians and key defense officials. The case came into light during Vishwanath Pratap Singh's tenure as defence minister, and was revealed through investigative journalism by a team led by N. Ram of the newspaper The Hindu.. The journalist who secured the over 350 documents that detailed the payoffs was Chitra Subramaniam reporting for The Hindu. Later the articles were published in The Indian Express and The Statesman when The Hindu stopped publishing stories about the Bofors scandal under immense government pressure and Chitra Subramaniam moved to the two newspapers. In an interview to her published in The Hoot in April 2012 on the 25th anniverssary of the revelations http://thehoot.org/web/home/story.php?storyid=5884&mod=1&pg=1&sectionId=1Sten Lindstrom, former chief of Swedish police discussd why he leaked the documents and the role of whistle-blowers in a democracy