On Tuesday, December 4, CBI under the guidance of NSA Ajit Doval extradited the middleman in AgustaWestland, Christian Michel from UAE. India had previously tried to extradite several high profile fugitives like Warren Anderson of Bhopal Gas Tragedy and Bofors middleman Ottavio Quattrocchi. But this is the only time when the nation has got success in extraditing a citizen of the third country (Michel is a British citizen).
It is not that India did not enjoy good diplomatic relations with other nations earlier. But the whole thing in diplomacy revolves around the will of the government. The process of bringing fugitives back to the nation requires strong will which the previous UPA government lacked.
In 2007, the then UPA government under Manmohan Singh sent a delegate of CBI officials to Argentina making extradition request of Ottavio Quattrocchi. He is an accused in Bofors Howitzer gun scam. Reports say that the attempts were so half-hearted that Quattrocchi’s Argentinian lawyer Alejandro Freeland, criticized the CBI saying that its case was “weak” and petitions had “irregularities”. He further added that his client’s relationship with the Gandhi family “was not a secret”.
The Bofors scam took place when Rajiv Gandhi was the Prime Minister. He happens to be the prime accused in the scam. While the hearing was going on in Argentina, the court even chastised the Indian delegation for its failure to produce proper documents. Abhishek Shukla, a social science scholar of BHU Varanasi, filed an RTI, asking for the details of all the foreign visits made by the CBI delegation during the Bofors probe. In the reply to the RTI, it was disclosed that CBI spent around 40-lakh on its so-called adventure of the extradition.
Similar is the case of Warren Anderson, who was the chairman and CEO of Union Carbide, the company responsible for the Bhopal Gas Tragedy. Several reports suggest that the Rajiv govt. at centre had allowed a safe passage for Anderson to flee away from the country. Senior Congress leader Arjun Singh, the then chief minister of MP, also wrote in his autobiography “A Grain of Sand in the Hourglass of Time” that home secretary R.D. Pradhan called him and told to release Warren Anderson from house arrest, of course after the bail plea. He also added that the whole thing took place “on the instructions of the then Union home minister P.V. Narasimha Rao.”
On the contrary, NDA government under PM Modi made a firm plan for the extradition of Christian Michel. The whole extradition operation was named ‘Operation Unicorn’ and was spearheaded by National Security Advisor Ajit Doval and was duly coordinated by the interim CBI chief M. Nageshwar Rao. The operation turned out to be successful for India but the Gandhi family and left-liberal media seem to be in distress since then. Congress and their supporters bragged Modi government on this issue as well. Here are few of the tweets by left liberals showing their hypocrisy:
Big coup for the Modi government as #ChristianMichel brought back to India. Big question is will he turn approver and how many big names will he throw under the bus ? This is the BJP counter and check mate to #Rafale. #AgustaWestland
— barkha dutt (@BDUTT) December 4, 2018
#ChristianMichel admitted in July that the #Modi govt offered him a clean chit if he agreed to frame Sonia Gandhi ji.
This extradition is nothing but a red herring to distract from the Rs 1,30,000 cr #RafaleScam ahead of #RajasthanElections#BJP_भगाओ_देश_बचाओ#AgustaWestland
— Dr. Shama Mohamed (@drshamamohd) December 5, 2018
All these shreds of evidence point the finger towards the UPA government which has always supported scamsters and laid a fertile ground for fugitives to grow. Now the time has come when all their sins came haunting them back. Christian Michel is just the first nail in the coffin.